Uncle Sam

“Don't take my picture. Don't say where I take you. Don't call me my name, call me 'Uncle Sam,' I have enough problems before with foreigners.” Uncle Sam began his life when he was born in Rangoon in 1951. That was before the junta. His mother was a midwife and his father was a health assistant for the government. Even though they were Shan, they had little to fear from the government because of their jobs, and because things weren't so bad then. When he finished high school and had to choose a career, Uncle Sam chose jade trading. Moving gem stones out of Burma was a popular business. His dad gave him some start-up funds, which Sam quickly ran through. The trade wasn't as easy as he thought, so rather than face his father with the bad news, Sam went to work construction in Bangkok for three years. His father wasn't an idiot. He entreated Sam repeatedly to come home and try something else. “You don't have a head for business Sam. My friend will set you up with a job in the hospital mixing drugs.” Sam took the job. Although he wasn't impressed with the pay he found he liked being in Health. Eventually he became a health administrator for the government as his father had been. As such he was assigned to government convoys sent to the Shan countryside, forcing development projects along the way. Much of what employees like himself told the Shan about the projects and the benefits was just propaganda. They never got much. Shan nationalism was growing then. The people weren't happy, not with the government, not with the union, not with the starvation. Kun Se's rebel Maung Tai army was getting stronger, really at its peak back then. They had real weaponry, real training, tens of thousands of volunteers. And of course, such a charismatic leader. Uncle Sam began to help them secretly. As a government employee, the son of a government employee, from Rangoon, he was above suspicion. He wasn't counted among the Shan, even while he stole medicine from the government and gave it away. Things were going fine and he wasn't particularly worried about being found out, until Kun Se surrendered to the Burmese in 1996 and went into house arrest in Rangoon. The Maung Tai army broke into pieces, and in the crumbling Uncle Sam was ratted out. “Betrayed me!” he says. He fled to Thailand. When he arrived there he found a reunion of rebels. A little disoriented, he served briefly in what was left of the rebel army. By 1997 he knew soldiering wasn't for him any more than gem trading. He learned of the medic training centre in Thailand, further south along the border. The Shan sent him there, where he trained for two years to become something of a rough and ready doctor. He was good at that. And ambitious with it. Before too long he brought his skills to camps of displaced Shan scattered along the northern Thai-Burma border, where the Shan were pushed by a furious Burmese army. Those refugees are still there. Uncle Sam still sends them medicine. Today he lives permanently in Thailand, fat and loquacious. Canadians bought him a migrant worker ID, and as long as he has that he can stay. He is happy in his young career. He takes Shan teenagers and makes field medics of them. He butts heads with rebel commanders who stew along the border in new villages of displaced ethnic minorities. Butts heads with well-meaning foreign doctors who come to help him train. Can't ever go back. He betrayed the Burmese government, and then was betrayed himself, so he cannot go back and keep his life.

Kang Hseng

Within three days of arriving in Loi Kaw Wan, we all had a Kang Hseng crush, and he knew it. Kang is hot to begin with, but being one of the few city boys in Loi Kaw Wan, he possesses unusual charisma. This is what he said: Kang was born and raised in the capital city of Shan state: Taunggyi (Dong-chi). He has two older sisters, both of whom have been to college and now have relatively good jobs in retail. His father was an opium addict for 25 years. He paid for his habit by dealing. It's a little fuzzy, but he may have been a bootlegger too. The work put Kang's family squarely in Taunggyi's middle class. When it was evident Kang was on the verge of growing up, he had to decide what to do with his life. He's Shan, but because they lived in the city and his father had a mind for business they never felt threatened by the Burmese. At first Kang wanted to be an engineer, but he fell 5 per cent short on the entrance exam. His uncle in Singapore offered him a job. “Come work for me in Singapore. I'll set you up with a position and you can make a good living here,” his uncle told him. No. Another uncle is a monk in San Francisco, but Kang didn't want to be there either. A third uncle told him about the rebel Shan State Army, which he knew nothing of before, and the medics who bring aid to the Shan huddled along the border. That was the job 19-year-old Kang took. When Kang first told me this I thought “well you're a good guy Kang, but you're the only one here who can go home anytime you want. It doesn't have to be a serious thing for you.” Then I realized how much it meant. He could have chosen so many other lives. He was one of the rare ones; safe, comfortable, educated. He chose to go in when the others ran out. Almost three years later. He likes Loi Kaw Wan. He's a good medic and when the supplies hold he's the town dentist. He'll only leave if he wins a spot in the Mae Sot training clinic. And after that he would come back. Plus, he's staying because he's fallen in love with a 20-year-old student down the hill. He's a clothes horse with a choker of black beads like the surfers wear, and a black motorcycle jacket. His motorbike lust is strong, but with the honorarium salary he gets it will take him years to save up for one. He has an elfish face, likes to smile and show-off. His anime haircut makes him look like Bruce Lee and he loves it when people tell him that. He has no desire to be a soldier, but he calls the SSA “our organization.” Many Shan change their names when they escape or become rebels. Kang didn't change his, because he wants people to know it's him doing these things. Dangerous. He has his own private house; a bamboo and thatch hut the size of a backyard tool shed, with a dirt floor. There's a bare light bulb in the thatch that works for the two hours a night the generator's running. Between the bamboo cot and the rest of the house is a rack of clothes that acts as a wall. The door hangs onto the upper corner of its frame literally by a thread. He loves his house, because it's his only private place. In a few months he and the other two single male medics will be moved into a dorm, and he's not looking forward to it. Early every morning he took Cody and Sanjeev down to the clinic yard to teach them kung fu. Now and then he'd find one of the medics' guitars and play, which he was good at, and sing, which he needs to brush up on. Every night when all the others went to bed, Kang and I stayed up together to talk. We would play cards and tease and flirt. He told me all his secret gripes about how the Commander runs the town when there are no strangers to see it. Talked about politics and the genocide in Shan and how it's all going to end. And what happens after the end. He reminds me so much of another friend.

Shan AIDS

Bay Da said in 2007 he saw about 10 HIV positive patients. That he generally sees “a lot,” and they are typically male, under 40, and soldiers. I don't know why he said “2007” instead of “2008,” unless he hasn't counted up the 2008 cases yet. The first AIDS patient I saw was on February 11. She was, well she still is at the moment, a 52-year-old woman who had been in the week before (although this one looks so shrunken that I find it hard to believe it's the patient they're referring to) with an infected tooth socket. This patient is very wasted, certainly under 100 lbs and probably around 75 lbs, black lips surrounded by sores. Her daughter is with her, a healthy-looking, distressed woman, also a young man and a bunch of same-aged kids who may just be in for the show. The daughter is so upset that she won't let me take pictures, Khang Seng is busy putting her IV in and he looks up to tell me to stop. So I'll wait until the family leaves the In-Patient ward for awhile, if they do at all. The photo is necessary Why is the photo necessary? Because she's part of her people's genocide। Burma has enough money to have kept her safe and well if it wanted to. Her death is a victory for them. Word is, the woman will die within days without medicine, which can only serve to hold her on a little longer, slow the deterioration. That much is probably obvious to anyone. Amy says that her daughter said that this woman's husband died a few years ago. “Of the same thing Mom has now.” The next day she's still alive. She has tuberculosis and pneumonia, and what all the medics call “CD4,” which is code for HIV. I ask Homm Noon if people here understand the phrase “HIV.” She says they do. I ask her if they've told the woman's daughter she has HIV. She says no. I ask her if it will embarrass the woman's daughter if they say “HIV.” She says like she always does when I wish she'd be precise. “Yeah sure.” “But they must guess that she has AIDS.” “No I don't think they guess it.” “Why did they bring her in?” “Some abdominal pain. The air around her bed smells dangerously rotten। A terrible smell around her, but it's not that she's soiled herself. I don't know what can take the nasty smell of death off her body. It's not the same as feces or vomit. It's unnatural decomposition. Like something breathing of a dead body. Anyway. The next morning I come in to take her picture if I can. She's awake. She nods when I show her my camera, and she pushes down the comforter and lifts up her blouse so I can see her emaciation.

Bay Da

We arrived in Loi Kaw Wan in the afternoon. Once we came through town to the medic compound, we stood and looked around at things. Suddenly a tall young man running at full tilt leapt onto Dr. Semkuley and hugged him with his arms and legs. That's the most emotional reunion I've ever seen between two men. The man was Bay Da, whom everyone knows has the biggest smile since Eddie Murphy, and much nicer than Murphy's. Especially since the corners of Bay Da's mouth curve up, even when he stops smiling, which he eventually did. He smiled so much those first few days anyone would think he was the happiest man in the borderlands. Of course, his smile fell into disrepair over the next two weeks. It began with slow fractures, changing from joy at having Myron back, to worry, nervous smiling. Beaten dog smiling. Shorter smiles, frowning in between, right in front of us. It took two weeks for Bay Da to stop being formally gracious, open up, and say enough for me. Two weeks to say something to me that could make me cry. When the woman watching her mother die of AIDS in the clinic down the road only made me angry. Bay Da climbed down from the frame he and the others spent all day building to hold these mega big solar panels, so the clinic will finally have night light. We sat on the grass together and he took off his Chinese army boots, inside which his feet had stewed all day without socks. Man what a stink! Like grade C ham left under the deck for a week. I moved to sit up wind and we joked about the smell. He said I should write about how people in Loi Kaw Wan are too poor for soap so donors would send some for his feet. Then we headed off to bring the tools someplace for safe keeping. “Sometimes when we walked in the forest for four or five...or seven days, very difficult to get clean. No soap and got very dirty.” “You mean you were in the forest for that long?” “Yes” “What were you doing in the forest for seven days?” “Hiding, from Burmese soldiers.” “Oh. You were one of those people.” “Yes.” “What would happen if they caught you?” “They want to make us porters. Porters carry their weapons and food, and big bombs. A big bomb... They burned my father.” My skin crawled. “They took cigarettes, pressed on his face. You know when cigarettes burn, and the end is red? They burned on his face, here,” he traced his finger along his cheeks, “here.” “They tortured.” “Yes, tortured. I was seven...or six. I never forget that in all my life.” Earlier we had also joked about how he would like to be president. The things he would do, notably enact litter laws. Bay Da is an environmentalist, dislikes litter, and takes the decimation of the local teak forests by the SPDC personally. As he should, the SPDC are raping his people in order to rape his land. Anyway, his president talk ends with a smile and he says “in my next life.” “I want to have some coffee.” “I want my freedom.” “And what will you do with your freedom?” “I will travel, and present about Burma's politics and the environment.” I didn't expect him to have an answer so ready. After we put the tools away, and after he told me about his father's torture and I tried to keep my head tilted up so tears wouldn't fall out of my eyes and perhaps he was doing the same thing, he told me more. “I will tell you my real dream. This is real, what I wish. I want to go to a small village and teach English. Have maybe 50? students. I teach English and improve my English. At my home town we have waterfall,” he showed with his hands, “a beautiful waterfall. And land is flat and soil is very...good.” “It's no good here?” “No. Very hilly, and difficult to bring water.” The Shan aren't a mountain people. They are traditional farmers who are used to rich plains where they can grow just about anything. This place is Akha land. The Akha like the rugged land, but they had to move aside here to make room for the Shan refugees. “I want to have a house, and around the house, trees, because I like the environment. I would have trees. That is my real dream.” “Do you want this in Shan, or Thailand?” “Shan. If I can, I don't like in Thailand.” The whole time, his nervous smile would flicker by. It's surprising how a face constructed to fall so naturally into a wide grin can drop into such exhausted despair. He'd mentioned even on the first day that he doesn't think about worrying things because it would just make him depressed. But I knew when he said that, even though I didn't know him, that he must think about those things all the time.