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