Out Of The Comfort Zone
With refugees on the Burma border, a refreshing bath and fresh perspective
Paula Bock
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 TOM REESE / THE SEATTLE TIMES What mystifies me about war is why anybody would want to hurt kids like this? One night, a few weeks before this picture was taken, the junta torched Huay Kaloke refugee camp, home to 7,000 people, including these children. During the day, the kids are fiesty. After dark, they're terrified.
TOM REESE / THE SEATTLE TIMES Every year, we bring medical supplies, toys and clothes donated by friends in Seattle. Here, a refugee medic friend and I carry clothes across a checkpoint into a refugee camp that was torched. -- Paula Bock
PAULA BOCK Even though it's his vacation, my husband, Tao, often works past midnight on reports after he's seen patients in clinic, visited outlying schools and taught pediatrics to medics. He recharges by feasting on local street food, which he loves. We've slowed the pace considerably since the birth of our daughter, whom we now bring with us.
TAO SHENG KWAN-GETT Volunteering on the Thai-Burma border for a dozen years has changed me. I'm humbled and inspired by friends who've had everything ripped away -- families, home, jobs, safety -- and still care about others. They connect me to the rest of the world, help me see behind horrible headlines. Back in Seattle, I relive certain moments, a dusty afternoon, the smile of a child recovering from fever. I feel human. My life is not only about me.
TOM REESE / THE SEATTLE TIMES I started a sunrise aerobics class in 1996 after reading that Burma's Nobel Peace laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, did aerobics while under house arrest. (She's been jailed at home or in prisons for 12 of the past 18 years.) In "Freedom from Fear," she talks about small, daily acts of courage that help preserve human dignity. Even in war, you still need to lift your body and spirit. Aerobics is culturally acceptable for Burmese women and requires no equipment. It's also great fun.
TOM REESE / THE SEATTLE TIMES In this photo, from 1997, Dr. Cynthia Maung rides with her son, Nyein Chan (translated means Peace) and husband, Kyaw Hein, to a woven-leaf school she created for a dozen children, mostly orphans. Now, a decade later, her son and daughter are teenagers, she's adopted several more children and cares for more than 160 kids, mostly orphans, in the Bamboo Children's Home. During our yearly visits, we joke with Dr. Cynthia about how fast the kids have grown and how much we adults have aged.
TOM REESE / THE SEATTLE TIMES Students are remarkably enthusiastic, even as classroom temperatures soar above 100 degrees.
TAO SHENG KWAN-GETT These teens were in my two-week workshop on photography and journalism basics. Their resulting documentation of refugee life was witty, provocative, heart-wrenching. They staged a hush-hush makeshift exhibit, clothes-pinning their photographs to rope. A few months later, their pictures perished when the camp was firebombed; all the kids survived.
PAULA BOCK On a string around his neck, Hser Lah's baby son wears a bullet casing filled with traditional medicine so ghosts will not capture his soul. He recovered from malaria after his mother carried him out of their jungle village, Chogali, to Dr. Cynthia's Mae Tao Clinic in Thailand.
PAULA BOCK I met Shu Wah and Oh Mu when we volunteered in Chogali, a hill-tribe village in rebel-controlled Burma that had 85 children, five elephants, no electricity, no cars. When the village fell to enemy troops in 1997, many children escaped, but not Shu Wah and Oh Mu. For years, I searched and worried.
TAO SHENG KWAN-GETT Six years ago, Shu Wah safely crossed the border into Thailand.
TAO SHENG KWAN-GETT Two years later, Oh Mu joined her. They live in boarding schools run by Dr. Cynthia.
AFP In September, streams of saffron-robed monks led 100,000 peaceful marchers through the streets of Burma's largest city, Yangon, to protest the dictatorship's harsh rule. A few days later, the military cracked down, killing at least 10 and maybe hundreds. Since then, the junta has arrested and "disappeared" thousands as soldiers raid monasteries and hunt down sympathizers. |
After sunrise aerobics in the parched rice fields, cistern water feels so refreshing. In the women's cinderblock washroom, surrounded by refugee friends, I'd dip a plastic bowl into the deep pool, pour it over my grimy body, then lather with a sliver of soap — all while still modestly wrapped in a Burmese longyi per local custom.
So ethereal, this bathing experience. Sunlight reflecting off the slippery cement floor, a glimpse of green fronds above the clinic's rusty tin roof, the slap of wet washcloths against stone, everyone's hair twisted up at the nape of the neck, everyone's soap slivers wedged into chinks in the concrete.
Dawn is my favorite time of day at Dr. Cynthia's refugee clinic on the Thailand-Burma border, where my pediatrician husband, Tao, and I have volunteered annually during vacations since 1996.
Daybreak is when young monks pad barefoot down the street with their alms bowls, accepting rice and giving blessings, a ritual at the heart of Buddhist society.
Early mornings, it's not so hot, and you don't yet know what's going to happen the rest of the day.
Of course, there are the scheduled activities. Over the years, Tao has treated patients, taught pediatrics, helped with a land-mine rehab program and written the clinic's annual report. I've drafted grant applications, packaged birthing kits, peeled garlic, crafted sock puppets, visited filthy floating ghettos, and taught photography, aerobics and English to refugee medics.
That sounds overly official. We started volunteering a dozen years ago because we wanted perspective on our comfortable lives, hoped to help somewhere somehow and the civil war in Burma (also known as Myanmar) is among the worst humanitarian crises on the planet.
Maybe you saw the stream of saffron-robed monks leading a peaceful march of 100,000 protesters in the streets of Yangon last month, and a couple days later, the photo of a bloody monk floating, face down, in the river. At least 10 and maybe hundreds were killed during a military crackdown that continues as the junta rounds up thousands and "disappears" even more. Already, some have fled across the porous border into Thailand. Undoubtedly others will follow, the sick and wounded headed for Dr. Cynthia's Mae Tao Clinic, where we volunteer.
To learn more about the clinic and refugees
To read a special project about Dr. Cynthia, Burma and the Orchid Girls, go to www.seattletimes.com/burma.Dr. Cynthia's Mae Tao Clinic, go to www.maetaoclinic.org.
Over the years, Dr. Cynthia has become famous for her compassion, a refugee and physician often likened to Mother Teresa. She trains medics, takes in orphans and sends health-care workers into war zones, their backpacks loaded with medicine. Families displaced by war come to her clinic seeking care for malaria, tuberculosis, reproductive health, land-mine injuries, flu, HIV, sexual violence. More come each year.
The military has destroyed more than 3,000 villages in eastern Burma, according to a recent United Nations report, forcing 1.5 million people from their homes. The American Association for the Advancement of Science recently documented damage in this area using high-resolution satellite imagery. What gets me is that burning villages and raping women wasn't enough. Reports say the soldiers rammed bayonets through cooking pots so any survivors couldn't use them.
How could we not go back? The war hasn't gone away, and neither have all the skinny kids who need clean water, schoolbooks and vitamins. I'll also admit to motives not entirely selfless: tropical sunshine during Seattle's rainy winters, fresh mangosteens, my favorite noodle stand. And there's something else, hard to explain.
I once read that 80 percent of being a good friend is just showing up. Maybe that's the difference between being a donor, a doctor, a do-gooder . . . and a friend. The former show up to do good. The friend shows up just because.
You do projects, hope to reduce suffering, but you never really know. Like the time I gave my lunch to a grandma who'd crossed the Dawna mountain range fleeing the military, shredding the soles of her feet. How I wanted my rice to nourish her!
Instead, she vomited.
A reminder that helping is complex. Over time, you make mistakes; you learn. You learn to provide what's really needed, not just what you want to give. You learn fulfillment can't come solely from checking off items on a do-good list.
What if you help rebuild a library in a refugee camp that was burned to the ground — and it all gets torched again? Do you erase the check mark? Abandon your altruistic agenda? Spend your next holiday on a Maui beach? (Tried that, felt hollow, sat by pool with computer plotting next volunteer visit.)
You learn to find joy in the unexpected. Stray moments. Momentous events.
On our first, months-long volunteer stint, I spent afternoons stringing jasmine leis with children in a hill-tribe village in rebel-controlled Burma. Dr. Cynthia had set up a clinic there and installed squat toilets and a simple water system. After we returned to Seattle, Chogali village fell to the military. Several children escaped and found safety and school at Dr. Cynthia's main clinic near Mae Sot, Thailand. Others were missing.
I worried about two little orchid girls, Shu Wah and Oh Mu, and tried to search for them. They were trapped in Chogali with enemy soldiers — not the most brutal of regiments, but still, young men with guns. I wanted to believe the girls were safe, but knew they were not, especially as time passed and they matured from cute to lovely.
Every day I thought about them. Every year, my worry accumulated.
Longing. You have longing, my friend Maung Maung Tinn told me during one of our visits. Maung Maung Tinn is an artist and refugee medic who indulges my addiction to words.
In Burmese, the word "longing" has gravitas; it's like having a serious disease. Naming the affliction, knowing others have suffered from it throughout history, oddly, gave me hope.
Momentous? Six years ago, Shu Wah safely crossed the border into Thailand. Two years later, Oh Mu joined her. They are living with other orphans and unaccompanied minors in boarding schools run by Dr. Cynthia.
Unexpected joy! The children grew up. They live.
Here, in the land of abundance, we presume children will survive. We turn on a faucet, water gushes.
Early every morning, I indulge in a long, hot shower. It's my favorite time of day, before I find out what has happened on the streets, in the villages, at the clinic. Anything's possible. I always hope for peace.
Paula Bock is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff writer. Email: pbock@seattletimes.com. Dr. Tao Sheng Kwan-Gett is a medical epidemiologist for Public Health-Seattle & King County. Tom Reese is a Seattle Times staff photographer.
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