Burmese Lessons (29 page)

Tennyson takes me to the section of the tarpaulin expanse where his friends and family live. They are all worn out and hot. One of them has a serious case of conjunctivitis, the red eye suppurating and painfully swollen. We do not stay long. For the first time I wonder where Tennyson himself lives. Here? No, he must have a place to stay in Mae Sot.

I’m shy to ask about this. It seems too private, and culturally untoward, for a young woman to ask a man where he lives. But I’m curious. Presumably, it would be too dangerous for an active KNLA member to stay in the camp. Tennyson told me that when the Burmese soldiers arrived in Beh Klaw they searched out the hut of an old man who used to be a Karen commander. After he confirmed his identity, they shot him in the chest.

Tennyson and I stop outside the temporary clinic so that I can meet some of the medics and take photographs. He watches as I put new film into my camera. “An NGO told me that you load a camera. Like a gun.”

“And we also say you shoot it. You shoot pictures. Or you shoot your subject.”

He blinks at the clunky old Nikon in my hands and says, in a voice like cold iron, “It’s nothing like a gun. You can’t kill anyone with it. And a picture is still there after someone dies.” He shakes his head. “A camera keeps people alive.”

Moved by his poetic turn of thought, I nod but keep quiet. The empty air feels uncomfortable, but I literally bite my tongue.

Tennyson continues, “When you kill a soldier from the other side, you always try to get to his body and take whatever is worth anything: his gun
and ammunition first, but also his money, his watch maybe, his boots, his jacket if you need one. Often they don’t have much, just the gun. But once, when I was looking through this dead kid’s clothes, I found a letter. Folded inside the paper was a bit of money—three, four hundred kyat, I don’t remember. But I remember the letter. To his mother. I read it. He said he wanted her to buy a big pot and start selling noodles on the street. She lived somewhere in a little town; they were poor. He was going to try to send her some money, but Burmese soldiers at the front line make little money. He said he didn’t know how much he would be able to send her, next paycheck.

“He just talked about the
mohinga
noodles. The white noodles, for breakfast. I sat there with that letter in my hand and I cried like a child. The mother had lost her son. And she would not get his letter. She would not get the money, either.”

He scratches his head and turns away from me. “We are sick of killing each other. But still we do it. I have friends whose chests are tattooed with the words ‘We will not surrender.’ The Burmese soldiers still burn down the refugee camps.”

I follow his gaze into the near-distance: row upon row of colored tarpaulins, and a scattered kaleidoscope of more colors—clothes hanging on the lines that secure the shelters to the ground. He looks me in the eye. “I was shot several times. But I survived.”

“That’s extremely lucky.”

“You must be lucky,” he replies, as though some people, for private reasons, choose not to be. “If not, you die. I have a good fate.” He walks off as I turn into the clinic tent.

W
hen we drive away from Huay Kaloke refugee camp on Tennyson’s noisy Suzuki, I smell charcoal. At first I think it’s because we’re traveling along the perimeter of burned land, but soon enough the expanse of black field and patchwork tarpaulin recedes. We’re on the two-lane highway
back into Mae Sot, a short distance away. Farmland, some of it green, some of it fallow, stretches away into small hamlets of Thai farmhouses and trees. I smell something burning, something burned, even on the motorcycle. Then I realize: it’s settled into the fiber of our clothes, our hair. I sniff the back of Tennyson’s khaki jacket. But there’s no scent of the man, no sweat at all. Just ash.

Today Tennyson is
taking me to visit Maw Ker refugee camp. The motorcycle thunders through the hot wind over the hotter road. Dust strikes our faces and rims our nostrils. When I turn away from his back to spit, I feel the sandy crunch of it between my molars. Tennyson yells, “We’re eating a lot of dirt, aren’t we? Isn’t Thai food delicious?”

Maw Ker is some sixty kilometers away from Mae Sot, tucked into the sparsely forested hills, not close enough to the border to be attacked easily by the Burmese regime. It is a barren, messy but also orderly village of almost nine thousand Karen, Burman, and Indo-Burmese Muslims. It’s been here for more than a decade, a model refugee camp. Tennyson goes to a friend’s hut to sleep off the heat of the journey while a guide takes me to visit the camp leader, the teachers, the health workers. “Educated people,” he says humbly. As we walk down the main road of the camp, the guide nods to friends and neighbors with a proprietary air, showing me off. He asks how far away Canada is, is Canada so very far away, is it farther than America? “Do you think you could help me go there and find a job?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t plan to go back to Canada for quite a while.”

His high, broad forehead wrinkles in doubt. His jowly face is quick to translate private feeling into visible expression. Does he think I’m lying to him?

The narrow lanes off the main road are part open sewer, part stagnant black stream, edged with sticky rust-colored mud. “Hot season,” my guide explains. “But yesterday it rain and rain.” We detour around a large puddle of water.

The place has the feeling of an abandoned village, yet there are so many people here, hidden in the open. Most of the children were born here. Their eyes glitter from the low doorways, from behind clumps of weeds and small banana trees, through chinks in thatch-woven walls. They are like children everywhere, lively with intelligence and humor, hungry to eat up the world. But this is not the world, and the food here, for both the body and the mind, is neither rich nor plentiful. The place is small and stunted and tightly crammed with people. Men and women sit on the porches of the little huts, idle, or with small tasks occupying their hands. Frustrated energy floats around them. There is no electricity, no TV. How many radio programs broadcast in Karen, their native language? A model refugee camp is synonymous with a model prison. When Tennyson and I arrived, we had to stop at a checkpoint manned by Thai soldiers.

I ask the guide, “Do you ever leave the camp?”

“Not often. We are not allowed to go out too early or to stay out too late.”

“Why?”

“The Thais don’t want us to take their jobs. They want us at the camp only.”

“What happens if someone stays out?”

He shrugs. “Money. The guards want some money from us. Or they might beat you up.”

I wonder what happens to the women, the children, not just at the hands of the Thai soldiers but at the hands of their own men. This is a traumatized population without much medical help, with no psychological counseling, in overcrowded conditions. Domestic and sexual abuse must be rampant.

“Is it hard for the families here, to get along?” I ask.

He scowls. “To get along?”

“Are there difficulties between the men and women sometimes? Fighting, problems at home?”

“Problems. What you mean?” His big head pulls back. He knows exactly what I mean.

“I mean, is there violence sometimes—between the men and the women? Because the situation is so hard in the camp, maybe it affects people’s relationships?”

He shakes his head. “No, no! Nothing like that here. Only the Thai soldiers violent, and the Burmese soldiers. Not the people, we all peaceful.”

Right. As if he’s going to tell a white stranger about the personal problems of his neighbors. Or himself. I try to redeem myself by asking a few questions about the school.

But he keeps talking about the cruelty of the Thai soldiers who guard the camp. “It gets worse. In the beginning, long time ago, they respect. Now they don’t respect.”

“But even the Thai king came here, didn’t he, to visit?”

He makes a sour face. “That’s long time ago. He come for a little visit. But he does not stay.” He looks me straight in the eye. I hold his gaze and walk into a mud puddle.

B
y the time we get to the clinic, my shoes are heavy with mud. My feet are filthy. I kick off some of the mud as I stand looking at the long, narrow building. It sits on a small rise amid a group of leaf-thatch and bamboo
huts. The forests on the surrounding hills are plucked clean of bananas and good wood. The few trees left are naked: their leaves have become walls and roofs.

The stairs into the clinic are made of roughly halved trees. I leave my mucky shoes on the bottom step. On my way up the stairs, I swear as I stumble. A young woman appears in the open doorway. “Hello. Are you all right?”

My guide, still standing at the foot of the steps, introduces me. “I’ll tell Tennyson you’re here,” he says, and waves. “I have to go home now.”

The young woman proffers a bamboo bench—the “waiting room” bench—and says, “Please sit down.” Pause. “But not fall down,” she adds, not smiling at her own joke. She has dark circles under her eyes, but fatigue doesn’t seem to affect her lightheartedness. “I’m happy to meet you,” she says. “It’s always good to have visitors.” She wipes the sweat off her upper lip with a small handkerchief.

She is twenty-two, with lovely feet and hands, a black waterfall of hair drawn back with an elastic band, and skin the color of pale clover honey. Flawless teeth. Her name is Victoria. She is a medic.

She became a refugee at the age of three, when her father joined the KNLA and began to fight against the dictatorship. If the Burmese military knows that a man is involved in armed insurgency, it will sometimes torture and kill the rest of his family. So her mother left with her and her two siblings, choosing the insecurity of a refugee camp over the dangers of staying inside Burma.

“How did you become a medic?”

“I took training at Dr. Cynthia’s clinic.”

“Ah! I’ve visited there a few times. I couldn’t believe how many people the doctor helps. And how happy the atmosphere was. It wasn’t what I expected.”

Victoria smiles. “You know how it is! I was scared to study there because I thought, It is a hospital, it will be so sad. But at the clinic we learn
that, together, we can do something good. Dr. Cynthia is our hero. She is like Aung San Suu Kyi.”

Victoria goes to a small dispensary and takes out several rolls of gauze. I watch her cut strips off the roll and fold them into small pads. The rest of the clinic stretches out on either side of the waiting room into two long sections—one for men, one for women. A few men and a few women with children sit or recline on the mats in each room. Some are sleeping; some have glazed, feverish eyes. A few are expressionless, slack with exhaustion and illness. There are no curtains or other attempts at privacy. Saline drips are hooked to the thatched walls. The walls don’t reach all the way up to the roof, so I peer out over the heads of the patients to the rest of the camp and beyond, into hills covered with thin trees.

“What kind of illnesses do you usually treat here?”

“A lot of malaria. And the children suffer from chronic diarrhea. Some of the mothers think if a baby has diarrhea it’s best not to give him water. So the babies die.”

“How is the water?”

“We tell them to boil it, but sometimes they can’t. It’s hard to find firewood for boiling. So the children get sick easily. They’re not strong to begin with. Mortality for the small ones is twenty-five to thirty-five percent. A lot of babies die.”

“How many patients do you have a day?”

“Between seventy and eighty. The majority children. Malaria is worst for the children. The adults survive, but the children are weak. All malnourished.”

“Everyone on the border seems to get malaria.”

She sighs. “Yes. I still get an attack every few months. If I’m working too much. Have you been in the camps a lot?”

“No, I haven’t. I want to spend more time on the border. But I don’t want to get malaria.”

Her face hardens. But she’s smiling when she says, “We also do not want to get malaria.”

“Of course not, no. I know that. No one wants to get malaria.”

Silence. I am, truly, an idiot. The silence acknowledges this and permits me to speak again. “Do you work here alone?”

“Not usually. Another woman medic is often here. We also have some older girls who act as nurses for us, helping out, tending to the patients, giving them food. Our head medic is sleeping in the consultation room. He was up all night with a sick man.” She points to the bamboo wall behind her. The entire clinic is made of bamboo.

Another young medic and two nurses join us. They are younger than me, quick to laugh, pleased to have the distraction of a visitor. There is a solemnity about them also, an authority in their hands and eyes as they accomplish small tasks while we sit chatting. They tease me about Tennyson. I didn’t tell them that I arrived a couple of hours ago on the back of his motorcycle; the camp grapevine has supplied them with this information. They’re so curious about the nature of our relationship that I suspect they have a crush on him. “Is he your Karen dictionary?” asks one of the nurses.