Refugee Camp California

A few weeks ago, I got the chance to spend a week in a Burmese refugee camp up by the border.  This particular camp is mostly Karen (one of the ethnic minorities in Burma; the Karen National Union’s struggle against the Burmese government has been called the world’s longest-running civil war, and while there was a ceasefire signed last month, it’s unclear whether it will be honoured on the ground).

Up Ahead in the Distance, I Saw a Shimmering Light

Some friends and I took a bus down to the nearest border town, ate lunch at a run-down little noodle bar at the bus station, then loaded all our stuff into a pickup truck for the trip over the mountains.  The views along the way were stunning… 

... at least, from the glimpses I caught while I was holding on for dear life.  Our driver was a young guy whose driving philosophy seemed to be, “WHEEEEE!”  Picture a roller coaster with no seatbelts; when you have to brace yourself so that your head doesn’t bash the ceiling as you go around turns, someone’s having a little too much fun at the wheel. :)

Such a Lovely Place

We made it, alive but queasy, to the camp, and trekked across about half of it to reach the guest house where we’d be staying.  Like most of the structures in the camp, it’s a bamboo and wood building, raised on stilts, with a drying area underneath and an attached washroom at the back.  It’s run by a round, beaming older woman we just called Moogha (“Auntie”).  She doesn’t speak English, but one of my Karen friends was staying with us, so she helped translate.

Moogha is awesome.  She’s plastered the guesthouse walls, inside and out, with photos of her family… interspersed with posters of Thai soap stars and Korean pop singers, as well as the occasional heart-spangled poster of syrupy-cute kittens. :)  (And Jesus.  But just two small Jesuses.  Jesi?)  In the evenings, she’d take us on a tour of the family pictures, telling us about how her brothers and sisters are scattered all over the world – this one in Australia, that one in Philippines, a few in Thailand.  (That’s the case for a lot of the people in the camps, especially the older folks:  everyone seems to have at least one relative who’s left to live abroad.)  We did our own, informal tour of the soap star posters without her.  One of my friends beckoned us over to a particular star in a school uniform and said, “I’ve been staring at this for ten minutes.  Is that a boy or a girl?”  My Karen friend – let’s call her K. – peered intently at it for a long time, and then pronounced with great gravitas, “I think it is tom.”  (“Tom” is short for “tomboy” – Thai/Burmese slang for a young lesbian who adopts a boyish look.)

Moogha and I didn’t exactly start off on the right foot:  our first night there, she smiled and beckoned me to sit next to her, then gestured at me and rubbed her arms, saying something in Karen.  I jumped in and answered the question that I assumed she was asking, because it was what everyone had been asking me all evening (and, many of you will recognise, all my life) – “Aren’t you cold?”  (I was the only one in a t-shirt.)  K. started laughing, and corrected me:  “No, no – she said that she always thought she was fat, but look at you!”  Um… thank you?

But that’s another thing Thais and people from Burma have in common – when they say something like that, it’s not a dig, it’s just a statement of fact.  They’d probably be horrified if you took it personally.  So I laughed, and we ended up spending a really great week staying with Moogha.  My favourite part was the one night that all the women (K.; the other foreign woman staying with us; Moogha; and me) sat around drinking cocoa (with sweetened condensed milk – it works surprisingly well) and talking, with K. interpreting for us.  Moogha wanted to know whether we were Christian.  I said that I came from a Catholic family, and my other friend said her family was Muslim; Moogha took all of this in stride, since Karen State has seen missionaries of all stripes over the years, and the camp itself contains multiple worship sites for Muslims and for several Christian denominations.  Moogha’s family, just in the last couple of generations, has had Catholics, Baptists, Muslims, Seventh Day Adventists… it was interesting that when a family member converted (often upon marriage), there didn’t seem to be any stigma or disappointment around it.

The guesthouse itself is rather beautiful, and staying there was, in a lot of ways, relaxing – there was a broad porch overlooking the dirt road out front, and we couldn’t sit down for five minutes without Moogha whipping out a plate of cookies and bringing out the tea with a speed that would put even the English folks I know to shame.  (Everywhere in the camp served this great looseleaf tea, with a strong, fresh, grassy taste.)  One thing that really surprised me about the camp overall, actually, was how good the food was.  I think I slightly prefer Burmese food to Thai food (not that I don’t love Thai food), because Burmese dishes are usually a bit hotter and less sweet.  But I didn’t realise that Burmese cuisine also has a fair amount of Indian influence, until I stayed in the camp.  Every morning, you could buy parothas and savoury roti, stuffed with chickpeas, at the shops along the road.

The washroom took a little while to get used to.  Basically, it’s a squat toilet behind a curtain, with an umbrella over it – for privacy?  Decoration?  I have no idea – and a series of water butts, with scoops you can use to bathe.  When we could, we would rush back at the hottest point in the afternoon to have a bath, because the freezing water would actually feel good then.  After dark?  Not so much.  (One thing about being up in the mountains in northern Thailand, though – the water’s plentiful, and pretty clean.)  I did try, once, to bathe Burmese fashion, wearing a borrowed sarong for modesty (even though we took turns in the washroom) and washing underneath it.  Yeah.  I have no idea how the hell people do that without growing at least one additional arm.

You can also wash clothes in the washroom, and dry them under the house (which comes with its own set of taboos:  shirts and underwear have to dry on separate lines, and you can’t put men’s clothes to dry next to women’s).  I was putting out a pair of jeans to dry when I ran into Moogha’s flock of geese clustered around their food bowl.  I tried to pick my way past them, but they shot me deeply offended glances and left the bowl in a squawking huff.  Okay, fine.  I hung up my jeans, shucked my shoes outside the outer door of the washroom, and went in to have a bath.

When I opened the door to come out, I suddenly came face to face with the entire flock, lined up outside the door, shifting their weight back and forth and puffing out their shoulders like parodies of East End gangsters.

“Dudes, I need my shoes.  I just – can I get my shoes?  Could we do that?  Is that a possibility here?”

They eyed me up and down for a second, and then, almost proudly, shifted aside to show me what they’d done.

Which was SHIT ALL OVER MY SHOES.

Damn, yo.  You don’t cross geese.

(Speaking of the washroom, there was a funny moment on the night before we left the camp, as well:  We were all sitting around by candlelight, and I was wrapped in a shawl that basically covered the top half of my body.  Moogha asked me something, and K. translated, “Do you have clothes under?”  I must have looked puzzled, and I opened the shawl to show that I was wearing a t-shirt underneath.  Everyone cracked up, and K, when she got her breath back, clarified:  “Do you have clothes.  Drying.  Under.  The house?”)

We’re All Prisoners Here, Of Our Own Device

The refugee camp is arranged on either side of a small river in a steep valley.  It’s gorgeous, but it’s a precarious location, at serious risk from floods and landslides.  You can see the gouges in the side of the mountain where past landslides have taken out huge chunks and ripped up trees, and apparently, the main road was completely submerged the last time the river overflowed.  (At least here, there are still a lot of trees to anchor the soil:  in another camp we visited nearby, the refugees had to clear much of the forest to build houses, and a few years ago, a landslide wiped out an entire slope of buildings.)

 

In a way, the physical environment mirrors the situation of the refugees.  They’ve clearly done a lot with the camp over almost two decades:  in addition to the elegant traditional houses, there’s a new hydropower generator, and probably a couple dozen small shops scattered along the main dirt road, selling everything from Karen handicrafts to Thai snacks.  (The snacks and other odds and ends can’t net the shopkeepers much of a profit, because they’re trucked in and sold to the shops at high prices, and it’s not like the shopkeepers can mark them up much if they want them to sell.)   

 

However, because the camp is, by law, a temporary facility, nothing is allowed to last:  the refugees can’t set up solar panels (too permanent) or use concrete in their homes.  (Bamboo houses need to be heavily rebuilt, if not outright replaced, every few years.)  And it’s not like there are opportunities within the camp (outside of a few, hotly contested NGO jobs).  You can’t even set up a shop without government permission.  Do exceptionally well at the camp school, several people told me, and you might end up one day… teaching at the camp school.

It must be a very strange existence.  On the one hand, you don’t exactly have to do anything; you’ll still have food, and a place to live.  And on the other hand, there are so many barriers in place to prevent you from doing anything.  Or you could always leave the camp (as many do), possibly giving up on the dream of getting back to your old lands in Burma one day, and make a life for yourself elsewhere.  For the kids who were born, or at least raised, in the camp – and there’s a whole generation coming to maturity now who are too young to remember anything else – that’s an even tougher choice:  Stay with what you’ve always known, or head out into a world that your life in the camp really hasn’t prepared you to face?

It was fascinating watching my Karen friends from Chiang Mai, especially those with family and friends still in the camp.  Within hours of arriving, they’d ditched their jeans for traditional longyis; they started laughing more and standing straighter.  I sometimes forget that they live in a foreign country every bit as much as I do.

They started telling stories, too, that I might never have heard back in Chiang Mai.  One of my friends, E., grew up mainly in the camp, but before that, she and her family were in a Karen village near to a militia stronghold.  The young commandos would have to steal from neighbouring farms as a test of their stealth (whatever they took would always be returned the next day).  One night, E.’s mother heard one of their ducks quacking and screeching like crazy, and looked outside to see two shadowy figures making off with the panicked duck.  E.’s mother grabbed a makeshift weapon from the kitchen and tore out of the house after them, yelling for them to stop.  They got away, but the next day, the duck was returned by two contrite young men.  “Oh, auntie, auntie, we got a punishment!  First we could not make the duck be quiet, and then you chased us!  We failed the commando test!”

But not all the stories were funny.  E. also told me about her family trying to settle further up the mountain, to have a farm there, until the competition with local villagers over land and resources drove them to the camp; and she told me about what had happened about a year after she and her family settled in the refugee camp.  In the middle of the night, Burmese soldiers arrived, and started setting the refugees’ homes on fire.  “Maybe one hundred, two hundred houses they burned.”  I asked why there wasn’t some kind of security for the camp; she said that there is now, but that at the time, the few Thai guards had turned and run.  “We had no weapons, but there were some who had been soldiers – Karen soldiers, you know – they had guns, and they…”  Her voice, which had been cool and matter-of-fact, started sounding forced.  “They tried to form a line…”

She didn’t give me many details beyond that, and it was a few minutes before she could look at me again.

You Can Check Out Any Time You Like…

On my last morning in the camp, I walked past a cluster of young men in longyis and military castoff jackets, gathered around a radio.  A few of them were warbling along as I passed:

And still those voices are calling from far away,

Wake you up in the middle of the night, just to hear them say…

So, naturally, I started singing.

Welcome to the Hotel California,

Such a lovely place, such a lovely face…

And then we all cracked up. :)

The ride back over the mountain was a lot smoother, with a much older, more experienced driver – I’d like to put down for the record that it also didn’t take a minute longer than the drive to the camp.  However, that was still long enough for him to play his Jim Reeves CD.  All the way through.  FOUR TIMES.  All I could think, after the third rendition, was, “Yeesh, this Reeves guy really has to stop falling in love with women who make him this miserable.  Then again, one of these songs is about a single breakup driving him to drink and leading him to bounce around cesspool beach resorts catching assorted venereal diseases, so I think he also has to acknowledge his own role in this problem.”

And that was my time in the refugee camp.  I’m still turning a lot of it over in my mind, but I think it was helpful for me to see, given the work I’m doing.