Jalebi Yatra

Onwards to Makassar

First word of the day here:

Night Tak

11 pm 4 Aug

We are stranded in Tak.Upon arriving at the Tak bus station, we learn that the minibuses to Mae Sot have stopped running for the night. Eleven hours and three buses after leaving Mai Sai, we are stopped short of our destination.

As Jabin and I dine on ‘cup of noodles’, a guy with a minivan tries to tempt us into paying him 25 bucks to take us the final hour and a half. On the flat screen television hanging above us, the fishing channel broadcasts from America a giddy southerner catching bonefish on a Key West flat. I’m jealous. 

The minibus service resumes in the early morning; it looks like we are here for the night. Despite our situation (tired after a day of bus travel and without a bed to sleep), group morale is still pretty high. Mirza tries not to let on that he is disappointed we won’t have a proper dinner, but Jabin and I laugh as he sulkily stalks around the bus station snack stand looking for a suitable meal. 

There are nice, wide wooden benches we’re going to sleep on. We are only worried about the restive dogs milling around and the security of our baggage. Mirza volunteers not to sleep in order to keep watch. 

2 Aug: I woke up to the reality of Burma today. Burma’s rich endowment of natural resources has become a curse in the hands of nefarious leaders. At a café in northern Thailand, an expatriate environmental NGO researcher explains how this curse creates looming catastrophes and those already in progress. 

An abundance of tropical hardwoods, especially teak, has encouraged massive deforestation. Open-pit mining has poisoned the streams leading to the natural areas that are left. The government is ravaging the environment while the local citizens receive no benefit from its exploitation. Often, the citizens are raped and shot as the Burmese military sweeps in to “secure” the resource sites. By all indications, the leaders are profiteers who lack any regard for their citizens’ welfare.

Now, the Burmese government is turning its exploitation to hydroelectricity from mega dams. This morning, the dam building is on the top of this environmental NGO researcher’s mind. He points out existing and planned dam sites on a map published by Burma Rivers Network (http://www.burmariversnetwork.org/home-mainmenu-1.html). The government has 25 dam projects in progress.  These dam sites, we would learn in later interviews, correspond with increasing militarization in ethnic areas including those currently in violent conflict.

Chinese companies are building most of the dams, though Thai and Indian companies, as well as a Swiss engineering consulting firm, are also participating. Myanmar’s energy hungry neighbors are eager to overlook the government’s abuses as they bids for shares of Myanmar’s energy resource wealth. 

I ask the researcher his opinion on the international community’s sanctions regime. When I was researching this topic at SAIS last Fall, the current debate in Washington was questioning the sanctions approach after its failure over two decades later to either reform or bankrupt the regime. But this researcher explains that, while sanctions have failed to improve the situation, they have also reduced the extent of the damage. He fears that if the sanctions are lifted then a flood of European companies will accelerate the already unsustainable pace of natural resource extraction and environmental damage. At the same time, he acknowledges that the investments of Myanmar’s immediate neighbors, particularly China, are more than sufficient to sustain the excesses of the military regime—as the development of dams illustrates. 

If international sanctions should not be lifted but will never solve the problem, then what is the way forward?, The question feels awkward as I ask it; the challenges seem too big to take on in such a restricted political space (discussion about these kinds of issues inside Burma warrants arrest or worse). 

In his response to my query, he turns the conversation from geopolitics to local forces, which he sees as the primary actors of change. Local groups of concerned citizens, according to his approach, must mount legal challenges against the corporation’s use of natural resources. He calls these “localized actions”. The role of outsiders in this approach is to help build capacity for these local groups to monitor resource extraction and understand their legal rights. Unfortunately, these rights are highly diluted in Myanmar’s legal code, the judicial process is far from fair, and any significant challenges to state authority are, at the moment, futile and will be squashed.

Mai Sai Max

3 Aug: Pudgy Pastor Max hands us ears of boiled corn out of a plastic bag, which we munch on this bus headed to the northernmost town in Thailand. We met Pastor Max at the bus station in Chiang Mai where we started our day’s trip and now again further north at the Chiang Rai bus station. We’re all headed to the border town of Mai Sai where Pastor Max, still in his thirties, ministers to a church community, half of which are Burmese immigrants. 

Over a delicious, spicy lunch at the Mai Sai bus station, Pastor Max lays out the challenges facing his Burmese parishioners, mostly Shan migrants. The children are allowed to attend Thai schools, but when they graduate, the Pastor explains, “NOT THAI” is stamped on their diplomas and they are refused Thai work permits. They cannot obtain legal work in Thailand, nor are their diplomas recognized in Burma. “They are caught in between”, says Pastor Max, and many, he says, turn to unskilled labor earning a hundred baht a day and even sex work.

Yesterday at a coffee shop in Chiang Mai we met an expatriate director for a migrant labor NGO. A grizzly veteran of the international NGO world, she grumbled “I’m anti-anti-trafficking”, when asked about the extent of human trafficking on the Thai-Burma border. A very small percentage of all migrant workers are “trafficked”, though it attracts a disproportionately large share of attention and resources given to the plight of migrant workers. Less than one percent of Burmese migrant workers in Thailand are trafficked, but a large majority of them face harassment in the workplace and lack access to government services such as schools and hospitals.  

Since official work passes are issued in conjunction with an employer, migrant workers have little possibility to seek better working conditions and wages. The NGO for which this lady works supports migrant workers legal cases. Despite new legislation granting migrant workers more rights and better access to the Thai justice system, employers have been ordered to pay less than 10 percent of the total damages claimed by migrant workers. The situation was far from perfect, but she emphasized that it had vastly improved from the situation fifteen and twenty years ago. 

After lunch with Pastor Max, he gives us a lift in the raggedy (though very clean) church van to a hotel near the checkpoint on the Thai side. It’s nearing 6 pm when we reach the checkpoint. On the Thai side, people heading into Burma queue up in the rain. They are holding umbrellas in one hand and a motorcycle or bicycle handlebar in the other. School kids in green uniforms and red and white ones wave to me from packed vans. Chock-full pick-up trucks and vegetable sellers pushing handcarts are all trying to get back across to the Burma side before the checkpoint closes at 6:30 pm. 

A motorcycle pulls a rickety metal cart in which a blue-vested six year old sits on a white tarp, blue border pass in hand ready to present to the border officials. His action figure backpack lies beside him in the cart. A lady on another motorcycle jockeys it forward in the queue, her two small daughters are seated behind her. Plastic shopping bags dangle from the cycle’s handlebars, and a black umbrella sticks out of the front basket. They present blue temporary border passes to the guards and shuttle through. 

Three Pagodas Pass and Monastery Caving

30 July (Part Two): A dark-skinned, mustached man with south Indian facial features fries balls of ground, spiced chickpeas over a small bucket of coals. A green plastic net basket in which he places the finished pakora to drain tops his two foot high, portable contraption. He is meters away from the international border demarcating Burma to the west and Thailand to the east at Three Pagodas Pass in the Tenasserim Hills.

Indeed, Jabin finds out by speaking to him in Tamil, the pakora seller’s family had, three generations ago, immigrated to Burma from Tamil Nadu, a state in southeastern India. Eager to surprise him with the little Tamil I know, I ask, eyappadi irukinga? (how are you?). Nlar caen (I am fine), he replies without hesitation and unenthused. A young boy close by pokes samosa in his sizzling wok (see photo, taken by Mirza).

Though this border is closed to international travellers, Burmese workers flow by. One lady swings a metal dhaba container (her lunchbox) from one hand; a teal colored umbrella is hooked around her other arm. Another, dressed in a green poncho and pink helmet, pushes a red scooter around the red and white striped gate. Many of these people come across the border to work by day in small Thai factories offering cheap wages and return every night to the homes on the Burma side. 

For thousands of years, people have flowed through this pass, carrying tradable goods, ideas, and guns. It is a vital connection point linking south and southeast Asia. Some historians say that in the third century Buddhism entered Siam from India through this very place. Burmese armies started coming through here ten centuries later, including the ones that ransacked the Siam kingdom of Ayutthaya in the eighteenth century. The “Death Railway” connecting Bangkok and Rangoon to supply Japanese troops in World War II, ran through Three Pagodas Pass. 

Today, only a small segment of the railroad track remains here on the Thai side of the border as a remembrance (though perhaps these are a replica of the original). We bend down to inspect it and one of the MWO workers bends back some grass to show an engraving in the steel: “CARNEGIE”. Nearby, the three pagodas for which the pass is named stand in a line on a circle of grass and are draped in yellow, orange, and pink cloth. Touristy shops offering gem jewelry, teak carvings, and snacks ring the outer edge of the circle.

As we leave the border on the three motorbikes—I am now piloting one of them—the drizzling rain picks up to a pour. We veer off the main road back to Sangkhla Buri, and ride past kilometers of rubber plantations. The rain is shellacking us as we pull up to a monastery built into a side of a hill (see photo, taken by Mirza). Once we take permission from one of the monks to enter, we hesitantly proceed into the extensive cave complex where at one time Japanese soldiers in retreat took refuge. Now the monastery’s monks and nuns meditate in these caves. 

Past drippy stalactites—some almost met by stalagmites emerging from the cave floor—the passage way opens into a large space. A small pagoda, a golden Buddha statue, and a white Buddha statue line the back wall of the space, and some plastic sheeting lays in front of them for kneeling and prostration. A couple candles and a small vessel of flowers are placed in front of the white Buddha.  

Thru another passageway, up about twenty shaky wooden steps supported by scaffolding which, at first, I’m hesitant to trust, is another meditation space. This one is smaller and has only one two foot high Buddha statue. A bulb dimly illuminates the space. I’m alone, but then a nun in a simple white shirt appears at the top of the steps. Silently, she approaches and ascends an eight-rung ladder leading to an un-illuminated, narrow passage way. She disappears into the darkness for meditation.

As we return to town, the rain continues to nail us. I squint my eyes in an attempt to keep out the drops stinging my face—while still trying to maintain visibility. We stop at one of the MWO worker’s house, and we gorge on palmello and the red, hairy rambootan. We dip the palmello segments into a mixture of salt and dried chili and sample spicy coconut milk curry with thin, white local noodles. This family keeps an Asian Palm Civet as a pet—the animal that poops delicious coffee beans—and he runs around the property and up a durian tree. 

In the evening, we meet with a couple Burmese journalists that work for Irrawaddy Media and collect news from the “inside” (Burma). One speaks about the illegal and lucrative timber and mining trade happening in Mon state and the gems, mostly jade, coming out of Shan state through Mae Sot (where we will visit in another week). 

Then the conversation turns to the ongoing fighting between the Myanmar military and ethnic rebel armies. Now the Army is fighting the Kachins, north of Mon state. Though a few of these ethnic armies have pretty advanced capabilities—the Wa and Kachin ethnic armies, according to one journalist, now produce their own guns and ammunition—they are still much weaker than the Myanmar military, supplied with Chinese arms. The ethnic armies do not cooperate against their common opponent, the Myanmar military, a product of the ‘divide and rule’ tactics practiced by the Myanmar junta. Now the military fights with the Kachin, but the Mon know that soon enough, once the military defeats the larger ethnic armies, they will renege on the current ceasefire and resume fighting against a Mon ethnic army that has not fought in over a decade. In a month or three or five, Mon refugees from a renewed conflict will likely stream across the Three Pagodas Pass and amass in the border area—pushed out of Burma and not welcome in Thailand. 

Monastery Meet

30 July (Part One): Splash! My morning bath is in the Khao Laem Reservoir. I jump in a few meters from where we slept. The water is warm on the surface, but just a couple feet below it is noticeably cooler, even cold. I hop aboard a country boat moored to our house raft, untie the line, and move in frenetic circles before I learn how to wield the stubby wooden paddle and navigate a straight line. Above, young Thai couples on weekend holiday from Bangkok and saffron robed monks traverse the bridge. I spot a group of Thai girls pointing and giggling at my steering difficulties. Blushing, I paddle away from the bridge towards a lone fisherman, casting and retrieving his hand net from a squat at the stern of his tiny skiff. Otherwise, I am alone on the placid water.

Breakfast on spicy noodles, peanuts, and pork—sprinkled with lime juice. The three of us (along with two workers from Mon Women’s Organization) start for Three Pagodas Pass in a light, on/off rain on a few motorbikes, Mirza and Jabin’s ponchos flapping in the wind. We pass rubber and teak plantations, then a steep, densely-vegetated hill throwing off morning mist (see picture, taken by Mirza from his bike). We slow down at a checkpoint where roadblocks are setup. The Thai security personnel wave us through.

Just before we reach the border, we visit a monastery where seven monks and fourteen novices live. Thirty kids from Karan and Mon and Burmese migrant families attend school at the monastery as well, and these kids are horsing around the large prayer hall as migrants from Burma living in the local area prepare a special meal of noodle soup for Buddha Day (which occurs two times every fifteen days). Paper prayer flags of different (now faded) colors with various cut-out designs are strung together from the wooden rafters below the sheet metal roof.

The noodle soup is dished out in green, pink, and white plastic bowls and served up to the kids sitting across from each other in two neat rows as well as to clusters of adults sitting throughout the hall. We are introduced to the head monk. He sits in lotus position at the front of the prayer hall, draped in a saffron-colored robe and chewing a wad of paan. We make casual conversation with him (for a head monk, our local guides explain, he is very informal). Spitting out his paan into a nearby plastic bucket, he rolls up a stubby cigarette from coarse tobacco and some sort of pliable, dried leaf. He strikes a match and takes a puff. The acrid smoke hits the air.

We move to a classroom off the side of the monastery (an English lesson on vowels still up on the whiteboard, next to a three foot gold colored Buddha statue) where we meet two economic migrants, a young couple with bright smiles which they break into often. They work in a nearby shoe factory. The husband, thirty years old, has shoulder-length hair, crooked, betel-stained teeth and is dressed in jeans and a spotless white polo. The lady, twenty four years old and slim, sports a purple polo and light, white cardigan sweater. They would not be out of place window shopping at your nearest mall or strolling arm in arm to the buffet table at a country club, but their preppie appearance and frequent smiles betray their difficult lives.

They traveled here from Yangon with high expectations (as of yet, unmet) for more economically rewarding work, bribing their way through checkpoints inside Burma. In Yangon, their psychology and chemistry degrees were of little use in obtaining high-skilled work, and they ventured here, just across the border, based on stories they heard of higher paid (though still unskilled) work. Now they work in a shoe factory earning in baht the equivalent of $2 a day alongside children as young as thirteen years old.

They carry no passport, only their Myanmar government issue ID card and factory ID, both of which they show us. These documents allow them to cross the international border, a few hundred meters from where we are meeting, but not past the Thai checkpoint (which we crossed on our way) into the town of Sangkhla Buri and the rest of Thailand.

They are working now to put together enough money to go to Bangkok, for which they will need to pay 15,000 baht ($500) to human traffickers. But to gain any skilled work in Bangkok, they will need to learn Thai. The lady mentions she also wants to learn English and computer skills to better her employment prospects, which she may do in night courses if she can manage the tuition costs.

At the end of the meeting, we wish them well, and Jabin and one of the MWO workers give them a lift on the motorbikes back to the small shoe factory. We re-enter the prayer hall and sit in a circle on the wooden floor to partake in the Buddha Day lunch: “local” noodles, fish in a green broth, tamarind, fried garlic, hot pepper, all mixed together. Super tasty. Children play and giggle around us as the locals insist we help ourselves to seconds out of the serving bowls. A coconut sweet for dessert, which Jabin enthusiatically remarks is nearly identical to a sweet made in his native Kerala. Then we set out from the monastery for the short walk to the Three Pagodas and the international border.

To Work (If We Ever Get There)

29 July: I decided back in June to make a stop in Thailand on my way back to the States to attend my good friends’ Dao and Constantino’s wedding, scheduled to take place at Dao’s hometown of Trang in the south of Thailand. Jabin and Mirza, who I worked with at a New Delhi think tank in 2007, had been contemplating a research trip to northeast India, but, prompted by my travel plans, made an impromptu decision to switch their travel itinerary and research agenda to Thailand. 

Mirza called me on 22 July and asked if I could get to Thailand by the 27th and join them for a week and a half of research on Thai-Burma border issues before I needed to head south to the wedding. Excited at the prospect of traveling with these old pals (and experienced research hands), I immediately put together an exit plan for northeast India—where I was teaching, swimming, and fishing in a tiny tribal village—so I could join them. 

A week later, the three of us are boarding an early morning mini bus in Bangkok headed for Sanghkla Buri and the historic Three Pagodas Pass. Mirza and I are making our first trip to Thailand. Jabin visited six years earlier with a Czech friend to hit up the tourist spots. Mirza and Jabin conducted field research together on the other side of Burma on its border with northeast India where they explored issues involving the Chin community. 

We are all newbies to the Thai-Burma border and are about to get a crash course. I couldn’t ask for better travel partners. Jabin, ten years my senior, is a China hand and Mirza an expert on northeast India, including his native Assam. They are both upbeat, quick learners, and flexible. Most importantly, they are equipped with well-developed senses of humor. 

We reach Thong Pha Phum, halfway to Sangkhla Buri in a quick couple of hours, but make a critical mistake when we board a big red bus for the second leg instead of a mini-bus. Rather than taking another two, three hours max, we reach Sanghkla Buri after another seven hours, including a leisurely two hour lunch stop at a roadside pavilion pit stop (part of which I pass snoozing on a wooden platform next to our bus conductor flipping through a Thai newspaper). The slow progress of the big red bus gives us plenty of time to enjoy the lush mountainous landscape of the journey’s last leg as we inch our way towards the Burmese border. 

We finally arrive in the late afternoon, nine hours after leaving Bangkok, and are greeted at the bus stand by a guy and lady, both in their twenties and workers of the Mon Women’s Organization, our local contact here. We pile on two motorbikes and putter to the MWO office, run out of the bottom floor of a residence, where we meet the rest of the local staff. Mon is the state in Burma that borders Sangkhla Buri, and a significant amount of Mon migrants are working in the area between this town and the Burma border. 

After our initial introductions, we walk twenty minutes down to the reservoir formed by the Khao Laem Dam. Thin at this northern portion of the reservoir, a wavy wooden bridge around 200 meters long spans the banks. We head down the near bank to a grouping of twenty house rafts and walk across seven or eight of them to the one we’ll occupy for the next couple nights (see picture, taken by Jabin). After we are treated to a delicious dinner back at MWO’s office and stroll the bridge, the three of us lay out on the deck of the house raft, preferring the night air to the three rooms prepared for us. There, we chat about girlfriends and professional ambitions—decidedly content to be in a strange land floating off to sleep. (In the morning, Mirza is first up, and takes a picture of Jabin and me still snoozing).