Burma, the Beautiful

Celebrating – and advocating – independence, halfway across the world.

By Geoff Aung, Columbia University
Wednesday July 19, 2006

MAE SOT, Thailand — On the east end of Mae Sot, a cluster of food stalls and a crowd of bicycles comprise the so-called “night market,” a bastion of noodles and rice where only a fool would eat for more than $2 a meal. In this quiet Thai town, a mere 10 minutes’ motorbike ride from the Burmese border, the night market is the preferred venue for all things sweet, spicy, and satisfying – including conversations. On July 4, I gathered there with three other Americans to toast Independence Day over fried fish, cold lamb, hot tofu, and a liberal helping of Beer Chang.

While the cheap eats, vibrant street culture, beautiful countryside, and wonderful locals are reason enough for some to travel to Mae Sot, this group of Americans and most of the foreigners here have come because of the Burmese military dictatorship just across the border. They are here as humanitarian workers, and they are here as volunteers; the dire refugee crisis and exiled political groups require both. For all of us, a free and democratic Burma is the ultimate goal.

Last year, I spent the Fourth of July wandering the U Street area of Washington, D.C., watching the fireworks over the Washington Monument on the National Mall, and shotgunning beers with fellow interns atop an apartment building in Foggy Bottom. I slept peacefully that night, while visions of American grandeur – proud flags, explosions in the sky, and majestic monuments – danced in my head like sugar plums on Christmas Eve. Needless to say, this year’s Fourth was a bit different.

The foreign aid workers here are responding to the brutal dictatorship of General Than Shwe across the border. It is a dictatorship that ferociously insists on driving its people further and further into a nightmare of oppression that began in1962. The popularly-elected opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, has long been under house arrest, giving her the dubious distinction of being the only imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureate in the world. Civil and political rights are still nonexistent, and in the eastern regions of the country, the dictator’s army has used the longest-running civil war in the world (58 years) to send more than 100 thousand refugees into Thailand, while tens of thousands of internally displaced peoples (IDPs) hide in the jungles.

It is this refugee crisis that brought Sarah Wohler, a 23-year-old from California, to Mae Sot. “There’s something wrong when people don’t know about Burma,” she says. After living in Europe for a few years and working in hospital emergency rooms in her home state, the earthquake in Pakistan in 2005 provided her an opportunity to experience disaster relief first-hand. With Australian Aid International, she was based in Kashmir and helped run clinics in cities she describes as “flattened.” Despite finding Kashmir every bit as dangerous as most Americans would imagine, she says being there was “the most amazing experience of my life – it changed my life.” Sarah tried to return to the United States for college, but she could not stand being there. “I didn’t want to be back,” she says. “I wanted to be somewhere where I felt I was making a difference.”

Even now, with her college degree still unfinished but soon to begin medical school, Sarah works on medical relief in Karen State, one of the eastern Burmese states where Than Shwe’s dictatorship – in a suitably Orwellian fashion known as the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) – has most violently focused its attacks on civilian populations. Karen State is the part of Burma nearest to Mae Sot and the source of most of the refugees populating the camps in Thailand along the border.

Sarah connects her work in Mae Sot to her American roots, an association echoed by several – but not all – of the Americans I spoke to here. For her, “doing small things in a place that is worse-off than America is an important part of being American.” Similarly, Meredith Walsh, a 28-year-old from Memphis, likens her work in Mae Sot to a basic criticism of American politics: “Questioning the government is patriotic,” she says, “and I do that [to the Burmese government] everyday I’m here, just by virtue of the fact that I am here.”

For people like Sarah and Meredith, being American is something they’ve begun to know and understand not by draping themselves in historical mythology and summer barbecues, but by hitting a zoom-out on their perspective and trying to contextualize the country they know best, traveling the world and bandaging its wounds.

“I am learning more about America by not being there,” Meredith says. Lynn Yoshikawa, a Californian who is leaving her job on the border to begin a master’s program in Sweden, agrees: “I know much more about the U.S. being outside than inside,” she says. In America, “You’re raised to think one way, not being aware of what goes on outside the U.S.”

Fighting Disillusionment

Making a difference in the world, according to Americans in Mae Sot, is not impossible to undertake from within the United States. But living and working abroad is an opportunity to see crises firsthand from real people, rather than photographic portraits. It is the difference between reading a report and meeting with the authors in their village, between passing legislation in Congress and seeing its implementation through in a small Thai mountain community.

For some, foreign aid work is a preference for hands-on work in the field over more bureaucratic maneuvers in the United States. Aryca, a former art history student from Fargo, N.D., who now coordinates volunteers in Mae Sot, says, “Staying in your own country and working on public policy is good and useful, but for me, lobbying and senators are terrifically boring.” Instead, Aryca prefers to work on the ground, where she knows she can contribute: “The reason I’m here is because I want to work on social change. I could do it elsewhere, but I know this place well.”

Eric Loftman, a law student and former sweatshop activist from Indiana, sympathizes with this bias towards overseas action. Of the Americans I have met in Mae Sot, Eric is the most intense about his dissatisfaction with the United States. He says that since he was young, he’s had a “poisoned attitude about America.”

“I think America is beautiful. I like road trips,” he says. But he maintains his identification with what he calls a “culture of disillusionment.” Eric’s work with a legal group here in Mae Sot focuses primarily on the plight of Burmese migrant workers, an incredibly vulnerable group of people who, seeking escape from the difficulties of life in refugee camps, too often become victims of sexual or labor exploitation. Eric’s optimistic view of the possible benefits of globalization, notwithstanding some current problems, motivates his work. For him, globalization is too often a one-way project of American imposition. He believes it can be reformed into something more beneficial for the entirety of the world’s population – but only if Americans are willing to go out into the world and work toward that goal.

As Meredith sees it, the luxury of life in a post-globalization United States carries with it certain responsibilities. “Wherever you graze, that’s where you’re going to focus on,” she says. “The criticism I have of Americans on that is that everything we have depends upon – even exploits – other people. We need a greater awareness of our impact.” Even Meredith, who served with the Peace Corps in the Philippines after graduating from Smith College, acknowledges that working for what she calls “social justice” is an opportunity. “‘Saving the world’ was very appealing as an idea,” she says, but it is “an easy answer, in a way—not a sacrifice, more a privilege.”

A Renewal of Hope

In Paris in the 1920s, a well-known group of American expatriates called themselves the Lost Generation. Among them, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway made literary history with their poignant tales of disillusionment. Fitzgerald famously wrote that theirs was “a generation grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.”

The American expatriates in Mae Sot – an admittedly less famous group of willful exiles from a land of plenty – come far to seek something we cannot get at home. But our self-imposed exile is not as despotic as that of the Lost Generation. If our faiths were shaken, we would not be here. We are here because we still have hope. For America, for Burma, and for the future, we believe a brighter dawn awaits.

Take Action Now at www.uscampaignforburma.org.

Illustration: Matt Bors

--------

Comments
Leave a comment about this article below. For more discussion, visit our community page and sign up for your own Campus Progress blog!

1. Geoff: THANK YOU. Just one correction: 100,000 (or even 123,000 reported by the Irrawaddy) Burmese refugees is a very conservative estimate. There are many more refugees living in camps in Thailand unregistered, and 200,000+ Shan ethnic minority people who have fled violence in Burma but are unable to get ‘refugee status’ from the Thai government because they have not signed the Refugee Convention or its Optional Protocol. Additionally, there are upwards of 1 million migrant workers from Burma in Thailand and neighboring countries who, although they also lack refugee status, are often fleeing fighting and a “well-founded fear of persecution.” And who can count the displaced inside Burma? There are 50,000+ in E. Burma alone, and 20,000 more displaced just since March. The numbers may be more like up in 1 million by now.

   — cristina - Jul 19, 09:28 PM - #
   
   

2. We can talk forever on the situation in Burma. We all know what’s wrong! Maybe it’s time for the Chindits to return. To once more tackle the beast, for one more time to release Burma from the grip of evil.

   — Ian Willson - Jul 20, 02:37 AM - #
   
   

3. Thank you Geoff. Keep us updated with more trenchant pieces like this one.

   — Brandon Auerbach - Jul 20, 11:34 PM - #
   
   

4. who is geoff aung? i’m all ears. nice work, mate.

   — eli - Jul 22, 11:35 AM - #
   
   

5. Great job Geoff. It is important that everyone be aware of global issues that affect massive amounts of people.

   — Corey Ponder - Jul 22, 07:42 PM - #
   
   

6. Excellent job!

   Here’s hoping President Bush doesn’t bomb Burma. Cheers!

   — Matt Fisher - Jul 28, 09:09 PM - #
   
   

7. Is this Geoff from John Jay High School? If not, sorry.

   — Tom Barden - Sep 11, 01:39 PM - #