This is where hundreds of thousands of unarmed and unequipped civilians and babies try to survive in the rugged and disease-ridden terrain through shelterless heavy rains and also, now, the ground is covered in land mines. Wah Doh was one of these survivors. Burma army troops came into his village when he was thirteen; he and his family fled, and weren’t able to go back for sustained fighting in the area. For six months, they lived in a cave with, by his estimation, four or five hundred other people. There was little space. There was no school. Wah Doh cried a lot at the sound of gunfire, though the adults sang to calm the kids, to calm themselves, to occupy their empty time. Since the little bit of rice they’d carried out of their village
was all they had to last, Wah Doh’s family daily ate rice soup: water with a few grains of rice in it.
At BA, I was always the tallest person in the room, but next to Wah Doh, I was a giantess. His telling me this story during one of our between-class translation sessions made me wonder if his teenage diet was why this full-grown male just a few years my junior no way weighed more than ninety pounds.
“Were you bored?” I asked.
He looked at me a little impatiently. “What was ‘bored’?” he asked. After they left the cave, his family had to stay on the outskirts of a village for an additional year and a half, until they were sure it was safe to return to their own.
So consider, as Htan Dah suggested, IDP. As urgent and vast as his crisis was, if you were one of them, your crisis would be much, much direr. The Burma army has come into your village and burned it down, along with your crops. The government has ordered you to move to one of the hundreds of concentration camps it sets up for ethnic scum like you. This camp is really just a big empty field on which you can forage for food and sheltering supplies anytime you are not being used as a slave for portering, building and/or maintaining army camps, and other “public infrastructure projects.” It’s not like there’s sanitation or medicine there, and you could very well be worked or tortured or shot to death, so you run away, into the jungle. Let’s hope you were able to bring some rice! Ideally, you have hidden some, as did the village Htoo Moo ran away with, among the trees. If not, you can go back to your village under the cover of night and try to salvage some from your old reserves, which the assailing troops scattered all over the ground and burned. Or maybe your village hasn’t been attacked or burned down, but you’ve just miraculously survived being used as a human land-mine detector and are afraid of being conscripted for that duty again, or you’ve just realized you’re pregnant and don’t want to risk being raped into a miscarriage, so you still run away into the jungle. Since you don’t have a house, or a kitchen, or a pot anymore,
you can soak rice in green bamboo stalks for half an hour, then roast the bamboo over a fire until it’s cooked. Or you can soak the rice in your
longyi
—Burmese sarong—for an hour, bury it a foot under the ground, then build a fire on top, which will steam the rice in about fifteen minutes, and which is really handy when you don’t know how long it will be before you have to start running again. When the rice gets low, you’ll eat rice porridge, and soon, when things get really desperate, rice soup. This, again, is all assuming you’ve got access to that rice. Or fire. Or, for that matter, water. And that it’s nighttime, since cook smoke can be seen by government troops during the day, so it’ll give away your hiding place. You’ll probably have to scavenge, looking for bamboo shoots, mushrooms, trying to eat bark, but it really stresses you out, since you know a lot of people step on land mines this way; so many are laid, “in stark contrast to the complete rejection of mine use that we see elsewhere in the world,” says the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, that they cause one in twenty-five deaths in eastern Burma. But maybe in your hunt you’ll find a piece of plastic, which would be pretty neat, because then you could live under it, which will be especially helpful if it’s the season when it rains for several months solid. Keep your eyes and ears peeled for advancing troops. Hope there’s not a measles outbreak. If you can muster the energy, try to help give the kids some sense of normality, holding school in the dirt. Some of the kids are pretty unfocused, many of them suffering from acute malnutrition, and you don’t have any supplies, but the activity helps distract you from what happened with your toddler, who, as an IDP in eastern Burma, had a more than one-in-five chance of dying before his fifth birthday, and did. If your surviving child gets sick, you’ve sworn to carry her to the nearest welcoming hospital. It’s in Thailand, just through hostile, enemy-controlled jungle, over a mountain range and a river that rushes from its headwaters in Tibet toward the Andaman Sea, and past a corps of shady Thai border police. Watch out for land mines. And soldiers. And tigers.
So you’re fending entirely for yourself in the middle of the open
Burma jungle, kind of like a shot-down Air Force pilot but without the handbook or hope of rescue. Unlike in the case of Htan Dah and his fellow refugees, and unlike what they do for even those other internally displaced populations in places like Iraq or Sudan, none of the major international aid players, UN or Doctors Without Borders or International Committee of the Red Cross or Mercy Corps or otherwise, has official responsibility for you. It’s possible you’ll get ideological fortification from a community organizer like Eh Soe now and then, but that hardly meets your essential needs. There is a crew called the Back Pack Health Worker Team, eighty-some groups of two to five Burmese, mostly Karen, each that trek around Burma with up to forty-pound bamboo baskets strapped to their backs packed with donated supplies picked up in Thailand, delivering babies, handing out minimal meds, doing land-mine-related amputations with whatever it takes, wire saws and hacksaws and knives. They target 170,000 displaced people with their 294. Seven have been killed. One has been arrested and remains in prison. The Karen Department of Health and Welfare also sends some medics out with supplies. Hope that they’ll come to an area near you. Otherwise, your best chance by far of getting any relief is from the army of a roving Pasadena-seminary-ordained American ex-Special Forces soldier named Dave.
LET’S BACK
up for a second. Karen State was not always, even in recent history, one of the worst places you could live. It has been the staging area of a deeply divisive ethnic and political war for many decades, yes. But remember that in 1984, when Htan Dah was a toddler living in Thailand, he was one of ten thousand refugees from Burma there. Out of several million Karen—estimates vary from three to six; Burma hasn’t had a decent census since 1931—that’s not so bad, relatively speaking. It wasn’t until ten years later that the number was eighty thousand, and a decade after that that the number doubled, plus nearly another hundred thousand outside
Thailand and at least half a million more in the Burmese jungle. Part of the difference was the fall of Manerplaw.
Though the junta didn’t recognize Karen State as autonomous, during the long time that the KNU had a lot of eastern Burma under its control—and a lot of the Karen under its protection—it functioned as if it were, as well as it could in a war. The Karen National Union had divided Kaw Thoo Lei into districts and townships and tracts, and it held elections for positions on committees. It harvested and sold teak and taxed the border, and in the ’70s, it built Manerplaw, an elaborate headquarters with a parade ground and departments like finance and education and transport and health and welfare. There were doctors and engineers and rubber stamps with official insignia. There’s a flag, a wide horizontal stripe each of red, white, and blue, red sunrise against blue sky in the upper left box, where the US’s stars go, superimposed with the golden drum of their ancestors. There were economic stimulus programs that implemented basket-weaving training. For twenty years, Manerplaw thrived, the last democratic stronghold in the country. The Burma army had tried to take it repeatedly, of course, but had always failed. Until the DKBA formed, forged an alliance with the regime, and gave up all the KNU inside information you could please.
One warm winter night in 1995, the Karen at Manerplaw gathered what they could carry and set the whole headquarters ablaze, fleeing by the light of the flames as the Burma army closed in. It was only a matter of time before the Burma army’s capture of that long-contended and crucial post led to its takeover of another key stronghold, Kaw Moo Rah, which was shelled so hard that it lit up the sky and shook the houses of Mae Sot. It’s hard to know how many thousands of soldiers the KNU had at the time; some say five, and some say fifteen. Whatever the number, a sizable portion discontinued their service then, disillusioned, and where the resistance had once controlled huge areas of Karen State, it now had only a few disconnected pieces of land. It was open season on Karen civilians.
The Burma army started destroying thousands of villages and trying to force their inhabitants into several dozen concentration camps (though without so much the “camp” part, really, since there was no infrastructure or shelter). In response, tens of thousands of desperate Karen threw themselves into the arms of unmitigated jungle or across the border into Thailand.
Enter Dave. Dave grew up in Thailand, the son of American missionaries of some repute, his father a gruff and understated preacher, his mother an ex-showgirl who says she was second in line to play Julie Andrews’s part in
The Sound of Music
. She smiles when she explains that she thought her husband was brash when they first met but was soon so won over by his passion for Christ that she quit her promising career and moved with him to Thailand. She’ll sing for you, if you go over to their Chiang Mai house for pancakes, and she’ll tell you about how they gave their son a found bear cub for a play-mate, and how it was the cutest thing when Dave would wrestle the bear, and how everyone was sad to have to get rid of the bear after it got a little rough with Dave’s young sister.
When he grew up, Dave went to Texas A&M and became a Special Forces soldier, doing anti-narcotics in South America, working with special forces in Thailand. He met a girl, who thought he was a little brash, but he wooed her into a mountain-climbing date, and beyond. They got married, he quit the service, and he joined Fuller Seminary in California, ultimately deciding that he, too, should become a missionary.
He was in Thailand doing God’s work when the big post-Manerplaw offensives were displacing people like crazy. When he went to the border with a backpack full of supplies, he ran into a KNU medicsoldier who was also eager to help. That day in 1997, with the KNU in full retreat and refugees and IDPs swarming the borderlands, the two men treated as many wounded as they could, picking up a guy who’d stepped on a land mine and taking him to a hospital to have
his leg amputated, back and forth over the border, rushing into Burma to help the injured as if the whole country were a house on fire. The Free Burma Rangers was born.
The first Free Burma Rangers team consisted of two medics, a nurse, and a soldier—Dave founded the organization in collaboration with key KNU personnel—along with a videographer, photographer, reporter, and pastor sent to the jungle for a three-week relief mission. Since then, 110 teams have conducted more than 350 missions that have treated some 360,000 people. And they’re all dispatched with medicine and video cameras and at least one gun from a base that Dave has built right in Karen State, right in the middle of enemy territory.
“The purpose of the training is to train, equip, and inspire you to serve your people and help them get freedom,” he explains to his new recruits, ethnic guys from Burma, sometimes peppered—or salted, I guess—with a few white Christians, during the six-week training on base. Dave is buff and sinewy and fair. He is a charismatic brightness in the vast green jungle camp. “We call ourselves the Free Burma Rangers because we want everyone in Burma to be free. A ranger is one who can go alone, or go in pairs. No matter what the obstacles, he will always try. If a ranger has a weapon, he can fight. If he has no weapon, he can still do something to help. No one can stop the Free Burma Rangers from serving and loving other people. And no one can stop you from serving your people.”
Training involves war-game-like drills, with burning buildings and unconscious villagers and enemies attacking from the wings. The rangers complete intense physical obstacle courses, plus training in swimming and lifesaving, backpack flotation, using maps and compasses, operations order, building rope bridges, rappelling, land-mine removal, video camera use, CPR, first aid, syringe and IV use, human rights interviewing, counseling, crack surgery and dentistry.
So this is where Dave lives, along with his wife and two little
towheaded girls and a boy, running his own kind of insurgency from the middle of the jungle in the middle of this war.
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The whole thing operates on a budget of about $1 million a year, and the whole budget, like all of the money that fed Karen refugees for years, like some of the money that still educates and feeds them now, comes from individual donations and church groups, via Internet donations and checks. Additionally, PO boxes in Thailand receive contributions of supplies: toys and vitamins and toothpaste, all sealed into little plastic bags with postcards full of Bible verses.
But Dave tells his recruits that they can all work together even if they’re not Christian, because they’re all God’s children, and God is bigger than everything. Training includes liberal amounts of praying. Before the missions, team members confess their sins to one another. During the missions, they pray over their patients, and hand out Bibles where few other books exist. They pray that God will keep them safe and give them signs so that they can avoid conflict with or capture by the Burma army. Dave says there’s no other explanation for his being alive today. Once, when he was being pursued by more than a thousand Burma army troops, he says, the only way to survive was to hunker down and pray for safety. It worked. The teams press on whether fighting is heavy or not, whether or not Dave’s baby girls are with them. Prayer has, according to the Free Burma Rangers, made Burma army soldiers get lost in pursuit or mis-steer their boats, has helped teams find
their way when they’re lost and alone in the middle of completely encompassing land-mine-filled jungle. They’ve got a list of miracles longer than the Salween River.