For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question Page 13

  I was in the same spot when Eh Soe walked in after the meeting ended.

  “What are you doing?” he asked. He talked faster than anyone in the house, maybe just because he could, because his English was better. It made him sound fussy. That, and the fact that if Htan Dah’s intonation was like Yogi Bear’s, Eh Soe’s wasn’t entirely unlike Snagglepuss’s.

  “Nothing, Eh Soe. I’m resting. How was your meeting?”

  He sat down on the end of the bench, pushing my legs out of the way with his ass. “Fine. Why didn’t you come? We talked about you.”

  I sat up. “You guys were talking about me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Just, is it useful to have English classes, should we have English instructors in the future . . . like that.”

  “Well what did they say?”

  “They were just discussing if it is a good use of time when we are very busy, and our English teachers come only for a short time, is it long enough to learn anything or make a difference.”

  My mouth went dry. “So what did they decide? Do they think it’s helpful for me to be here?”

  “They were just discussing.”

  “I mean, you can’t expect miracles in a month, and it certainly can’t hurt for my students to be taking classes, or even just having English speakers around. Plus I paid for my own trip, and I buy some of my own food, so it’s not like it isn’t cost-effective. You should have come and got me when they started talking about teaching so I could have participated in the conversation!”

  Eh Soe shrugged. He repeated, more firmly, “They were just discussing.”

  By the time I returned home from class that day, I’d sunk to the full depth of a morale crisis. Due to busy schedules, the enrollment of my early, advanced class had suddenly dropped from seven to three. It also seemed to me, however delusional, that my students/coworkers /housemates—and, I’d thought, friends—weren’t being as friendly. They had decided, I had decided, that I was useless. So I nearly cried thankful tears when Htan Dah walked up to me after I got back to Office One and said, “Can you help me with something?”

  It took me about five seconds to find the organizational map of the United Nations on the Internet.

  “Wow!” Htan Dah said. “Thank you!”

  By the time I’d finished showing him some tips for effective Googling, I felt much better.

  “It’s getting late,” I said. “Do you have a lot more work to do today?”

  He shrugged. “Are you hungry?”

  “Always.”

  He thought for a moment. “What should we cook?”

  “What do we have?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “Eh Soe can take you to the market. Do you want to go?”

  Eh Soe never went to the market, but I thought it was nice of him to give Htan Dah a break from grocery shopping. “Okay.” I’d never gone anywhere with Eh Soe before. I was about to realize that I should have kept it that way.

  I’d gotten a lot better about being on the motorbikes. One recent day, I’d noticed when Htan Dah and I were almost all the way to our destination that I’d forgotten to spend the ride picturing skulls crushed against the pavement like so much fruit. He was trustworthy, stable, careful, and the panic that had before made me hard and tense throughout—with my small, soft, precious head exposed to the wind and the sun—had suddenly turned to something warm and liquid like tea.

  Eh Soe, however, careened carelessly around corners, too fast in traffic, turning his head back to talk to me, terrifying me by taking his eyes off the road. He tipped his face almost far enough around to make eye contact with me when he told me that any groceries that were about to be bought for the office/house, I had to pay for. There was no more money in the food budget, he said, not looking at the oncoming traffic and sharp impending bend.

  The house food budget was forty-five hundred baht, or a little more than a hundred bucks, a month. With all the extra people around and hungry visitors coming through, there wasn’t anything Htan Dah could do to make the budget stretch that far, not that he’d really tried—we want to eat it now, we eat it now, budget be damned. And so the market funds had dissipated completely two days ago, a whole twelve days shy of the next check from the organization. If I wanted to eat anything for the next ten days, Eh Soe advised, I had to buy it, and I couldn’t very well eat in front of everybody else, so I should buy food for them, too.

  “Do you really think that’s fair?” I asked.

  “Of course,” he said, steering with one hand and gesturing gratuitously with the other. “If I have no money, and you have a lot of money, you should buy the food.” Once we parked, he started grabbing big bagfuls of stuff, and when I started to protest that that was kind of a lot, he reminded me that there were, like, seventeen people to feed. And here I’d thought Eh Soe was just being sweet in offering me a ride.

  When we got back, Htan Dah was in the dining room/garage talking to Abby. He met my gaze, but not so easily as usual.

  “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 beginn
ing, 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:Internally
displaced persons are persons or groups of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized State border.

  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:As a consequence of the poor living conditions that IDPs are forced into, illnesses are frequent and malnutrition is rife. The threats of military attack, food insecurity, and illness and injury are the primary obstacles to the IDPs’ survival.

  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.”