“I need to be at professional level,” The Blay said. He moved to the table against the front wall of the room, where his laptop was set up, and clicked on something that launched “Say You, Say Me” on loop, adjourning the conversation. As the rest of the group dispersed, Htan Dah ushered me into the adjoining narrow, cramped computer room, where three of the desks were occupied. He gestured at the lone available one and told me I was free to use it for my classwork.
I sat down at the computer with a notebook and pen. Originally a Midwesterner and constitutionally a nerd, I was instantly energized by being handed an assignment that was potentially too big and too far outside my abilities to complete. And I’d been feeling much better. I’d been negotiating the squat toilet without incident. Also, the night before, I’d walked into the bathroom with my towel, shut the giant wooden door behind me, and stripped off my clothes. I’d stood next to the high trough holding a plastic bowl of icy water and taken just a few breaths before dumping the contents down my neck and chest. My body went rigid and my heart into hard beats with the shock of it, and it took a lot of goes before the wet became more refreshing than traumatizing, but I was clean. We’d had more from that bottomless pot of stick soup, but I was snacking on yogurt and nuts, so my stomach wasn’t so achingly empty. At night, the darkness in my room was so complete that I felt warmly, tightly wrapped in it, and I fell asleep listening to the lizards chirping on the ceiling, one of which had crapped on me. Now, my morale high, I started searching the Internet for do-it-yourself ESL courses while the same soothing Lionel Richie song played over and over in the background.
After several hours, I took my notebook back into the living room and sat down to do some brainstorming on my lesson plan. Near me, in a chair in front of the TV, sat an unfamiliar face bearing a wicked scar. His hair was cut military close, and he was lean but well cut, like most of the other guys.
“Very beautiful,” he said after a while, and I looked up to see him
nodding at Christina Aguilera dancing around the screen in bursting silver lamé.
I smiled and agreed.
“Where do you come from?”
“The United States,” I said. “Do you live here?”
“No. In camp.” Christina Aguilera went through three costume changes in her music video before he asked, “Do your parents have divorce?”
“Are my parents divorced?” I started laughing. “Yes, actually, they are. Most people’s parents are divorced in the United States.”
He nodded steadily. Yes, he’d heard of this. “You are very lucky!” he said with his eye on the TV. I wasn’t sure what to say to that. “You have democracy! You want divorce, you get. You want go, you leave. How did you get here?”
“I flew here. On a plane.”
More nodding. “How much it costs?”
“One thousand three hundred sixty-six dollars,” I said. “That’s ...” I did some math in the top margin of my notebook, above TIPS FOR WRITING A MEMO. “Fifty-four thousand six hundred forty baht.”
“Fifty ...” He narrowed his eyes.
“Fifty-four thousand six hundred forty. Here.” I turned my paper toward him and pointed at the number.
His face didn’t unfurl, and he just shook his head, then shrugged before saying, “A lot.”
“How much money do you make?” I asked Htan Dah at dinner. For the past three meals, he had come to get me from my room when he was done cooking, and then he and Ta Mla had sat at the table with me. The others trickled in or came and went while I ate.
“Five hundred baht per month.” About $13. Ta Mla was smashing fish paste and rice into neat little cones between his vertical thumb and four fingers before scooping it up to his face. Htan Dah shoveled a huge spoonful of rice into his mouth. I had a spoon, too, which he always set out for me. Tonight, he’d also set a plate
piled with finger-thick, footlong branches topped with comely green leaves in front of my place.
“What is this?” I asked.
Htan Dah and Ta Mla both scowled at the little woodpile as if they’d never seen it before, though they’d each just put an end of one of the limbs between their teeth and then quickly chomp-chompchomped it into smaller pieces before swallowing. “I don’t know(!),” Htan Dah said. Each word was a note higher than the last, a singsong in ascending tones. His exclamations, I realized, made him sound like Yogi Bear. He laughed and shook his head. “You want to try?”
“No, I’m good.”
“What about fish paste?” he asked, nodding at the ever-present bowl of sedimentary oil on the table. His eyes sparkled fiercely. “You don’t like fish paste?” That morning, when he saw me turn my head to escape the smell as Ta Mla splashed the sauce onto his plate, he’d opted to describe how thoroughly you had to let the fish rot before you mixed it with chilies and oil while I tried to eat.
“Shut up,” I said.
The Blay walked in singing. “Say it together. ...”
“What is this?” I asked him, pointing at the branches.
“Morning glory?” he guessed. He laughed. “No. I don’t know.” Another unfamiliar face joined him in the dining room/garage, and together, they left.
“How many people live here?” I asked Htan Dah.
“Maybe . . . ten.”
I’d seen a lot more dudes than that milling around the house. Many of them were dudes in Che Guevara T-shirts. “Who lives here? You, Ta Mla, The Blay, Htoo Moo”—he of a silent
h
and the constant smiling and the never talking to me and the stupefyingly round and hard-looking ass—“Ta Eh Thaw. ...” That latter was the girl, whose name I knew now that Ta Mla had written it down for me. “Who else?”
“Gaw Sayyy,” Htan Dah began, drawing out the final syllables of
the names, “Eh Soooe, Georgieee, Eh Kawww
5
. ... They are inside. In Burma.”
“Doing what?”
“Doing interviewww, taking videooo, taking picturrre. . . . They go to the village, and they tell about what is going on in Burma, and about how to unite for democracy. Also, they ask, ‘Have you seen Burma army? Have they raped you, or shot you, or burned your village?’” This explained the “Human Rights Vocabulary” translation cheat sheet I’d seen my first night. I’d gotten a better look at it that afternoon while organizing my class, studying the fifteen most used phrases. One side listed words in Karen script, a train of circular characters, loops that extended lines or swirls above and below the baseline. The other side was in English: 1.) Killings 2.) Disappearances 3.) Torture/inhumane treatments 4.) Forced labor 5.) Use of child soldiers 6.) Forced relocation 7.) Confiscation/destruction of property 8.) Rape 9.) Other sexual violence 10.) Forced prostitution 11.) Forced marriage 12.) Arbitrary/illegal arrest/detention 13.) Human trafficking 14.) Obstruction of freedom of movement 15.) Obstruction of freedom/expression/assembly.
“Then what?”
“Then they enter information into Martus.”
“Into . . . what?”
“Human rights violation database.”
“Then what happens to the information?”
“We can share, with other HRD.”
“With other ...”
“Human rights documenter.”
“So you guys collect it all ...”
Htan Dah stared at me.
“And then what? Then it just sits there?”
Htan Dah shrugged.
“How do the guys get to the villages?”
“They walk.”
That explained Htoo Moo’s ass. “How long are they gone?”
“Depends. Maybe three months.”
“Do they just hide around the jungle that whole time?”
“Yes(!),” Htan Dah said. “If they are caught, they could die.”
This, though probably obvious, caught me off guard. Htan Dah and I watched each other for a moment.
“Do you ever do that?”
“No. I am office manager.”
“Do you?” I asked Ta Mla.
“
Yes
,” he said, nodding gravely. “I am . . . human rights . . . documenter.”
Well, somebody had to document it—stealthily. One activist who gave an interview to a PBS
Frontline
reporter served seven years in prison. Another was sentenced to twenty-five years for giving an interview that was critical of the regime to the BBC in 1997. Of the 173 nations in the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index 2008, Burma ranked 170
th
, behind Iran and China and Cuba and every other country except the “unchanging hells” of Turkmenistan, North Korea, and Eritrea. Burma is third in having the most journalists in jail. If one exile newspaper’s tagline, which quotes Napoleon,
6
is right that one newspaper
is
worth a thousand bayonets,
7
and the employees of BA were fighting one of the largest armies on the planet by keeping villagers abreast of relevant world news and trying to collect
the villagers’ struggles to disseminate to the rest of the world, they did indeed need a solid grasp of English.
WHEN I’D
told The Blay that I had no qualifications to teach English as a second language, I’d meant, really, that I had one, sort of: five years of high school and college French.
“Okay, you guys, today we’re going to conjugate some verbs,” I told my afternoon class, the beginners. BA apparently had another office in Mae Sot, and most of my students apparently lived there. So, after one more full day of frantic Internet searching for a month and a half of lesson plans, Htoo Moo had, with neither a word nor a helmet and with a maniac’s speed, driven me to Office Two on the back of his motorbike. The beginner’s class contained Ta Mla, Ta Eh Thaw, and five people I’d never met. One of them was a middle-aged woman smooth of face and voice whose first question was how long I was staying and whose second was how they were supposed to have enough time to improve their English in six weeks. I’d only been in Mae Sot for four days, but even I was savvy enough not to use the “Six weeks is a really long time!” defense again with someone who’d probably lived in a refugee camp for twenty years. Instead, I just shook my head, my mouth open, apology creasing my forehead.
My morning class, the advanced students, had been easier, since their comprehension was higher and I hadn’t had to painstakingly guide them through the very basic conversational interviews with each other and verb forms I hadn’t thought about since second grade. Like the beginners, they all had brand-new notebooks with creatures and chaotic shapes in gaudy colors on the front and multiplication tables on the back. They were made for five-year-olds, possibly Japanese ones, but they’d been bought special for the occasion. As I settled myself on the blue tile floor, against one edge of the whitewashed drywall, the morning students pulled up a bench and a couple of chairs or sat on the floor with me. Having gone to graduate school
for writing, I had, unsurprisingly, decided to run the class as a workshop. After I regaled them with my tips on memo writing (“Most important: connect your purpose with the needs and interests of the reader”), for which they all leaned forward eagerly, we set up a schedule for them to bring in short essays describing a typical day in camp. The Blay, for all his insistence that I bring him up to professional level, hadn’t shown, but we’d assigned due dates for four students I’d just met, as well as Htan Dah and Ta Mla.
“Ta Mla!” I said after the afternoon class ended. It was two-thirty; I’d only managed to fill an hour and a half of each two-hour session, and I was exhausted. “You’re in both of my classes!”
“Yes,” he said, following me out of the room into the humid sunshine. “I . . . want . . . to learn.
Very
much.” His voice, like his features, was soft and serious. In our three hours of class together that day, I’d realized that he was taking in quite a bit more of what I said than his English-speaking abilities might’ve suggested. I just had to ask him enough questions and be patient enough to let him fully answer. He offered to give me a ride back to our office/house. Though I was relieved that he drove way slower than Htoo Moo did, he also seemed much less steady.
First thing the next morning, Ta Mla was sitting in the living room, facing the computer room when I strolled out of it after sending an obligatory email update back home. I’d also taped up a piece of paper saying that if I was hit by a motorbike/killed by a diseased mosquito/trampled by elephants, call my father, with his contact information.
“Are you finished?” Ta Mla asked.
“Yes.” He didn’t appear to be doing anything. “Were you waiting for me?”
“Yes. I . . . wait. For you.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“Yes. I wait for you. I have . . . no . . . friends . . . at the moment.” It did seem awfully quiet. Though it smelled like Htan Dah had been
cooking, it didn’t sound like anyone was in the house. “Have you eaten . . . your . . . breakfast?”
“No, I haven’t. Do you want to eat with me?” We walked toward the dining room/garage. “How long have you been in Thailand?”
Ta Mla told me, while he gathered his tidy fingerfuls of rice, that he’d left Burma in 1999, when he was twenty, because he wanted to go to school. He was born in a small village, just sixteen houses, that had a teacher only for kindergarten; to attend middle school, he had to move into a dorm a five-hour walk away. When he finished, he worked as a security guard in the village where he was born. Once, when he was fourteen and away from home, Burma army planes flew overhead before anyone could run away, strafing and dropping bombs. His father was hit in the thigh and ankle, but he recovered. Ta Mla’s job after that was to look out, warning everyone when government soldiers were coming so they could grab their babies and some rice and disappear into the jungle, which is about as much security as a village guard can provide. Though serving as an early warning system is a pretty risky job—sentries are killed if they’re spotted—Ta Mla managed to avoid detection, and for three years he worked and lived with his family. But he wanted to continue his studies. And considering the country’s abysmal infrastructure and economy, the best place to go to school in Burma was in Thailand.