For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question (17 page)

“Did you make Eh Soe take me to the market to tell me we ran out of money for food?” I demanded. “You should have just told me, Htan Dah.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t want to bother you.”

“So how did you guys buy this?” Abby asked, looking at the packed plastic bags Eh Soe and I had dumped on the table.

“I bought it,” I said.

Abby was appalled, and more so when I explained that I was going to buy food for so many people for such a long time. She argued with Eh Soe that they were taking advantage of me because I was white and nonindigent, and he argued that if you could afford to buy food, you should, period. She said that just wasn’t the way it worked, and as far as Abby’s and my life were concerned, she was absolutely right; I had some disposable income, and when I was in the United States, I spent zero percent of it buying food for hungry people, refugee or otherwise. But we weren’t in the United States, and that policy wasn’t exactly defendable, and anyway, I found out that Htan Dah had taken out a personal loan from a friend to buy the beans and eggs
he’d made me the night before. Dinner and breakfast, through the next two weekends, was on me.

“What would you guys do if someone didn’t come up with the money to buy more food?” I asked Htan Dah.

“We eat rice. And salt.” His use of present tense was not an ESL error; they ran out of food money almost every single month. At that point, they just lived off whatever was left of their staples, which were delivered courtesy of the Thailand Burma Border Consortium. In 1975, the Committee for the Coordination of Services to Displaced Persons in Thailand was formed in response to the refugees coming in from Vietnam. For years, it administered assistance to the incoming Indochinese population. When Karen refugees started arriving in 1984, the Royal Thai Government asked the organization to supply basic food and medical supplies. By 1994 so many Burmese refugees were setting up camp in so many locations—and the original refugees weren’t going anywhere, and were multiplying—that the Thai Ministry of Interior requested that sanitation and educational services be implemented as well. By 1997, the organization had its energies and abilities completely expended by Burmese refugees, whom it began serving nearly exclusively. Additionally, several members of the CCSDPT formed another group dedicated to providing them aid.

This was the Thailand Burma Border Consortium (TBBC). Every month, the NGO drove a truck up to BA and unloaded these refugees’ rations: thirteen bags of rice, fifty kilos each; one bag of dried yellow beans, forty kilos; two tins of fish paste, sixteen kilos each; forty bottles of cooking oil (which always, always ran out); a five-pound bag of chilies; and fourteen kilos of salt. BA then distributed some of this to Office Two, to another office farther up the border, to the Karen Student Network Group, and to villages in Burma via the HRDs.

TBBC also provides monthly rations to every household in every
camp, keeping the refugees fed for 58¢ a day.
²⁸
Since its beginning, there’s been a name change to broaden the organization’s appeal to donors—it used to be called the Consortium of Christian Agencies. Now most of its funds are institutional, but it was originally funded entirely by churches and other Christian charities. In 1990, its fund-raising goal was about $1 million. In 1996, the budget was $8 million. Today, it spends $35 million a year, and has collected hundreds of millions in its history of keeping Burma’s refugees from starving.

To celebrate not eating just rice and salt, I gave Eh Soe another ten bucks and sent him to pick up a case of twelve 22-ounce bottles of Chang beer and some change. He came back with fourteen and none. It was Friday night, after all. Any Karen women in the house instantly disappeared; Eh Soe said it was common for women to let men get drunk without bothering them or bothering to listen to them act like fools. I found Htan Dah’s wife and the female staffer, Ta Eh Thaw, in the family room and tried to talk them into joining us for a drink with much idiotic pantomiming, since the former didn’t speak English, but they declined.

We sat at the picnic table pouring strong cheap beer over fat round ice cubes that someone had procured, repeatedly clinking our small glasses and coffee cups together at my insistence. We tore into the market spoils with abandon, the guys firing up the wok and spitting fish bones on the table and flicking cheroot ash and hocking loogies onto the floor and badgering me with rounds of questions that started with the usual “If I go to America” (will people be nice
to me even though I’m Asian, can I marry your sister, etc.). Generally, Htan Dah’s kid was terrified of white people—he at least looked worried or at worst started howling whenever Abby or I approached, even though Htan Dah said soothing things to him like “Do you want to go to your auntie?” when I was nearby. (He said it in Karen, but when I’d pressed him to translate for me, he broke down and did, embarrassed.) But that night Htan Dah got the 17-month-old adorably drunk, and he became thrilled to meet us.

Abby and I, of course, were completely freaking out about the hammered infant. “Htan Dah,” I said, wincing at the child’s blissfully glazed eyes, “that baby is
drunk
.”

“Yes,” Htan Dah said. He raised his eyebrows innocently and pointed to a bowl on the table. “But also he has rice(!).” However we screeched and admonished them, the guys all insisted that at a year and a half, that kid was wayyy past the reasonable Karen drinking age.

Eh Soe became very serious and started waxing philosophic about his positions on gay rights (he wasn’t sure), discrimination (he was against it, possibly even re the gays), freedom (for), premarital sex (for, though he hadn’t yet had it with the girlfriend he was interminably chatting on the phone with), and the most popular guy in the house (him). By the end of the night, he was just plain wasted, and beseeched me to send an email home that the staff had run out of underpants and could someone please bring us some on an airplane. (I did.) We arm wrestled. (He lost.) Htoo Moo asked me if I had any lady friends I could hook him up with, and when I asked him in return if
kaw la wah
—white people—were okay, he said, “Yes. Very yes.” He was sitting next to Ta Mla, who held two of Htoo Moo’s fingers, his middle and index, in the way that is common platonic male affection in their culture and many others but that Htoo Moo seemed to be aware was not common in mine and therefore endured uncomfortably. The Blay asked me if I liked this place, then, after I answered in the affirmative, stopped talking to me, which was about as much interaction as I ever had with him.

Htan Dah’s cheeks got a little pink, but he refrained from getting obliterated, certainly way less drunk than his kid. He told me how his mother had taught him to cook. While he’d watched her, she’d told him that he would one day have to cook for himself, because he couldn’t assume that his wife could or would or should do it for him. He wished he farmed his own food, concerned that a lot of the produce sold in the markets was grown with chemicals. He was interested in working in a restaurant for one year, just for fun, just to learn to cook new things, and better, but didn’t think he’d ever get the chance.

“Would you do it if you got a Thai ID?” I asked.

“No,” he said softly. His exclamations had faded with the daylight and his sobriety. “It’s only for myself, not for my duty to my people. It’s not for the cause. Not for the war.”

The room never became as loud as a normal party, just as the house was never as noisy as a normal office during the day. There was no radio. The TV in the living room was turned down low. Sometimes a novelty cell phone ring went off.
²⁹
On Saturdays, the guys played quiet Ping-Pong. Tonight, however much we drank, it never got so boisterous that someone upstairs couldn’t have easily taken a nap. When I laughed particularly hard at something Eh Soe said, Htan Dah actually shushed me, because to be illegal someplace was to be illegal all the time, in the house or out, drunk or sober, he always had to be on the lookout.

We ran out of beer at eleven-thirty. The guys were chatting softly, intermittently, wound down and subdued. Eh Soe was keeping his sweaty face only far enough off the table that he could get a cheroot in and out of it. Ta Mla and Htan Dah had disappeared, the latter leaving a glassful of Chang behind. I stumbled into the computer
room, where I found them, HRD interviews and Excel spreadsheets on the monitors in front of them, respectively.

“Are you guys
working
?” I asked.

They nodded.

I didn’t really know what to say, so I said, “But, Htan Dah. You still have
beer
left.”

He waved his hand at me. “It is nothing.” I followed him as he walked back into the dining room/garage, took the glass down in one swallow, and went back to work.

I stood there watching them for a bit, immobilized with drunk and awe. I fancied myself a pretty hard-core worker, “But it’s nearly midnight!” They ignored me. “You guys are drunk!”

Htan Dah looked up at me, but didn’t say anything.

“And we’re celebrating!”

“Yes, we can celebrate,” he said finally, turning back to his computer. “But consider IDP.”

“Okay,” I said, turning to head back to the remaining revelers, though if there was anything in the world I most certainly did not want to consider when I was trying to have a good time, it was IDP.

 

DURING ONE
of our talks in our room, Eh Soe got pretty worked up about internally displaced persons, or IDPs. His job with BA was community organizing; he’d trained for two months to learn how to empower villagers. He was dispatched into Burma for weeks or months at a time to ask villagers how they could have meetings and solve their own problems, never being didactic or demanding but encouraging them to lead and survive, holding critical-thinking and confidence-building and creative-brainstorming workshops, not saying that Westerners know definitively that democracy is a good system or where diarrhea comes from—these guys weren’t about to impose another kind of dictatorship onto anybody—but urging villagers to discuss whether the former could work and the latter could possibly be caused by bad water rather than bad karma. Community
organizers going to Karen communities, however, tend to work in the remote, mountainous locations where they’re concentrated, not flat, luxuriant lowlands like where Eh Soe came from.

His first trip was in October 2005. He couldn’t sleep. He was hungry. His legs ached violently from climbing mountains. He was tired. Though he was only in Burma for a month and was supposedly avoiding offensive areas, he had to flee from the SPDC. When he was laid out with a fever for four or five days, he had no access to medicine, just some herbs someone had found him. Complaining to me about it, he admitted that he still fared better than his coworker, who didn’t shake his fever for three weeks.

“It was very terrible,”
³⁰
he said, laughing at how very terrible it was. “He almost died that time.”

But as bad as that had been, Eh Soe’s most recent trip, the one from which he’d just returned, had focused on IDPs, whose habitat was even worse than mountainous villages in that it was usually mountainous but also lacked even the meager amenities of villages. This is a UN definition of IDP:

For four years straight, Burma made the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre’s list of the world’s worst displacement situations, right along with, recently, Iraq and Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and other conflict-ridden nations people
have actually heard of. Eastern Burma alone—that is, the part of town that’s home to our minority protagonists—is packed with well more than half a million IDPs, more than twice as many as the whole great internationally war-torn landscape of Afghanistan.

This is how their situation is described in an advocacy-group newsletter:

They have, as the IDMC points out, no income, a disrupted social organization, and “profound psychological distress,” and are documentless, worldly-possession-less, hiding, and/or under attack.

This was Eh Soe’s take: “I don’t understand how people live in the jungle. People think IDPs don’t have skills, they are poor and stupid and sitting around, but they survive there.” He shook his head. “I won’t go back there again.”

“Really?” I asked. He’d already told me that he went back to his own village during the summers, rough and risky traveling, because he missed his mom. I couldn’t believe he’d flat-out refuse to go to the IDP settlements he was assigned to for work.

“Okay. Well, later, probably. But it is not easy to live in the jungle.” He waved his hand dismissively. “Forget about living in the jungle. Oh my god.” He shook his head again, harder, faster, increasingly flustered as he thought about it. “Oh my
god
. That is
not
a practical place to live.”

Being probably one of the more treacherous tracts of geography the world has to offer, Burma’s jungle is indeed not a practical place to live. Back in the day, it was one of the country’s best defenses. The very ill-fated eighteenth-century Manchu invaders could have told the soon-coming British what awaited them when they stepped off
their ships there: dysentery, cholera, malaria. It wasn’t any less hard on the powers that swept in 120 years later for World War II. Scores of Allied troops had to be evacuated for disease and exhaustion. Soldiers died of typhus. One detachment in the Japanese 54
^th
Transport Corps lost several men to tigers.
³¹
There’s a tree whose sap causes the body to erupt in horribly painful boils that can kill you. The survival guides issued by the United States Army Air Forces Office of Flying Safety, Safety Education Division maintained that in the event of an emergency landing, an able-bodied man could survive for
weeks
in the jungle—if he always moved calmly and slowly, used his parachute as a sturdy tent, stayed dry in the crushing humidity by changing his clothes often, drank water only if it had been boiled for three minutes or treated with iodine or Halazone tablets, used his signal pistol to scare off tigers or “angry” elephants, didn’t sleep directly on the ground, had mosquito netting and preventative malaria medication, and was never, ever barefoot.
³²