Contradictions Abound

Oh where oh where to begin.

Good friends, I write as I drip with sweat from every part of me. This week, as we creep creep creep into the Thai summer, has largely constituted of sticking to things. Sticking to chairs, sticking to clothes, sticking to your bike seat, sticking to other people, just sticking. It’s amazing how much sweat can come out of one’s body.

Despite the plentiful mangos and dreamily inviting nature of water festival being upon us, the oppression of the heat is undeniable. Today was clearly over 100 degrees; somewhere in that zone that becomes no longer distinguishable it’s so damn hot. On days like today the dogs are clonked out in a lazy heap in the shade, the flies grow heavy and clumsy, and even the mosquitoes seem to be relaxing.

Weather aside, all is a can of peaches here in Mae Sot. It’s amazing how, when you live in a place so distinct from your reality for so long (see also: sleeping on the floor for 9 months in Sangkhla) and then return to an environment similar to that from which you came (the hustle and bustle of Mae Sot), how parts of you suddenly bloom and reawaken, energized, as though their hibernation time didn’t drown them out, but rather refreshed them.

This seems to be what’s happening to me. I slowly find myself remembering the social norms of the West and coming back to the sarcasm and witty banter I like to throw about in a social setting. I find myself remembering how very fun it is to dawn clothing that shows off my white white shoulders, to think about the style of my outfit before exiting the house, to put on (gasp!) eye liner after 10 months of restraint. It is these small creature comforts that awaken me and remind me of home and all that which I was missing these past nine months.

At the same time this happens, these new parts of me that developed during my time in Sangkhla now dig their own small burrows in my heart, preparing for the wintry period that is ahead. My newfound abilities to hand wash and iron EVERYTHING slowly yawn and doze off, my foraging for bamboo shoots and vegetables in the backyard retires to the sofa, and my sarong-wearing waist readjusts to the world of zippers and flies.

It’s both funny and amazing how we as humans can jump from one world to another so easily. Of course there is that confusing time when everything is in question, when you ball your eyes out in goodbyes and stumble over your words with hellos and first impressions, but really, in just weeks, we can go from a town with no aircon and a number of trucks you can count on one hand to the world of wifi, traffic, and Tesco Lotus. What adaptable beings…

Before I head off to dinner and a night at one of the many bars in Mae Sot, I will leave you with some much anticipated words. I will tell you about the camp.

Umpiem Mai is a refugee camp of 20,000 people located south of Mae Sot in Thailand. Most of the residents there are of the Karen ethnic group of eastern Burma, but there is a good number of Burmese Muslims who come from Karen state, and a smattering of smaller numbers of people of the many ethnic groups in Burma. Most of the residents are there due to displacement from Burma’s military regime, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) and the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA), who have destroyed over 3,000 villages in eastern Burma. This involves a lot of fighting, raping, burning and running. The SPDC works together with the DKBA (a Karen force who came to an agreement with the SPDC a while ago) to quell the Karen insurgency for autonomy that has lasted since independence from Britain in 1948.

Others live in the camp not because their homes were destroyed, but rather because they are on the SPDC’s blacklist for one or more of a variety of reasons. Maybe they openly expressed disapproval of the SPDC, maybe they worked with the National League for Democracy (NLD—Aung San Suu Kyi’s party), or maybe they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. These people are in the camps because they will be harassed, imprisoned, or killed if they return to Burma.

Regardless of how one ends up in the camp, the conditions inside are less than favorable. I’m struck by this image when I first arrived and climbed one of the many windy and treacherous mud paths towards the school where I would be working. As I sweated and huffed and puffed with exhaustion of climbing, I saw a woman squatting, sarong-clad, wiry and dark, beating a club against what appeared to be a pig hoof. It was a dinner preparation of some sort. She squatted in the red dirt, children milling about beside her, a bamboo and thatch one-room house at her side. To think that her dinner would consist of this in some boiled water with chili was disturbing, and somehow the savagery of the club and the rawness of the hoof can’t seem to quit my mind…

The camp is a hilly place, cool and beautiful, really. It’s much like an impoverished village with dusty shops here and there, one or two noodle shops and a handful of tea shops so characteristic of Burma. There are schools, building which are allowed a tin roof and a concrete floor, a hospital and a cluster of other more permanent buildings that house NGOs, a church, a monastery, and a mosque. Houses are to be made of bamboo and thatch only, so that they are temporary dwellings, despite years and years of residence by one family.

In the present dry season the air smells and tastes of dirt. A dust coating covers everything from houses to clothes to skin to food. The air smells of smoke captured between the mountains from the farms nearby who are burning their field in preparation for the planting that comes before the rainy season. The noise is one of playground chatter. There are little kids constantly yelling, crying, laughing, singing. There are husbands and wives conversing, sneezing, arguing angrily. There are cows mooing and pigs snorting. There are a few chickens, although most were killed due to a scare of that unmentionable disease that’s got the world on edge. There are goats baaing and rats scampering.

The camp tastes like oil and preserved food. Rations consist of rice, yellow beans, chili, oil, and fish paste. For all other things, you must find the money to buy them.

Power comes from generators you must buy, and if you don’t have this money then you live without power. There is a lights-out policy at 9 due to security of the camp. While Umpiem is not located very close to Burma, there is a small worry that the SPDC or DKBA will find and infiltrate the camp, setting it ablaze as it did about a decade ago to Umpiem’s two predecessor camps. The SPDC and DKBA struck one of these old camps at night, causing many deaths to those who couldn’t get out in time. The other camp was more fortunate and attacked during the day. The inhabitants were relocated here in the hills.

Dirty water pours from spigots in each section of camp, and little kids crowd around them with slime-coated old petrol plastics to fill up and carry home. There is no alcohol allowed in camp, yet alcoholism is rampant…

Camp is governed by a committee consisting of the Camp Commander (Thai authority I believe), many other parties, and section leaders. Camp is divided into a variety of sections. The school where I’m working is between sections 5 and 7, in a Muslim area, and not a day goes by without hearing a call to prayer emanating slowly from a loudspeaker.

People are milling about, sitting around at home, carrying things on their heads, chatting, staring, listening to music. People are generally waiting—waiting for the bamboo shipment to come in, waiting for a customer, waiting for news of friends, waiting to go back home, waiting to be resettled to a third country, etc.

The camp is a fascinating mix of brilliant activists tossed out of their countries due to their political activities and poor, uneducated individuals from farms just wanting to go back home. It is a place where you will find a state of the art school where the students are getting an education comparable to that of a private US high school and an orphan child entertaining himself with a dead rat at the same time. It’s the type of place where you will hear the Karen version of Tom Petty’s “Don’t Have to Live Like a Refugee.” Camp is an unsafe place of refuge.

Camp is wow, camp is crazy, camp is exactly what you think it would be and what you least expected all rolled into one.

With this I leave you, friends. To dinner and beyond…

Love,

Laura

Lauraland: Mae Sot

Kings and Queens of the Bongo:

Hello and welcome to Lauraland: Mae Sot. I arrived one week ago after a long and twisting bus ride that effectively left my rear end numb until yesterday. Already in this past week I have wined and dined like the best of them, passed time at a house party, and hit up the local bar/lounge, Italian restaurant, and even the bagel place. Bagel! This word was nearly a vocabulary pariah prior to last week. But just say it with me, it feels so good… Bagel! Place! A place where they sell bagels!

Indeed the days of lusting for such western delicacies as bagels, peanut butter and pasta are over. Why? I can buy them at one of the few ex-pat catered restaurants, one of the four (four!) 7-11s, or, just like a gem from the gods, take a blithe jaunt over to the Tesco Lotus Express (aka COSTCO lite, Asian style). Mae Sot is, in a nut shell, heaven.

But even in heaven we have our ups and downs. I have outlined these strategically below in one of three categories: the good, the bad, and the fugly (fat + ugly):

Good:

• Superb food both Western and Thai. In the latter category we have the mango/ sticky rice/ coconut milk combo, with gorgeous yellow mangoes peeking out from every corner in Mae Sot as it is the hot/ mango season.
• Incredibly diverse office staff. We’re talking majority of people are quadralingual (a word?), consisting of Thai, Karen, American, Canadian, Singaporean, Irish, etc.
• Walkable streets: There is some semblance of a sidewalk here, much welcoming the stroll from place to place. What’s more is that the street dogs are nice and those that are not are tied up! Brilliance!
• There are gazillions of acronyms uttered from the lips of all those who live here. Acronyms on the Thai-Burma border= NGOs. Lots of acronyms= lots of NGOs. Indeed, Mae Sot is rife with NGOs doing fascinating, life-saving work.
• Such fascinating NGOs are staffed with equally fascinating people. Here’s Jim. He spent years in Bhutan expanding health for disadvantaged youth and now trains a team of backpacking medics. Here is Beth. She worked as a chef for 15 years until she decided to up and go abroad. Now she is a human rights trainer. Like that.
• My new office not only has air-con, but is also abuzz with (mostly) functioning wireless internet.
• I have a sweet house and roommate. Her name is Shona.
• Flat city= breezy bike-cruisin’.

Bad:

• Flat city= drainage issues. Drainage issues= smell eminating from sewage system that is both repulsive yet disturbingly intoxicating at the same time.
• No breathtaking lake to the tune of Sangkhlaburi.
• MSG is rife in the food here and local NGO-staffers have resigned themselves to it. I guess they’ve chosen to fight other battles.

Fugly:

• Dogs at the end of the street humping when I left for my run. Upon returning 30 minutes later, humping proceeded assumedly uninterrupted. Now for the kicker: these dogs were (one) fat AND (two) ugly.

The flip-o side-o

Why do all these crazy cool NGOs work in Mae Sot? Well friends, Mae Sot is located smack-dab in between many refugee camps that dot the Thai-Burma border. These places, referred to with the more cheery label of “camps,” define a lot of activity and life that takes place in Mae Sot. If something weird happens up in camp, its effects ripple on down to Mae Sot on many levels.

In fact, I am here because of the camps. I am working in one camp just north of here, teaching an intensive course on management (your assistance in instructing the fascinating topic of needs assessments is welcome…) and I will begin work up there next week. I did, however, pop on by last Friday to say hello to the future students (a rockin’ crew) and get a wee sense of just what the camp and school were all about there.

I was immensely excited Friday morning, as visiting a camp is something I have wanted to do forever. In a massive, plush and air-conned organization truck, the school program administrator (also a former camp resident), driver and I wound along a lunch-spewing road, curve upon curve, car making those squeaky rubber-on-concrete noises that I thought only existed as movie car-racing sound effects. When we arrived I gasped not at the poverty, but rather at the sheer beauty of this place: a cluster of houses situated atop hills, a place exposed to clean air and a fabulous breeze. The houses were small bamboo huts with thatch roofs, crowded together, row upon row, and the whole place took on this tan, sun-stained color, the houses and dirt blending together from a distance. Externally, the camp was breathtaking.

Upon entering camp, however, this false sense of beauty was replaced with a slap of reality. Inside it was clear that life in a refugee camp is hard living: there is a lack of things to do, places to go, jobs to be had, food to eat, water to drink, and freedom all around.

These are my thoughts from just a few hours in the camp, and I’m sure many will come in the days and weeks to follow.

To turning in early and fugly dogs-

:) Laura