Mae Sot

The streets of Mae Sot are always hot. I can't tell if it's humid or not. The heat makes me sweat so fast that I'm always sticky even if the air's not.

Unlike in the north, cultural differences, ethnic differences are pronounced here. There are different ethnic groups in Shan, but the differences are hard for an outsider to notice unless they're in traditional dress. Mae Sot is a town of migrants, refugees, aid workers, tourists excited about a day trip into Burma on the other side of the bridge. 

The Burmese don't try to hide. Some are pale, round faced women, their cheeks painted yellow with home made sunscreen. The men wear their longyi – the Burmese name for sarong. Muslim Burmese are here too. They look like Malay, East Indian, something I can't place. They wear embroidered fezzes and the women wear the kind of hijab that makes a circle of their face.

Mae La Oo Refugee Camp

With 16,000 registered residents, Mae La Oo is one of Thailand's mid-sized camps for Burmese refugees. It's estimated there are thousands more people than this living here, but the UNHCR provides rations for 16,000, so that's how many are permitted to register to live here.

The Thai policy is to let no foreigners into the camp, but as with everything else, as Hlah Tay says, they “have an understanding” (bribe) about letting them in anyway. “Everything here is under the table. Like we are travelling today, it is under the table. You saw the driver give the guard the money... Everything is an understanding under the table...it's very difficult for anybody to get out.”

It's expensive to get in too, or at least it was when the ABSDF brought us in. A "pass" comes to 1,500 Baht per person, about $50, plus 2,500 Baht ($85'ish) to hire a driver, each way. Hlah Tay estimates "no more than 100" foreigners visit the camp every year. Most are NGO workers, some are undocumented guests like us.

NGOs and the UN pays for everything in the camp, including the salaries of some of the border police. The Thai government pays nothing. The country does benefit financially because it's from Thailand that supplies are bought and drivers are hired. Even lumber and bamboo is bought in Thailand and trucked in, since it is illegal for refugees to cut teak or bamboo, and they could be arrested if caught doing so.

Cutting teak will bring a 6–7 year jail sentence. Trucked-in bamboo costs 25 baht per pole, wood is 200 baht per pole, with transportation charged on top of that. There is almost no way to make money in camp, but there are somehow many ways to spend it.

Even if there were as many residents as food rations, it's unlikely there would be enough to go around. The camp is divided into more than a dozen sections. Each section has a committee in charge of distributing food. However, rations can be skimmed. On our trip out, our group sat on top of bags of rice the truck driver bought in camp, saying it was a lot cheaper for him to buy food there, presumably from the section storage house,  than in town.

Hlah Tay believes there are 8 refugee camps in the Karen-Karenni region. There are some more in the south, and one registered Shan camp; about a dozen official camps in total. After that are IDP communities, unregistered refugee communities, legal and illegal migrants, bringing the number of Burmese refugees in Thailand or near the border to around 2 million, though no one is sure.

The camp has a very cramped, ramshackle feel. Refugees can't leave this camp for Thailand because it is very remote, and the road has a number of Thai border guard check points along the way. There is no need for a fence. There's no sign anywhere of a UN presence, for example row or prefab housing, signs, offices. Word is the Thai government works hard to keep the UN out, though the UNHCR is the umbrella organization for Mae La Oo.

Motor bikes are illegal here, again permitted “under the table,” so of course they're all over the place. I ask how I'm going to leave the camp, and Hlah Tay explains: “Yes, we will make arrangements. You can go by motorbike.” I ask if I can't hitch a ride with an out-going transport truck. “Oh no, because driver would not dare.” I do leave by motor bike the next day, with an ABSDF driver.

The inhabitants of Mae La Oon are a mixed bag compared to Shan land. There are a few Shan here, like  the man building a new house who does push-ups every morning, and practices his English in the hopes it will help his resettlement application. He has been in camp for six months, and wants to go to the US.

Others range from curly-haired East Indian looking people, to square-faced Mongolians, to round-faced, pale people with full red lips.

It's crowded. Dogs, poultry, pigs and people are close together in small, often randomly arranged bamboo structures. Theirs is an accentuated appearance of poverty as they are forbidden from creating permanent concrete structures. There is a narrow paved road through the centre of camp, some of the rest of it has gravel, most is packed dirt. Even the school is a bamboo platform on top of muddy sandbags and dangerously eroded packed earth.

Hotel Mae La Oo, February 2009

Mae Tao Clinic's HIV Program

For the past seven years the Mae Tao Clinic has run a voluntary HIV counselling and testing program. Every month the clinic hosts a get-together for the program members, usually to the Tai Watanaram monastery. Today, about forty patients came, some with their families. They took a yoga class at the foot of the monastery's three-story reclining Buddha while their children ran around.

Naturally the program members are all HIV positive, and many have additional problems like tuberculosis, liver disease and gynaecological problems, but they all look young and healthy. They're in their twenties, many with children. Of course those who are very sick probably don't come to the group outings, nonetheless all the vibrant looking people here are infected.

Saw Than Iwin is the program manager. He's an angular young man from Burma, living here and working for the Mae Tao Clinic illegally. He says that when the program started between 60 and 80 people volunteered to be tested for HIV every month. Over the past few years it's levelled off at 100 at month. Since the Mae Tao Clinic caters to the Burmese border community, it's Burmese who are in this AIDS group. About half of them live in Burma and cross over for treatment, and outings like today's.

“A very small percent knows about HIV and how it's transmitted,” says Iwin of the patients coming from Burma. There is some HIV-AIDS education within Burma, but it is only delivered by NGOs like UNICEF, mainly on TV. “Still not enough,” Iwin says.

Iwin and the program's staff are busy with counselling, explaining treatment and organizing program events. The members are like people anywhere else in the world. They complain if outings aren't interesting, make excuses about not using condoms. As each patient is different (some have other illnesses, some are less diligent about taking the anti-retroviral drugs supplied by the city hospital, some can afford a better diet and more relaxed lifestyle than others) no one can predict how long any of them will live.

The commonest way to become infected in the Mae Sot-Myawaddy area is through sexual transmission, but some others are victims of poisonous blood transfusions. That's how one 14-year-old girl in the group became infected several years ago. Iwin says her family brought her in for testing after she became mysteriously ill following her transfusion. The tests came back negative, but she continued to get inexplicably sick. When the family brought her back for another HIV test they learned she was indeed infected. Still, Iwin says the patients are all counselled not to worry about the future.

Sang Wan

Sang Wan was the interpreter for the Shan village reps interview. He's 34 years old, and he perfected his English by living in India for ten years. Apparently, for Shan who can afford higher education, going to India is a common way to study abroad for cheap.

After India he lived in Rangoon, then worked in Bangkok for a year and a half as a Thai-English translator before moving to Loi Tai Leng nearly a year ago. Now he's a member of the Shan army, working in the foreign affairs office and interpreting for foreign visitors.

He's a nice little man with wide-spaced teeth and a brown leather jacket. I first met him on the main road through Loi Tai Leng. It was evening and after a day of driving to camp we were finally there, so I walked out to have a look at the place. Sang Wan passed by and immediately began chatting, introducing himself, asking when we were likely to meet again. He wasn't the first English speaker I'd met in camp, so already I was impressed at the difference between people here and in Loi Kaw Wan.

After the interview finishes he and I walk with one of the soldiers who monitored me, whom happens to be a former member of the Free Burma Rangers and a friend of Sang Wan's from training days.

“If you extend your visa for six or seven months and come back here, you can go to the front lines.”

“I've been asking to go with the SSA for a year. I don't believe you.”

“You want to go?”

“Of course. I can't see anything from just the camps.”

For some reason the three of us began to joke around and do mock kung fu moves on each other.

“But in the jungle, you have to go like this,” said Sang Wan as he put me in a head lock and pretended to break my neck.

Shan Village Representatives Interview

Village heads from central Shan state travelled to the SSA camp for a secret conference on the future of the nation. Four of them agreed to meet for an interview, no pictures. With them at the table in a dark SSA hut was the English interpreter, two SSA soldiers who took thorough-looking notes, and me.

All of this entry is exclusively what they told me, drawn from my written notes of the interview.

The village reps all speak, often in unison, responding strongly to certain questions. They had come to the camp to discuss issues of Shan unity, and unity between the Shan and other ethnic groups fighting the junta. Unity, they explain, is one of the six policies of the Shan movement. The others are freedom, democracy, independence, development, anti-narcotics and peace.

They all want Shan state to be an independent country, as they claim was promised to them when Burma gained its independence from England. There are 26 ethnic groups in Shan State (the Shan compose about 60% of the population), but they have faith the 26 will cooperate to build a democratic country. They are even willing to work with the majority ethnicities of the other warring states: the Chin, Karen, Mon, to build a new country from all their lands. Any configuration is acceptable as long as it doesn't include the Burmese. This would result in a state shaped like a horseshoe wrapped around the Irrawaddy delta, but they are confident it can work.

They say it's always been the policy of the military government—the SPDC, to pit the ethnic groups against each other. Now that the election is coming and the SPDC needs to guarantee it will go smoothly, bribes are everywhere. Cars, houses, business opportunities and women all appear where the SPDC wants support. Suddenly, the SPDC has started holding weekly pep meetings in places they never visited peacefully before, laying out food and fine promises for all the villagers who turn out. The reps say everyone inside knows the gifts are meant to buy submission.

The same thing happened in 2008 before the constitutional referendum, in which nobody needed to vote and an appalling constitution was adopted.

They say they never see international aid, NGOs, or foreigners. Only in Taunggyi, the capital city of Shan where tourists are allowed to pass through on their way to Lake Inle, are foreigners ever spotted. But these men can't hang around Taunggyi, and they say they're alone out in the countryside. Not only does the SPDC forbid tourists from going anywhere they want to, foreigners are warned against venturing into the countryside, where they're told the Shan guerrillas will slaughter them.

The reps say come, someone please come and see the situation. They promise that a visitor would see the Shan aren't dangerous, they are friendly and ready to tell the truth. In particular, the men say, if a journalist comes that person would be worshipped for their daring.

One says the reason he came to the IDP camp conference was for the chance to meet a foreigner, and tell these things. They hope that in getting exposure, maybe humanitarian aid will come to Shan. They repeatedly ask the SPDC for health and education supplies, but nothing comes. Nothing but the army.

Since 1962 the army has always meant beatings, lootings, forced labour, extortion and death. If on their way home any are caught having come here they are certain they'll be arrested, they aren't certain of the consequences after that. Whatever happens, they say they are accustomed to being threatened with jail, injury, arbitrary fines and threats to their family. They will pass many checkpoints on their way back inside, and their only plan is to tell the military they were travelling to find work or visiting family on the Salween river.

It's common for Shan to cross into China, Thailand and Laos to find work, usually construction or farm labouring. This is because even without the military a family rarely makes enough at home to subsist on. So many people have crossed the border to work illegally that some Shan villages are made up entirely of old people. These village reps are trying to teach the youth about the independence struggle, but most choose to leave.

Another, almost final way to make enough money is to grow opium. After the fall of the Muang Tai Army in 1996, the SPDC took over the MTA's opium business, forcing farmers to continue growing it. and charging taxes on it. Despite its control of the opium trade the SPDC will also arrest people for it.

If life is hard without the SPDC at its worst, it's nearly impossible when it's on the attack. When the army arrives in a village without an outpost, it orders people away from their farms in order to act as slaves, building a base and carrying army equipment to the next site. It seizes food, supplies and accommodations, punishing anyone who opposes them. A few months ago the army burned two villages to the ground.

Rebel forces aren't thought of as a fighting resource equal to the SPDC. The SSA won't battle the Burmese near a village, as villages suspecting of helping rebels have been severely punished. Instead, rebels are all guerrilla fighters, ambushing government forces in the mountain forests. They say the SPDC hate the Free Burma Rangers the most, because the FBR carry a satellite Internet connection and post pictures of SPDC destruction online immediately after they find it. No matter what, the Shan reps feel like there is no way out. They believe their countrymen living a good life in Rangoon or Mandalay don't know the reality of life for the Shan, but they do know the SPDC are an evil force.

Why is the SPDC doing this? The consensus among the village reps is that this is ethnic cleansing. It always has been. The Burmese in power want the Shan and all the other ethnic groups to disappear, whether by assimilating, leaving or dying.

What the Shan want is the world to know, including the UN, so that they can get humanitarian aid, and eventually freedom. Some of the truth of what life is like in Burma was revealed during the democracy movement and massacre of 1988, but it's always been extremely hard for the Shan's voice to be heard. They say what the world sees of the Shan is just a shadow, not the body.

Burma's Thai Babies

The families in Loi Kaw Wan know there are advantages in their children having Thai citizenship. Citizenship isn't something countries just hand out, and in Thailand even the newborns have to work for it.

When we arrived in Loi Kaw Wan early Sunday morning, Homm Noon was waiting to greet us. She was at the end of her pregnancy, her face had become fat and freckled. The greeting was brief, because she was holding out just long enough to see us and then with her mom climbed into the tinny pick-up truck that dropped us off at the border post, and was driven away to the nearest Thai hospital to give birth.

Since she and her mother are the only trained midwives in the village, it made sense that she wouldn't want to deliver her first child alone in Loi Kaw Wan. The other benefits were realized later on. If Homm Noon's children are born in Thailand, they're Thais. In an area where you're either a Thai or an illegal refugee, the choice seems obvious.

It isn't a simple matter of being born in Thailand though – the babies need a Thai parent. There are men in Thailand, usually old men, who each take money to claim he is the father of a woman's baby. Homm Noon and her husband found such a man to do this for them, as did every other family in Loi Kaw Wan who's children are Thai citizens.

It must be a terrible choice for these families, for the father to give up any official connection he has to his own children, replacing his name with some grasping stranger's. Surely it isn't a secret either. The doctors who register the births can't believe for very long that the old men who come in with young Burmese women are really the fathers of all those children. The Thai government must be aware of the trick as well, still it continues. After the birth the women return home with a newborn, probably hoping never to meet the official father of their child again.

At the end of our time in Loi Kaw Wan we returned to Thailand and paid a visit to Homm Noon. She had delivered a baby boy and was resting in a safe house in Thailand until the baby could get some vaccinations. The safe house is used for Burmese patients sent to the Thai hospital. It's a small warehouse among a line of other warehouses and loading docks.

Homm Noon, her husbadn and the baby had blankets laid out on the floor of the empty storage unit, with some clothes hung up in the corner. She introduced her healthy little baby. We asked his name, and she gave one but said it's only his Thai name, for the birth certificate. He doesn't have a real name yet.

Zokawthar, Day 1

Finally, a little action. Within 15 minutes of opening the clinic the building echoed with the sound of a young woman's obscenely laboured breathing. What made her do that was a mystery, but it didn't matter because it stopped, abruptly. Immediately after that the curtain around the doctor's office blew aside and the unconscious girl was carried upstairs.

“Put her in Doctor David's bed upstairs so she's not in the way.”

“What was wrong with her?” we asked the Calgarian doctor who decided to conclude the check-up when his patient passed out. For the sake of accuracy, I have to admit we asked him that night.

“She's having panic attacks and hyperventilating. When I tried to get her to breathe in a paper bag she got scared and stopped breathing altogether. So I thought, 'uh oh.'”

“Why is she having panic attacks?”

“I don't know. She lives in Burma, so, stress.”

This was the first day in the Zakawthar clinic; the closest you can get to Burma without leaving India. Most of the patients had walked for hours from inside Burma to be seen by visiting Western doctors on the India side of the river. This group of Canadian doctors ran health checks in half a dozen villages in the area over the past week, but most of those villagers had left Burma years ago and live permanently in India now, so they're sick, but not Burmese sick. Zakawthar is the Indian side of a town centred precisely on the border, where Burmese (Chin, to be accurate) cross back and forth all day to sell cheap Burmese goods on the other side.

The two halves of the town are connected by a dirty iron bridge painted red in the middle to mark the borderline. On the Indian side is a thatch hut with two guards paralysed with boredom, since Burma wouldn't dare. Across the bridge is a more elaborate check-point manned by Burmese guards, identifiable by their buzz cuts and leather US Air Force jackets.

The ground around the clinic was splattered red with betelnut spit. Betelnut is a stimulant, chewing wads of it is so popular in this part of the world that enclosed spaces generally reek of it and even teenager's teeth are stained red.

It was a good day in the clinic for voyeurs of medical curio. After Panic Attack came Bear Guy, a man who had been mauled by a bear years ago but who couldn't afford reconstructive face surgery in Rangoon. Since then much of that side of his face has healed into a purple misshapen lump. Once a week he changes the gauze that protects the skin that refuses to heal.

There were a few goitre ladies, a little girl pale with malaria, starvation-soft hair and pierced ears, 80-lb old ladies and productive coughs. Unfortunately, for the voyeurs anyway, we missed the guy whose butt cheeks were melded together by untreated syphilis scars. He was in last week. Gross.

Very gross. But the majority of patients were just tired and hungry. They needed vitamins and aspirin and TUMS. In the morning volunteers and interpreters fought off fatigue by exchanging courtesy questions about family, in the afternoon by genuinely cracking jokes.

Around two o'clock, three of us, Dr. Lopita from Toronto, Zoey the Geisha-faced interpreter, and I, were called to the house on the hill to see a woman in labour. Woman, or teenaged girl, not important. She was well, the midwives were skilled, and we were only taking up space in the little plywood house. “Call us again when the baby comes.”

Around five o'clock the crowd was thinning and the sky was dimming. I slipped around the curtain and into Lopita's office. Her and Zoey were chatting softly, really just waiting for it to become too dark to work. Zoey's tiny Betty Boop lips were stretched over a piece of chaw lodged in front of her bottom teeth.

“Zoey, what are you eating?” She giggled and threw a pack of powdered betelnut on the table. “You should know better!” She giggled again and crossed her legs.

“You want to try?” Of course. Of course I want to try. She split the pack between Lopita, whose Indian heritage accustomed her to betelnut long ago, and the one who doesn't even like to drink. That's me.

One new to betelnut, especially in its potent powdered form, will suffer from an urgent desire to hork it as far and fast as possible out of their mouth. Then to go drink from a hose. Bitter, nasty dry stuff that sticks all over the mouth. My face blushes and contorts wildly even with mild discomfort, so my reaction now sent Lopita and Zoey into hysterics.

“Spit out! Spit out!” laughed Zoey. No, never. I'm tough, I can't take it. I squeezed my face to keep

myself from gagging and shook my head. When I stood up to go back to the waiting room I was introduced to the true power of betelnut.

“Oh god I'm dizzy. Zoey, I think I'm high!” They were laughing so hard by the time my knees gave out that the doctor in the office banged on the wall for us to shut up or share. I staggered back to the waiting room and collapsed into the chair. While I tried to scrape all traces of betelnut out of my mouth into the garbage can at my feet, Chester, who is from the '60s, counselled me. “Chester I'm high.” He agreed. “It's a stimulant Suzy, like mild cocaine.”

“I don't think this counts if I did it by accident...Oh jeez Chester, these Chins are all high.”

“Yeah,” he grinned. “Didn't you know?” Until that day I was proud to have never experienced a chemical high. Now I have to find something else to feel superior about.

The midwife raced back in, the baby was born.

“Wait for me, I need you two to help me to walk.” Every time either of them looked at my situation they began to laugh again, which made our hike to the house on the hill a giggling stumble. We stomped through the door, laughing and wiping away tears and holding me up until the world stopped spinning.

But there was a bad air in the room. The mother was resting, wrapped up on the floor. The midwife sat on the bed. a silent bundle of blankets in her arms. She unwrapped the blankets to show us. I thought it was already dead. It was least two months premature, like a skinny little guinea pig. It's skin was grey, its eyes were sealed shut and it's mouth dry and open. The midwife leaned this tiny body toward my lens so it would be easier for me to take a picture, which made me feel guilt-sick.

Outside the room Dr. Lopita said she couldn't tell if it was alive or dead, but the midwife said it was still breathing a little. Dr. David agreed to bring an injection of steroids to force the lungs open. When they stuck the needle in the little baby's thigh, it flinched, and gave us hope that it might survive until tomorrow. But Lopita said there was no hope it would last longer than that. It did indeed die overnight.