Our Shared World

Exiting Asia

2008-10-01T12:09:00.001-07:00

I met Nit ten months ago, in the heavy heat of a Bangkok afternoon as I walked from my guest house to the train station. He was leaning on the fence alongside a filthy canal that was choked with plastic and smelling like open sewage and industrial chemicals. He had a fishing pole next to him, with a line in the water and as I got closer, he hooked into something big. After five minutes, he pulled a four pound carp onto the greasy sidewalk, and looked up, beaming.

“Nice work!” I said in Thai.
“He’s a fat one,” he said. “What are you doing for dinner? Will you eat him with me?” Looking at the fish gasping on the sidewalk and the bracken water that spawned it, I was quietly happy to have other plans.

Nit was a handsome man, 28, with long black hair and leathery hands blackened from his work as an auto mechanic. He was from Issan, the agricultural province of northern Thailand. He’d come to Bangkok give years ago, looking for work, and had only returned once because the bus fare is expensive. He missed home. Though he’s older than the average marrying age here, Nit hasn’t taken a wife. “I don’t like the Bangkok girls,” he told me. “They’re too stuck-up. I like English girls because of their beautiful noses.”

Most mornings Nit wakes up early and walks to work in the mechanic shop to make a few dollars in a day’s labor. But not today. He got drunk last night, so he came out fishing instead. He’s a smart man, and has studied some English, but he rarely has a chance to use it, so he forgets. He wanted to know about where I was from. How long it took me to get here, and how much it cost.

“I want to go to Egypt one day,” he told me. “Have you ever been? I want to see the pyramids and Pharaoh’s tomb.” He was a proud man, opening his dreams like a lunchbox in a lion’s den, because, if he didn’t guard them like hell, everything around him – the trash-clogged canal, the paddy-land of his birth and the grease-stained hands he escaped to – would pluck them from him so quick he wouldn’t even feel the sting of the hook.

The fish was still slapping its tail on the pavement at Nit’s feet when I said goodbye. I had a train to catch. Nit shook my hand and wished me good luck, and I swear it was the most sincere I’ve ever heard those two words sound.

***
It’s now been a year since I left America, made the first journey of these travels and wrote the first words of these stories. I want to thank you all for your comments and e-mails and encouragement throughout the year. Due to sickness, other obligations and perhaps a bit of laziness as well, my posts have not always been regular. For the past two months I was on holiday in northern India with my beautiful girlfriend, and happily indisposed.

It’s been an eventful and valuable year in which I learned a lot about myself, the world and journalism. Over the course of it I was tailed by Burmese spies, arrested by the Kabul Counter-Terrorism Police Force, and embedded with a rebel army in the Golden Triangle. But I also simply sweated with people on Indian trains, shared food with families in Laos and talked about girls with taxi drivers in Thailand. And I suppose, at the end of it, I learned more about humanity from the mundane than manic. This morning I talked to a woman at a coffee stand in Bangkok with two young boys, whom she named Wind and Surf respectively. In the midst of one dusty journey in the central highlands of Afghanistan, a young man gave me his hat after I bought him a pomegranate juice.

Make no mistake, these are profound times – the global economy is crashing, the climate is warming and over the course of our lives the diminishing oil supply will rapidly change the way in which we live. But amidst these headlines, often the most revealing news, about who we are and how we live, fails to make the ticker. The stereotypical journalist is a cynical story-teller, already five drinks into the evening in bars throughout the world – pick up a newspaper and it’s easy to see why. But, perhaps unlike them, I feel more hopeful at the end of this journey than I did at the start.

Two hours ago I was driven to the Bangkok Airport by a taxi driver named Somphong. Like Nit, he was also from Thailand’s Issan province, a country boy who came to the city to find work. Somphong liked to talk. He started by having a good laugh about the beguiling nature of Osama bin Laden. “Isn’t that strange! The most advanced country in the world, and they still can’t catch him! That guy is strong! The police and the FBI are catching people all the time, but they can’t get that guy. It’s incredible!”

I learned more about Somphong as we sped down the freeways, over the bypasses and under the flyovers; the arteries of a city of nine million that can look like a terrifyingly beautiful matchbox car racing course. Somphong would lay down his vote for John McCain, if anyone asked it of him, because he’s old and level-headed. He wants to fly in an airplane one day. He likes Lao girls because they’re short and have big breasts. He talked about Burma, too.

“It’s a bad government, but it’s preserved some things. Look at Thailand,” he said, taking in the giant movie posters, the luxury cars, the smog and the noise in one sweep of his hand. “It’s developed, but there’s no nature anymore. It’s comfortable, but it’s stressful. Burma may have a bad government, but they still have their culture.”

There was some truth in what he was saying, another lesson on how the world defies explanation. But by then we were near the airport, and Somphong stopped talking to point out a giant Boeing-747 coming in for a landing. “Oh, look at it fall,” he said, slapping the steering wheel. “The pilot better get it right, or they’re all going to die!” Just before it landed, in his glee, he made a sound like a duck and we both laughed.

Peaceful Afghan Province Plans for Tourism

2008-07-12T01:09:00.000-07:00

Bamiyan, AFGHANISTAN – Call him forward thinking, but Sanjeev Gupta thinks it’s about time war-torn Afghanistan had a tourism industry.

Gupta, a regional program manager for a non-governmental organization called the Aga Khan Foundation, says that while some parts of Afghanistan remain too volatile to visit, Bamiyan, the province in which he works, is blessed with relative peace – and an abundance of cultural, historical and natural treasures capable of luring travelers from all around the world.

“Bamiyan has a lot of tourist potential,” Gupta said. “We need to correct the perception of Afghanistan. The whole country is not dangerous.”

To promote the industry, the Aga Khan Foundation has created the Bamiyan Ecotourism Project – a three-year program that will develop a tourism infrastructure, train guides, cooks and hoteliers, and raise awareness of the region’s attractions.

Nevertheless, the task of establishing a tourism industry in Afghanistan, even in a relatively safe province like this one, is formidable. Most western governments’ advisories strongly discourage non-essential travel to the country. Of the two roads that link the city to Kabul, one travels through territory controlled by the Taliban and the other experienced two roadside bombings in the past month. The journey takes 10 hours, over a dirt road that resembles the surface of an asteroid. There are no commercial flights to the province.

But Gupta is thinking long-term with the Bamiyan Ecotourism Project. So long-term that he imagines a future Bamiyan with an international airstrip. “It’s not that we’re starting the program today and tomorrow there are hordes of tourists coming,” he said. “But it builds a base.”

To be sure, tourism here is not without precedent. Bamiyan has been on travel itineraries since it was a major caravanserai of the Silk Road and once hosted famous wanderers like Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan. More recently, Laura Bush paid a visit in June. Bamiyan’s towering statues of the Buddha, carved into a sandstone cliff 1,500 years ago – a century before the birth of Islam – attracted foreign tourists up until the Soviet invasion in 1979. Few have traveled here in the last 30 years of war, and in 2001 the Taliban destroyed the Buddhist landmarks with rockets and tanks.

Now, as this province emerges as one of the success stories of post-Taliban Afghanistan, the people want their history back. Habiba Sarabi, the governor of Bamiyan and the only female governor in Afghanistan, says she is tired of seeing her province lumped in with the negative news from the rest of the country.

“If there is news about security in Afghanistan, then it affects Bamiyan,” Sarabi said. The governor hopes that as people become aware of the region’s safety, tourism will become a lucrative industry for her province. “It can bring a lot of income and a lot of change to people’s lives,” she said. The governor is still cautious, however. “We want to avoid mass tourism in Bamiyan,” she said. “Everything should be taken care of.”

Sarabi says she wants at least one of the Buddha statues to be rebuilt, a difficult project which several organizations have offered to fund, but is still awaiting approval from the Ministry of Culture in Kabul. “Unfortunately, they haven’t made a decision,” Sarabi said.

But according to Abdul Razak, sitting in the empty restaurant of his 18-room Roof of Bamiyan Hotel, tourism has a long way to come here. “The most important thing for tourists is peace,” he said. “If (the Bamiyan Ecotourism Project) can bring peace, then the tourists will come. If not, everything is for nothing.”

Razak said that the presence of UN and large-budget NGO offices have inflated the cost of rent in Bamiyan. As a result, he has to charge $40 - $60 per night for one of his rooms – fine for the vacationing expatriates from Kabul, but a higher price than he would use to target genuine travelers, often on smaller budgets.

“This is not a tourist price,” he said. “This is a crazy price. If more guests come, I will put the price down to $10.”

Down the hill from the Roof of Bamiyan is the Silk Road Hotel, which charges $80 - $100 for a room, but boasts Bamiyan’s first and only sushi bar.

Afghanistan’s recent instability has taken its toll on the nascent tourism industry here. The recent bombing outside the Indian embassy in Kabul and the January attack on the capital’s only five-star hotel have hurt business, says André Mann, founder of the Great Game Travel Company, which offers customized adventure travel expeditions around Afghanistan.

“Things turned to the worse, which we didn’t expect,” he said.

Mann said his company’s clientele are well-traveled, well-to-do Europeans and Americans intent on visiting Afghanistan. “We try to make it safer for them,” he said. While his business has suffered in 2008, in 2007 he organized trips for 200 travelers, and he hopes 2009 will be even better. “Afghanistan is absolutely unique,” he said. “It’s waiting to be discovered. It just needs some infrastructure.”

The decision to travel to Afghanistan was a rewarding one for Pei-Yin Lew, a 22-year old Australian medical student enjoying a trip to Bamiyan’s spring-fed Band-i-Amir lakes one recent Sunday.

“One of the main reasons I wanted to come to Afghanistan was to see these lakes,” she said, standing above a string of six brilliant blue lagoons set in the middle of barren sandstone badlands. “It’s truly beautiful here.”

When Lew arrived at the Afghan border after traveling for a month in neighboring Iran, she had a copy of the brand new Lonely Planet for Afghanistan and a profile on CouchSurfing.com, an online network of people around the world willing to host travelers in their towns. Travel websites, family and friends had urged her not to go to Afghanistan, but she’s glad she did.

“As a girl, traveling alone, you don’t know how people are going to react to that,” Lew said. “But it’s all about perception. Some will say it’s safe, some will say it’s not, but no one really knows.”

En route to Kabul

2008-06-13T02:55:00.000-07:00

I'm in Delhi now, wrapping up things before I fly to Afghanistan, perhaps next week. A story I wrote on India's ship-breaking industry ran on Newsweek.com yesterday and you can read that here. I'll be posting more stories when I reach Kabul. In the meantime, khoda hafez, friends.

Burial at Sea

2008-05-14T08:26:00.000-07:00

India fights to keep a deadly industry authorities say it cannot afford to lose

Photos courtesy of Andrey Potapov

The first stop of its final voyage was to collect 3,000 tons of Icelandic blue whiting from the Faroe Islands. Then, the ageing 370-foot Russian trawler ferried the fish to Nigeria. Three months later, the rust-riddled Komandarm Shcherbakov sailed on to India, to die.

On May 6, when the tide was highest, the vessel pointed its bow landward, gunned its engines for the last time and slid up the beach between the skeletal carcasses of other scrapped ships at India’s biggest ship-breaking yard, Alang. There, it found its final resting place in the sand.

According to the ship’s chief mate, Andrey Potapov, the Shcherbakov had asbestos insulation in its engine rooms and elsewhere, like many vessels of its age.

“It was built 25 years ago,” Potapov said. “They didn’t know it was bad back then.”

*****

Amrika Prasad was named after America. The closest he ever got to his namesake, however, was Alang, where more than half of the world’s ships were once sent to die. There, hundreds of miles from his home village, Prasad broke down discarded vessels from America and other countries, pulling his livelihood from the toxic guts of old warships, trawlers and cruise liners. Asbestos, hazardous PCB chemicals and radioactive materials were all currencies of his trade.

But one day in 1996, a plate of steel falling from a dead ship would land squarely on his back, ending his working life and crippling him forever.

With the help of a local lawyer, Prasad filed a compensation claim against his employer, who had no insurance for his workers. After nine years of fighting the case, the court ordered the ship breaker to pay Prasad 578,000 rupees ($14,440). That was only half of the battle. Prasad’s lawyer, Pradeep Thakker, is still fighting to collect the sum from the owner. Thakker says about 130 workers’ compensation claims he represents are still pending settlement. And Prasad’s wait is not uncommonly long.

“Working at Alang is a very hard job,” Thakker says. “So the downtrodden people of society work there.”

Most of the 5,000-odd workers now employed at Alang are migrants, risking fatal casualty rates six times higher than the mining industry for a few dollars a day. A committee appointed by the Indian Supreme Court in 2006 found that one of every six workers is suffering from early symptoms of asbestosis.

But as the Indian ship-breaking industry loses ground to the more competitive scrap-yards in Bangladesh and Pakistan, the authorities here are desperately trying to save it.

“India has the capability to recycle warships, nuclear vessels, passenger carriers and all kinds of ships,” says Atul Sharma, environmental engineer for the Gujarat Maritime Board, responsible for inspecting ships before they beach at Alang. Sharma confirms that the Indian authorities have never denied entry to a ship for scrapping, no matter how old or how toxic. While India will continue scrapping these ships, he said that prior decontamination should be the responsibility of the vessels’ owners, a call echoed by environmentalists and a 2003 Supreme Court ruling.

In the meantime, Sharma says asbestos and PCB chemicals are removed, bagged and placed in protected landfills. Environmentalists argue that putting PCBs in landfills is prohibited by the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, to which India is a party.

In September, 2007, the Indian Supreme Court issued two orders to regulate the industry. While requiring ship owners to be transparent about the materials their vessels carry onboard, the rulings point out the value of the industry. In the past ten years, ship recycling has brought 23 million tons of steel into India, a country badly in need of the metal, one says. In periods of high activity, the yard at Alang has employed upwards of 40,000 workers. A ship-breaker can expect to make $10 million recycling a large vessel.

But environmental groups argue that the true health and environmental costs of the industry haven’t been measured.

“These are toxic chemicals,” says Gopal Krishna of the Ban Asbestos Network of India. “But the moment these things enter Indian territory, they become non-toxic.” Krishna and others say the hazardous material onboard these ships are putting the workers and the surrounding village in great danger. “It’s an act of barbarism,” he says.

Krishna says the ship buyers and breakers hoodwink international law by using dummy companies to transfer ship ownership, changing the vessel’s name and flags on the high seas and lying to authorities about the final destination of the ships they intend on scrapping.

This was how the SS Blue Lady (formerly the Norwegian Cruise Line’s SS Norway) came to be beached at Alang. The 47 year-old, French-built steam liner has an estimated 1,200 tons of asbestos on board, in addition to several other toxic and radioactive materials. After the Blue Lady was decommissioned by a 2003 boiler explosion that killed eight crew members in Miami, Norwegian Cruise Line sent the ship to Bremerhaven, Germany. There the ship’s captain told inspecting authorities that the vessel would be repaired in Malaysia. But once on the high seas, the Blue Lady was “re-flagged” after being sold to Bridgend Shipping, of Monrovia, Liberia. It changed ownership again before arriving at Alang in June, 2006, where its dismantling has begun.

Jim Puckett, coordinator of the Seattle-based Basel Action Network, a group dedicated to stopping international trade of toxic materials, says last September’s Supreme Court rulings have failed to effectively regulate ship-breaking at Alang.

The Basel Convention, from which Puckett’s group derives its name, was adopted in 1992 to stem the trade of toxic chemicals. It was signed by 170 countries, including India but not the United States. The convention prohibits a signatory country from accepting hazardous material from a non-signatory, but Puckett says the rule of law is being flouted in Alang by the heavyweights of a very powerful industry.

“It’s complete anarchy on the beaches of India right now,” he says. “No one is in control except the ship-breakers. They seem to be running the show.”

Gopal Krishna, of the Ban Asbestos Network, says it takes a bribe of 125,000 rupees ($3,125) to arrange all the necessary papers to get a ship beached quickly. The breakers often take out loans from the bank to purchase large vessels to scrap. In doing so, they must scrap the ship quickly to avoid high interest rates cutting into their profits. Krishna and others say that this haste leads breakers to disregard the safety of their workers and the environment.

While the breakers stand to make substantial profits with every ship they scrap, workers like Amrika Prasad are not so lucky. After 12 years, he, like many others, is still waiting for his former employer to pay a single rupee of compensation for the loss of his limbs.

The Latest

2008-04-24T03:44:00.000-07:00

The San Francisco Chronicle recently ran a story I wrote about Burma's underground political artists. That article can be found here.

There is also a virtual copy of the current issue of Wend Magazine now available on the internet. The magazine can be difficult to find in stores, but it's easily perused here, where my article on Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor starts on page 60.

I'm currently in Delhi, and will be traveling around India for the next several weeks to report some stories. I'll be sure to write about them here first. In the meantime, aram se jaega, go with peace.

Last word on Burma - the full story

2008-03-16T04:11:00.000-07:00

My search for truth in Burma began in a sleepy embassy in Vientiane, Laos, where I sat sweating on a patent leather sofa in a crumpled silk shirt and tie, pulling phony business cards from my wallet. It was two months after the monk-led anti-government uprisings of last September, and I had already been rejected a tourist visa twice in Hong Kong and Bangkok. I decided to hit the diplomatic backwaters with a different tack.

So one night in Vientiane I printed a couple dozen business cards, which peddled me as the owner of a Colorado-based jewelry business. I designed my own executive stationary and drafted a formal letter of intent. In three days, I had the visa; stamped, sealed and shining like a coin from the pages of my passport.

I wanted to answer one question in Burma: how has a group of xenophobic generals survived 46 years of global condemnation, multiple popular uprisings and the persistent bloodletting of a handful of ethnic armies?

I left Burma a month later with a chilling answer. It wasn’t the generals’ military might that perpetuated their tyranny – it was their mastery of human psychology.

The decoy continued when I hit Rangoon. They say one person in four is a government informer in Burma’s commercial capital, and eager young men routinely stopped me in the street, full of questions in perfect English. “Where are you from? What are you doing here? Where are you staying?” I learned to invent alternate histories of my past.

I wasn’t alone; all around me the military government was manufacturing its own brand of truth. You could see it in the Orwellian billboards sprinkled around the city, declaring the People’s Desire in four concise points. You could feel it in the heart-thumping bass of the elite nightclubs where white shirts under black lights turned the realities of Burma upside down. You could read about it in the government daily, the New Light of Myanmar, quietly referred to by its street name, the New Lies of Myanmar. Banner headlines declared 2008 a time of “Unprecedented Opportunity” and that Burma’s “Private Sector is Booming.” This in a country where the majority of the population lives on less than a dollar a day, almost half of the national budget is spent on the military and people are drinking rice juice to survive.

Underneath the junta’s propaganda and wishful thinking, Burma’s truth stood out like a black eye. Beggars young and old plied the streets by day. Prostitutes took their turf by night, all dolled-up and doe-eyed outside the cinemas and under the bypasses, trawling the darkness for a livelihood in a country that has developed its own unique strain of HIV. In Burma, 360 young children die of preventable diseases every day because the government puts only 3 percent of the budget into healthcare. The statistics go on; dark, dense and revealing. But if you’re looking to take the pulse of Burma, you only have to sit in a teashop long enough and the truth will find you.

“In Burma, human rights, no,” Mr. Nyein told me with all the English he had one afternoon, edging his stool closer to mine though still looking away. “All people like Aung San Suu Kyi,” he said of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning democracy leader still under house arrest. He folded his hands at the wrists under the table. “But talking, danger.” And then he left.

Another day a teashop owner came to sit at my table, bringing with him a worn copy of Chicken Soup for the Soul. “You like George Bush?” he whispered. I was about to explain that not all Americans support their government when he stopped me. “I love George Bush. He thinks something and he does it. He doesn’t like Iraq, so he fights Iraq. I hope George Bush will fight a war with my country.”

After several of these teashop monologues, I began to see a Burma at a quiet simmer, in a precarious balance of anger and fear. This was the psychological pillar of the regime’s longevity. I was angry enough myself; watching the junta’s timber trucks haul old-growth teak to the Rangoon ports every day, listening to stories of taxi drivers suffering under the government’s daily fuel-price rigging, seeing the YouTube footage of the wedding of General Than Shwe’s daughter; festooned in the jewels of the country her father and his friends have bankrupted through corruption and mismanagement. Who wouldn’t be angry? Everything about the last 50 years of this country’s history was a moral outrage.

And then, suddenly, one night in the hills of central Burma, as I sat in a bare concrete room seething with eleven plainclothes policemen, I wasn’t angry any more. I was scared.

I had heard rumors of a secret military site in the mountains where the Burmese were building something big and dangerous with the help of some foreign advisers. The story was vague, but prevalent, and I wanted to have a look for myself. I found a guide, a jolly man with a pot-belly, and asked him about the idea. He thought about it for the night and met me the next morning with his answer. He would take me.

We hiked for 15 miles in the dust with brief lifts from two GMC jalopies from the 1930s, before we reached the village at the end of the road. Farmers told us about frequent helicopters coming and going from the other side of the mountain. Three months ago, they said, they were awoken by a large explosion that was never explained. A general had warned the village that no one was to venture to the other side of the mountain, and no one was to ask any questions.

For our own safety and theirs, the village put us under friendly house arrest. No one was comfortable saying much, so they lighted on the novelty of me, their first foreign visitor in living memory. Old men gathered that night from surrounding villages to appraise their first specimen of a white man. Bewildered and shy, they considered it a momentous, sober occasion.

“We must have been cousins in a past life,” one of them began cautiously, “to have had the good fortune to meet again in this one.”

By the morning our presence was clearly making the village uncomfortable – prison sentences come ad hoc and unexplained in Burma, especially where fraternizing with foreigners is concerned – so we started walking back to town.

The police were waiting for us 15 miles later, outside the teashop where I paid my guide and we were going to part ways. They put us on the backs of two motorbikes and took us to the concrete room on the edge of town, empty but for two desks, a picture of General Than Shwe and a sign on the wall that read “All Respect, All Suspect.”

It was the generals’ psychological alchemy – resurrecting fear from defiance. My passport was taken, there was much shouting, they found my digital camera, full of a journalist’s pictures, and took it to a computer shop to copy its entire contents. I was clammy, dry-mouthed and ready to vomit. Four hours later, when night had fallen, I was released – loaded onto a waiting pickup and deported from the town. The last I saw of my guide was in the rearview mirror: the police had him by the arm, and were leading him into the darkness.

Back in Rangoon I was being followed and my phone conversations were tapped. Random people sat next to me in restaurants, asking questions. I stopped talking to strangers. I started stepping onto moving buses, not knowing where they were going, but knowing, for the moment at least, that I was not being followed. The paranoia was paralyzing. Like Orwell’s Thought Police, they only had to do their job once; my own psychology was taking care of the rest.

I flew back to Bangkok a week later, still gripped by cold spasms of dread, worried about who was listening to me, who was watching. It was a small taste of the fear that has stagnated Burma for 46 years of blood-stained military rule. Last September, Burma’s volatile scale tipped from fear towards anger, and people who thought they had nothing to lose poured onto the streets in defiance. When the soldiers felled at least 31 monks and civilians and arrested thousands more, fear was restored: the same formaldehyde fear that preserves the generals’ power to further deceive, cheat and murder their own people. It’s the type of fear that silences you from the inside, until you trust no one, not even your own mind, and decades’ worth of your anger and defiance and sense of injustice all turn to jelly within your own heart.

It is giving too much credit to the generals to say they are responsible for all these years of hijacked truth, poverty, silence and isolation in Burma. It’s fear that’s done all that. The generals just hold the guns.

“You can shout freedom all you want,” one young man summed it up in a whisper over a teashop table, “But not when they’re shooting at you.”

Moving On

2008-03-09T23:21:00.000-07:00

I've come to the end of my time here in Southeast Asia, and am now moving on to India for the next several months. I will use India as a base for reporting from the surrounding regions. I'll try to keep the posts regular to keep you updated on my whereabouts and goings on. In the meantime, all the best, be in touch and safe journeys.

"Better than Burma"

2008-03-01T19:36:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I visited the rubbish dump on the edge of Mae Sot, a Thai town across the river from Burma. The dump itself was a predictable reflection of the consumption of a medium-sized Thai city. Plastic bags, decrepit toys, batteries, tin cans and the occasional ruined soccer ball stretched out for hundreds of meters.

But what's trash to some is the livelihood of others. Atop the garbage pile, more than 300 illegal Burmese immigrants have built small huts and call the dump home. They spend their days combing through the rubbish for a meager harvest - plastic and glass bottles and aluminum cans that they can cash in for petty change. Some have lived here for nine years.

"It's better than Burma," one mother told me as flies swarmed around her face. "We don't have work in Burma. Here we earn forty to sixty baht a day ($1.30-$2). There are many problems."

She told me that three huge bags full of plastic bottles will only earn her 30 baht, about a dollar. With that money she buys vegetables to cook for her family with rice. Sometimes they buy a fish.

The hardships aren't only economic; the work is dangerous. Last week as rummagers dug through the plastic, a bomb exploded wounding 14. Rumors suggest that the bomb was planted outside a rebel leader's house and was taken to the dump by accident where it was detonated by the scavengers.

It's another twist in a spate of blood-letting in the town. Two weeks ago, Padho Mahn Sha, the leader of the Karen National Union, carrying out an ethnic insurgency in Burma, was gunned down in his own house. I interviewed Mahn Sha in that house three months ago. He was a man respected for his wisdom and diplomacy.

Back at the dump, a Burmese monk has come to give stuffed animals to the children and food to the families. He took part in the protests in Burma last September and is now exiled from his homeland. I asked him about the future of his country and he looked around at the garbage for an answer.

"The poor is not forever," he told me. "And the rich is also not forever."

Recently published

2008-02-18T23:21:00.000-08:00

A piece I wrote about Burma's underground political art movement and its burgeoning but censored hip-hop scene was recently published at Newsweek.com. You can find that article here.

It was not accompanied by this cartoon by Kaung Htet, which ran instead in the military government's propaganda mouthpiece, the New Light of Myanmar.

The new issue of Wend Magazine should be in REI and Barnes and Noble within a few weeks. In the meantime, here is a web preview of my article on Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor.

A Dangerous Palette for Burma's Artists

2008-02-07T20:51:00.000-08:00

It’s only mid-morning, and sitting in his simple studio in the shadow of some of Rangoon’s wealthiest mansions, Thein Soe is already exhausted.

Soe, not his real name, is bone-thin at 61, with smoke-yellowed hair, and a face like the Scream. An artist for most of his life, Soe was 16 when General Ne Win took power in Burma in a military coup. He’s since weathered the military junta’s 46 year-rule on his country, watching it crush pro-democracy demonstrations, turn one of the wealthiest Southeast Asian economies upside down and quash all freedom of expression.

He may be tired, but Soe is not a beaten man. From the studio in his quiet home, he still tries to capture the truths of his country in his paintings, installations and performance art. It’s not always a truth that’s savored by the government.

“I suffer,” he says, “It’s very difficult to show our inner sense, our expression. There are many censors for art here.”

Every painting hung publically in Burma must first pass the scrutiny of the Ministry of Information’s Censorship Board, and any sign of discontent, disloyalty to the government or unseemly political message can shut down the gallery and land an artist in jail. Just a month ago, the government shut down a gallery opening of Soe and his friends just before it began.

“They were sending us a message,” Soe says.

Soe is surrounded by canvas. The nature of his work has always been sensitive, under a government that is deeply suspicious of the arts. Many of the paintings that surround him, spilling from the walls to his desk to the floor, are potential prison sentences. Dozens of Burmese actors, comedians, writers and artists have spent time in jail for work that was considered critical of the government. After the brutal crackdown on the monk-led demonstrations last September, the arrests are more frequent.

“We paint what we suffer and what we feel,” Soe says of the group of 10-15 master artists that make up Burma’s underground political art movement. “The majority of this is sadness.”

Like many things in Burma, the art scene has been set back by the country’s isolation from the world. A lack of access to current art magazines, grinding poverty and the frequent closures of Rangoon’s art universities – breeding grounds for activism, the government fears – have worked to hold back the Burmese art scene. Most of the paintings sold in the few galleries of Burma are realist portrayals of monks and pagodas which a tourist can roll up as a memento of a trip to the country.

But among artists across the country, portraits of the detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi are bought and sold in secret and Burma’s underground political art movement is growing with every young artist joining the fold.

But traditional materials are expensive and hard to come by, and some youths are turning to performance art to speak their minds. One young man recently walked a busy street with a birdcage on his head, before dropping it and fleeing.

“I worry for them,” one of the older artists says. “What they are doing is very dangerous.”

“Artists have a responsibility to their people and country to express what happens,” says Moe Lwin - also not his real name - one of the leading contemporary sculptors in Burma. “(My work) is the record for my period; what I have seen and what I have suffered.”

When Lwin and his friends give an exhibition in Rangoon, they must apply for permission from the censorship board two weeks in advance. They offer snacks to the censors when they come to inspect and explain the meanings of the obscure works.

“Sometimes they are worried,” Lwin says. “If they give permission, they have responsibility for the show.”

For the artists, the dangers are not exaggerated. Burmese poet Saw Wai remains in jail after publishing a hidden message, that read “General Than Shwe is crazy with power” in what was ostensibly a love poem in a Rangoon daily in January. Lwin’s own brother spent 11 years in prison for his political poetry. His uncle died behind bars for his writing.

Still, despite the dangers, Lwin says his fellow artists and writers will persist. “We are not angry, we are sad,” he says. “All of these years have been wasted time.”

“Artists will express themselves whatever happens. We are not politicians, we are people. We feel like people, we suffer like people.”

Voices from Burma

2008-02-02T21:23:00.000-08:00

The prostitutes come out at night, powdered and preened, to sit in the dark corners near the cinemas and under Rangoon’s bypasses.

“They’re hungry,” my driver says, passing a group of them in short skirts and heels.

You mean horny?

“No, hungry. For food.”

It is almost five months since Burma’s military government brutally crushed uprisings of monks and civilians, leaving at least 31 dead and many more missing, and Rangoon looks like a city at war. The potholes in the streets and the upturned pavement of the sidewalks were not caused by explosions, however, but rather decades of neglect. Razor wire lines the perimeter of government complexes and the houses of the wealthy, and sandbag outposts hide rifle-toting soldiers outside military buildings.

Rangoon’s streets are back to status quo, congested by day and quiet by dark, swept clean of the defiance of September. But the grinding poverty that brought the Burmese into them in September, and also in the uprisings of 1988, remains unchanged. There is anger in the teashops, and the sense that the country is simmering just below boiling point.

“In your country, you work two days and you have food for a week,” says Maung Lwin, a welder taking a break for tea after lunch. “Here, you work for one day and you eat for one day.” Lwin supports his family on an average daily wage of $2.30, the same salary the government pays a specialized doctor. Money is so tight that even sitting down for a 15 cent cup of tea takes careful consideration.

“You are human, I am also human,” he tells me. “But my luck is not the same as your luck.”

None of it makes any sense. Blessed with wealthy deposits of gemstones, teak forests, agricultural land, natural gas and oil, Burma has the potential to be the wealthiest nation in Southeast Asia. Burma produces 90 percent of the world’s rubies. Every night, scores of trucks carry massive old-growth teak logs – some as wide as the hood of a car – from northern forests to the docks of Rangoon. Burmese exports account for 30 percent of Thailand’s natural gas.

But in an economy run by the whims of the generals and their select group of friends, in a country ranked the world’s most corrupt by Transparency International’s 2007 index, none of that money trickles down to the rest of the population. Most of the profits are stored in banks in Singapore, as no one trusts Burma’s banks, 20 of which closed overnight in 2003 when their money dried up. The disparity between the rich and the poor, the connected and the rest, is vast.

You can see it in Rangoon’s nightclubs, where white shirts under black lights turn the realities of Burma upside down. On New Year’s Eve, Pioneers Dance Club is thumping with heart-shaking bass and the haute coutre heels of the children of the privileged, who paid the $10 door fee – four days' work for a government surgeon – to lose themselves in a night in booze and beats.

The room is filled with 20-somethings, clutching cigarettes and cell phones. The Burmese government has so regulated mobile phones that it costs about $2,000 to buy a sim card on the black market.

“You don’t worry, don’t worry! Everything is on me!” Jarem, a drunk Nepali ruby dealer shouts in my ear. He is dancing in front of a neon green felt poster of the London Bridge, and flashes me a practiced American gang-symbol, and a few words of what he considers appropriate ghetto slang.

“2007 was shit, man, SHIT!” he shouts. “But it’s over now, here comes 2008, forget it. FORGET IT!”

But for most of Burma, 2008 offers little more hope than the year gone by. In regulations that would not affect the night-club revelers, the government frequently decrees commodity price hikes and rations. On Dec. 30, taxi drivers were only allowed to buy one canister of compressed natural gas to power their vehicles – not nearly enough to turn a livelihood. The next day, the government lifted the ration, worried it might spark protests like last September’s fuel hikes did.
In early January, the government raised the tax on satellite television from 6,000 kyat ($4.60) a year to 1 million kyat ($769) – a 166-fold increase. It later reneged on the price rise, as dissent mounted.

But figures remain which the government’s daily games of brinkmanship cannot go back on.
More than 360 children under 5 die of avoidable diseases in Burma every day, according to Save the Children statistics. According to the UN, a third of Burma’s young children are underweight and 1 in 5 do not live beyond the age of 40.

Despite the daily struggle to get by - or perhaps because of it - many Burmese keep abreast of international news, via proxy internet servers and shortwave radios. They’re keeping a particular eye on the upcoming U.S. presidential elections.

“You like George Bush?” the owner of a teashop asked me on my first day in the country. I readied myself for my canned defense that not all Americans support their government. I needn’t have.

“I love George Bush,” he said. “He thinks something and he does it. He didn’t like Iraq, so he fights Iraq. I hope he’ll fight a war with my country.” He was thumbing through a worn copy of Chicken Soup for the Soul, and told me he wanted to write an edition of his own one day.

In the streets of Rangoon, I found out, George Bush enjoys perhaps his highest approval rating outside of Crawford, Texas. The heart-breaking reason is that the Burmese are still hoping America will use its military to oust their government and restore democracy to the country.

The U.S. election came up in another conversation I had with an English literature university student at Rangoon’s Shwe Dagon Pagoda.

“In America, it takes a lot of money to be a president,” he told me. “Here, you just need to have a gun and be a good shot. After you’re president, then you get a lot of money.”

I asked about his favorite writers, and he told me he had an affinity for the existentialists.

Several days later I was sitting in a tea shop watching buses that were built before WWII growl down the streets. I noticed a man at the next table was watching me. I took a sip of tea and smiled at him. He looked like he had something to say and was forming the words in his mind. Finally, he got up and walked over to me.

“In Burma, human rights, no,” he said quietly, crossing his arms at the wrists, as if they were hand-cuffed. “All people like Aung San Suu Kyi,” he said of the democracy leader who has been under house arrest for 12 of the last 18 years.

Then he put a finger to his lips.

“But talking... danger.”

And then he left.

Back from Burma

2008-02-02T06:11:00.000-08:00

Apologies for the long period of radio silence, I just got back from a month-long trip to Burma. It was an interesting journey, and I'll be posting some of the stories here shortly.

While I was there I had a piece run in the San Francisco Chronicle about the Shan State Army and their role in fighting the increasing opium trade in the Golden Triangle. That story can be found here.

I'll be back with more soon.

New Year, Same Pain for the Shan State Army

2007-12-23T01:50:00.000-08:00

The recruits march in lines of five, to the snap of snare drums and singing songs of war, trailing long shadows in the early morning sun.

Training camp graduation is still a week away for these new recruits of the Shan State Army, one of Burma’s last armed resistance groups, but their drill sergeants are looking for a perfect performance during the festivities of the Shan New Year, on the first new moon of December.

The soldiers are a disheveled crew, once farmers and monks, wearing worn out boots and dusty uniforms and carrying Vietnam War-era M-16s and Chinese AK-47s. Their bodies are a canvas of traditional tattoos; snarling tigers, dragons, crossed spears and ancient Pali scriptures they claim will deflect bullets and ward off hunger and cold. Their faces are vacant, their footsteps hollow.

They march to the parade grounds, past the bamboo and thatch houses of Loi Tai Leng, the mountaintop headquarters of the Shan State Army, on the border with Thailand. They will practice their routines repeatedly for the rest of the day in preparation for Shan New Year.

The celebration of the New Year for the Shan, Burma’s largest ethnic minority, is the biggest event of the year in Loi Tai Leng, an otherwise quiet fortified village of 2-3,000. It is now year 2102 for the Shan, and year 46 of the SSA’s armed struggle against the Burmese military government. But as the calendar quietly turns in this forgotten corner of Burma, the future of this rebel army and their people isn’t looking any brighter.

Each year the Burmese consolidate their control by building supply roads that snake around the SSA’s shrinking pockets of territory and carry troops and artillery to jungle outposts. The SSA soldiers, who live off of broken rice and soybean cakes and have been paid only $12 this year, resort to guerilla tactics to ambush Burmese battalions on patrol.

“They are many and we are few,” says one veteran soldier. “We shoot them and run. We kill them and run.”

Despite admitting his army is outnumbered by at least 40 to 1, Colonel Yawd Serk, the bespectacled leader of the SSA, remains confident.

“It depends on your heart, not only your gun,” he said. “It depends on your morale, your spirit. Hitler had many soldiers, but he lost.”

At the end of his speech on New Year’s Day, Col. Serk silences a crowd still snickering from the missteps of the recruits by pulling a pistol from his belt and firing it into the air. On cue, a volley of missiles and mortars whizz off in plumes of white smoke from the forest below, sending thunder across the valleys on impact.

Col. Serk later boasts about the theatrics with a challenge to the Burmese military. “We showed the enemy today,” he said. “If they turn on their T.V.s, they will see the pictures. If they want to come fight, we welcome them. If this year they don’t come, then next year we will go to them!”

But sitting in the crowd are a group of civilians from Burmese-controlled areas of Shan State who walked for weeks through landmine-littered jungles under the cover of darkness to see the festivities. They live a much different reality than the military bluster of Loi Tai Leng.

These civilians have recent, firsthand accounts of Burmese troops terrorizing their villages for information on the SSA, stealing livestock, burning down houses and raping women.

Among them is Khun Thaw, 43, who three months ago escaped four years of forced labor for a Burmese military battalion. The beatings rendered him nearly deaf, and one of his ribs is still broken. He lived on the banana tree trunks the Burmese troops fed him – an edible stalk often given to pigs. He said the Burmese troops would use the porters as human shields during firefights with rebels, shooting over their shoulders for safety.

His wife and four children have had no word of him since the Burmese soldiers took him captive, and it’s too dangerous for him to go back and find them.

“I have no family anymore, no clothes. I am hurting,” he said.

Hsai Aung Nyat, 26, is another civilian who arrived at Loi Tai Leng two weeks ago. He said a Burmese battalion came to his village last month and “arrested, beat and tortured” the headman on suspicion of being an informer for the SSA. He said it’s a common occurrence in many villages.

“I don’t know if he’s alive or dead,” Nyat said. “No one wants to replace him. It’s too dangerous.”

The civilians said their situation has worsened after the military crushed September’s democracy protests in central Burma, but that the repression has been decades-long in the remote areas of eastern Burma where foreigners are not allowed to travel and there are no cell phones or internet bloggers to document it.

In a purely pragmatic sense, the SSA can rely on the abuses of the Burmese military as a failsafe recruitment strategy. Many of its 10,000 soldiers are fighting with a painfully personal chip on their shoulder.

Sai Shwe, 18, is one of the recruits who graduated on New Year’s Day. He still has the full cheeks of a child, and his voice shakes when he tells his story. Shwe had left his home in central Shan State to become a novice monk when he learned of a Burmese attack on his village. He returned to find his aunt raped by Burmese soldiers.

“I wanted revenge,” he said, blinking hard. “I think only one thing now that I’ve graduated. I want to go back inside and take revenge for my aunt.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by Sai Yawd Merng, 32, a monk for twenty years and now a second lieutenant in the SSA.

“Here, if you have no gun it’s like you’re sticking your neck out for them to cut it,” he said. “Civilians have become the victims of war. Now, without a gun, you will not see peace in Burma.”

Col. Serk concedes that the dedication to pacifism of Burma’s democracy icon, Aung San Suu Kyi, is a brave strategy, but finds little relevance in it for the Shan. While enjoying international fame, Suu Kyi’s support isn’t universal in her country’s tribal peripheries, largely because she is ethnically Burmese – the 60 percent majority of the country which has historically lorded over the minorities.

“It’s a different situation in a different country,” Col. Serk said. “She is working for the Burmese, not for the Shan.”

And so, after the debris of the Shan New Year’s celebration is cleared away, and the village headquarters of Loi Tai Leng returns to business as usual, the next year looks to be more of the same for Burma’s largest minority and the rebel army fighting for its freedom.

In these haunting mountain ranges, stacked slate blue against the sun, the sounds of celebration fade fast.

Recently Published

2007-12-21T02:19:00.000-08:00

My story on controversial hydropower in Laos ran in the San Francisco Chronicle on Dec. 17. Have a look at that story and photos by clicking here.

And the story about Jackie Pullinger and her life with Hong Kong's heroin addicts, gang members and prostitutes ran in the Chronicle on Dec. 14.

Also, for a feature and photos from the New Year's celebration in Shan State, take a look at the travel section of the San Antonio Express-News in the first week of January.

And keep an eye out for the next issue of Wend Magazine, due to hit the racks in Barnes and Noble and REI in January. My story and photos on traveling Afghanistan's remote Wakhan Corrdior will be published in that issue.

With the Rebels

2007-12-14T06:34:00.000-08:00

Follow this link to see a slideshow and descriptions of the lunar New Year's celebration of a dying culture and the rebel army that vows to protect it.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/14504395@N07/sets/72157603457593751/

Clean energy, messy consequences in Laos

2007-12-01T21:20:00.000-08:00

In dense tropical jungle, the playground of wild elephants and endangered animals, the spirit lands of 28 distinct ethnic groups, one mountain of Laos' remote Nakai Plateau is groaning from within.

Deep inside it, teams of workers in threadbare shirts, hard hats and rubber boots clang hammers on steel as they gauge a three-kilometer hole through the earth that will serve as the drain pipe for the reservoir of Laos' biggest development project ever. Machinery shudders from the depths. Shrieks of steel on steel and distant thuds sound like an advancing army of orcs.

It's called the Nam Theun 2; a $1.45 billion, 1,070 megawatt dam that is projected to bring $2 billion into Laos over the next 25 years. Over 90 percent of the electricity it generates will be sold to Thailand. For the first 25 years, the revenue will be split between four investing companies from France, Thailand Laos and Italy. After that, all the profit belongs to Laos.

The Communist Lao government hopes the Nam Theun will help turn the country into the “battery” of Southeast Asia. Laos doesn't have oil or an ocean, but it does have the Mekong and its tributaries. Currently 10 dams are being built, and 70 are being considered. The Nam Theun 2 is the biggest.

“This is a commercial project and a development project,” says Vilaphone Vilavong, Director General of Energy in the Ministry of Energy and Mining. “It’s a good thing for Laos. One hundred percent of Laos supports it. Ask anyone you like.”

The World Bank, which has put $130 million into the project, says it will alleviate the poverty of Laos, where 80 percent of the population lives off the land and the average income is less than $2 per day. A doctor in a state hospital earns a monthly salary of about $40.

But the dam has its detractors. Activist groups say it will flood one of the most biologically and ethnically diverse regions in the world, and destroy the fisheries and fields of over 120,000 people living in two river basins.

Among them is the Berkeley-based International Rivers, a social and environmental group that documents the impacts of large hydroelectric projects around the world. Their program director for Laos, Shannon Lawrence, has been visiting the Nam Theun 2 project site for four years and remains skeptical.

“This is not going to be the panacea to Laos’ development woes, the one golden ticket that gets them off foreign aid and makes them a self-sustaining economy,” she said.

Lawrence said Laos’ history of corruption doesn’t lend credibility to the government’s claim that the dam’s revenue will be used to “eradicate poverty by 2020.”

“In a country that does not have a track record of using central government revenue to really deliver those benefits… it’s a very risky proposition,” Lawrence said.

The reservoir will also flood one of the most bio-diverse regions in Asia. The jungles of the Nakai Plateau are home to 400 species of birds – 50 of which are endangered, and 35 percent of which are found nowhere else in the world. Of the last five large mammals to be discovered or rediscovered by scientists have been found in the Nakai Plateau. Among them was the Laotian Rock Rat, rediscovered last year. Scientists thought it had been extinct for 11 million years.

The Lao government has said that $1 million of the dam’s annual revenue will be set aside for conservation efforts to protect the remaining jungle from illegal poaching. Many villagers have forraged in these jungles to supplement their meager diets for generations.

With the reservoir slated to be filled in 2008 and electricity to be produced by 2009, Lawrence admits there’s little chance of stopping the project now. But she said International Rivers is still working on easing the consequences of the dam.

“We want to see that the commitments made to [resettled] villagers are met,” she said. “It’s important to keep a close watch and make sure villagers get what they were promised.”

The Nam Theun 2 Dam will relocate 6,200 villagers when it floods two-thirds of the Nakai Plateau – an area three times the size of Sacramento. Anthropologists have identified 28 distinct ethnic groups in the area, some of them which have not yet been classified. The relocated villagers are now transitioning into different livelihoods on less land.

Som Vang, 41, is the headman of one village that was relocated four years ago.

“Life is different,” he said. “Before I was a farmer, now I am a gardener. I sell vegetables to buy rice.”

Vang said living conditions are better for his village, they now have running water and electricity, but their buffalo are not adjusting easily.

“Now there’s not enough food for them to eat,” he said. “They’re all thin now.”

Before, Vang’s village survived on the highland rice they grew the livestock they raised, and the food they foraged in the forest. In their new location things are different. Forest food is harder to come by with the increased competition. And with no place to grow rice, they have now been told they should grow vegetables to sell in the market, a kilometer away. Their first introduction to the market economy has not been easy.

“Some days are good for selling, some are not so good,” Vang said. Down the road three ethnic women are walking back from the market, where they made “10 or 20,000 kip” selling their vegetables – about one or two dollars.

Nanda Gasparini, the World Bank’s media representative for Nam Theun 2, is nonplussed.

“They probably would have come into the market economy on their own,” she said.

Gasparini said in impoverished Laos, which has no oil or access to an ocean, options for development are few. Moreover, in a country where the hammer and sickle still flies fringe to fringe with the national flag, the Communist government ultimately calls the shots.

“The fact is, in this country, [the dam] is going to happen. The government is going to do it,” Gasparini said. She said the World Bank is involved to ensure that the project is carried through consultatively, transparently, and with minimal negative impacts.

The project has generated “6,000 to 8,000 jobs” for Lao nationals as well, she said. At the worksite, there were employees from Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines as well. Despite the dust-covered signs on the project site saying “Our Target is Zero Accidents,” International Rivers has been told of 11 workers dying, mostly in dynamiting accidents.

Gasparini said in a country with a small workforce of which very few are highly educated, “hydropower and mining are the most surefire options” for development.

But at least one Lao employee of the Nam Theun 2 Power Company, the consortium of companies building the dam, isn’t convinced.

“This is not development,” he said, asking that his name not be used to protect his job. “The government says it’s development, but it’s not. Development is bottom up. This is all top down.”

The employee made a funnel with a piece of paper.

“A lot of money goes in at the top, but not much comes out for the people at the bottom.”

The Colors of the Revolution

2007-11-18T00:29:00.000-08:00

It was the end of September and the Burmese military had just used guns, sticks and tear gas to smother nationwide democracy protests, when Surrinder Singh Karkar, 43, knew he had to leave Rangoon.

While other activists lay low, changed their appearance, or went underground, Karkar faced a few setbacks. There was his dark skin and prominent nose, his long beard and sorbet-orange turban.

Karkar is a Sikh, of Indian parentage, but born in Burma. As one of the organizers of the uprisings, he says he was the only Sikh activist in the streets, pumping his fist for a revolution.

“Everyone knew me, I was there from start to finish,” he said. “The government wanted me, dead or alive, they didn’t care.”

On Oct. 4, Karkar, a used car salesman and father of three, made his escape. In a four-day journey to the Thai border, Karkar walked on the road, caught lifts on busses and slipped through the jungle to avoid checkpoints. He stayed a night in a village controlled by a pro-government militia, telling them he was a trader, and then snuck across the border by what he calls the “water road” – across the Moei River.

Now in Thailand, Karkar stays inside the compound of an exiled Burmese political group in Mae Sot. He came to escape the police roundup of protest leaders and to tell the international media what is happening in his country. He’s also waiting to have a doctor look at his back, where he was hit by a policeman’s bamboo stick. More than a month later, it’s still giving him pain.

But Karkar is not a broken man. Sitting down for a recent interview, he smiles broadly and sports a yellow shirt that says “Free Aung San Suu Kyi.” Karkar says he was the only Sikh but not the only ethnic Indian to join the protests – thousands of Muslims and Hindus did as well. There were many different colors in Burma’s Saffron Revolution.

The ethnic Indians of Burma, which make up two percent of the population according to the latest official census in 1983, have long been discriminated against and denied citizenship. They are likely a much larger population than the junta will acknowledge. Karkar said the Indian religious minorities saw the democracy protests as a chance to change their long history of persecution.

“They don’t give us Indians a chance,” he said of the military junta. “In Burma, the government has no interest in Indians. For this reason, we were happy to protest.”

Karkar, a veteran of the 1988 student uprisings, said many thousands of Hindus and Muslims participated in the protests in Rangoon and Mandalay. He said the deteriorating economic situation and the lack of rights pushed many into the streets.

“We live there, we work there, it is our home, but the military makes it difficult to eat and drink, to come and go,” he said. “We have no money to drink tea. What more can you say? If we Indians can’t buy tea, what can we buy?”

Many Indians are denied a passport in Burma, even if they were born there. Karkar says it takes a “black money” bribe of 100,000 to 300,000 kyat ($70 to $214) for an Indian to get one. In a country where the majority of the population lives on less than a dollar a day, to most, this is simply unaffordable.

Karkar describes the city he left in bleak terms.

“There are so many poor people, so many beggars,” he said. “It’s very difficult to live. There’s no food, it’s not safe. Daily we see the police take people away.”

Karkar said the situation is bad enough that people will not stay silent for long.

“For sure, more protests are coming,” he said. “Before the end of December, for sure they’re coming.”

Karkar’s wife and child are on their way out of Burma to meet him in Thailand. They will stay until his back is healed and they can safely return to their home. He said he’s not worried about finding his way back to Rangoon safely.

“This is in the hands of the man upstairs,” he said, looking skywards. “There are many roads in Burma, and many jungles. I will get back.”

Karkar said the diverse population of Burma will remain united against the government as they were in the September protests.

“In Burma, Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Sikhs and Buddhists, they all mix,” he said. “There is no problem. But the government is a problem for everyone. They make the chaos, they make the confusion.”
The fighting peacock - symbol of the democracy struggle in Burma.

A Day in Burma

2007-11-15T21:15:00.000-08:00

I crossed the bridge to Burma two days ago, to renew my Thai visa. A bored official took my passport on the Burmese side - you have to leave by 5 p.m. - and told me to enjoy the sights.

It's amazing how much can change in 200 meters. On the Burmese side of the bridge, the roads are dusty and pot-holed, the noodle bowls cheaper to remain affordable for a much-poorer country. There are spies and pro-government militia soldiers walking the streets. Instead of the big diesel 18-wheelers you see in Thailand, there are cheap Chinese contraptions - a sputtering engine strapped to a steel-frame with wheels - for transporting goods.

I visited several monestaries and a school. Here is a slideshow of some of the pictures. It's as far as I can get into Burma right now: http://www.flickr.com/photos/14504395@N07/sets/72157603161362268/

The Artist

2007-11-12T07:12:00.000-08:00

Maung Maung Tinn is an unlikely philanthropist.

He fled his village in eastern Burma 13 years ago; after his parents died and when, as he tells it, he could no longer handle the sadness. He wandered into the jungle. Some KNU rebel soldiers found him there, crying and singing, alone.

“Singing doesn’t always mean you’re happy,” he says.

The KNU soldiers helped him cross the border into Thailand where he worked in a clinic for refugees and started devoting himself to painting.

Now 39, Maung Maung finishes a painting about every month. He has a style of his own, soft, understated watercolors, always of people, always precise in expression. He sells some of them, to NGO workers or travelers, and uses others for exhibitions.

He puts together calendars and just printed a book. He uses the money he earns to pay for schools for Burma’s displaced children, to fund orphanages or to pay the rent for H.I.V. patients who can no longer work.

“I try to help wherever I can,” he said. “I can’t run a big project, I’m not an NGO, but if someone needs something and I can help, I help.”

Maung Maung’s next exhibition will be in Italy. But the artist won’t be attending. Maung Maung has no passport, and with the reputation he’s earned with his work, has little hope of the Burmese government issuing him one. At this point it’s too risky for him even to go back into the country.

“I am not political,” he told me. But his paintings – of displaced Burmese villagers, deported migrant workers and children sleeping on the streets – would beg to differ.

Maung Maung led me into his sparse home yesterday, on the side of the highway to Burma. We sat on the floor, and he told me pieces of his life.

He looked a fragile man.

His face was thin, his skin sallow and his eyes pained with history – his, and that of his homeland. Sometimes they misted over when he stared into space. Sometimes they flashed with color when he talked about his home. Sometimes they drained of feeling entirely.

He gets homesick. Mostly at night, he says, when he’s alone. Sometimes at big parties when everyone is with their families and happy.

He’s been encouraged by various NGO workers and friends to resettle as a refugee in a third country. But he probably never will. He says he couldn’t stand to put any more distance between his heart and his home.

Instead he will stay to try to paint a better future for his country. His goal is to spread awareness, he says, so that the world will know and be shocked by the realities of life in today’s Burma.

But more immediately, Maung Maung’s aim is to help the refugees coming daily across the border, to whom life has been anything but fair.

He boils it down to a concentrate of kindness.

“I want to do something good – it doesn’t matter, big or small – before I die.”

Click here to see a gallery of Maung Maung Tinn’s work: http://www.burmesepaintings.org/index.htm
Maung Maung Tinn

Made in Thailand (with some help)

2007-11-09T22:00:00.000-08:00

Last week I plucked up the courage to pay a visit to a small sewing factory in town. I’d been directed to it by Lwin, a Burmese man who has spent the last 12 years quietly working to organize the 100,000 or so illegal Burmese laborers in Mae Sot.

In my interview with Lwin, I had asked him if he could arrange for me to visit a factory and meet some of Thailand’s 2 million illegal Burmese immigrant workers.

“There’s one near your guest house,” he told me. “Why don’t you go yourself?”

It was a challenge.

So one quiet day at noon, I did. I approached a man sitting outside the small, gated room that was chattering with sewing machines, and asked him in Thai if the owner was in. He looked uncomfortable, even more so when the young manager came out. They spoke to each other in Burmese. Then the driver turned to me and pointed to a rusted Chevy pickup.

“Get in,” he said.

I piled in with the driver and the manager jumped in the back. We rattled off along a road that led us to the outskirts of town. Half of me was still wondering if they were going to take my camera and wallet and dump me in a rice field, when the driver pulled into an unmarked drive.

A guard opened the gate, and we drove up to a long building humming with the zip of sewing machines.

There was a pile of sandals at the door. Inside were their owners – about a hundred of them, mostly young girls, and all Burmese working in Thailand illegally. Their fingers were moving at a fevered pace, flying under machines that stitched together baby skirts, frilly brown blouses and pinstriped designer shirts with labels that read ‘Christian Dior.’ The manager told me they were knockoffs.

I started taking photos. I learned the workers made $3.80 a day, for a nine-hour shift, less than half Thailand’s minimum wage for their class of labor. They worked six days a week. The clothes that they made would be trucked to Thailand and then shipped around the world to be sold for many multiples of their wages. The labels on the clothes said ‘Made in Thailand,’ but the truth was a lot more complex.

Aung Baing Soe, 23, was one of the few men in the room. He didn’t have much time to talk between hemming shirts.

“The work’s good,” he said. “We work from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and on Sundays we rest.”

Compared to what Aung Baing left behind in Burma, the work’s certainly better.

In Burma the majority of the population lives on less than a dollar a day. Currently, 12 percent of the population has malaria. Only half of the country’s children finish primary school, and a third of them are malnourished.

It seems the Burmese that flee their homeland for the opportunity of Thailand are less interested in just wages and humane working conditions than they are about survival.

But working illegally in Thailand has its price. To go outside is to risk arrest, fines and deportation back to Burma, a country in which it is considered treachery to leave. Instead, most of the workers stay inside, locked into an economy where businessmen turn a profit on the relativity of suffering.

They work in the sweatshop, they eat in the sweatshop and they sleep in the sweatshop’s garage; 10 per tin-partitioned room, right next to the owner’s tinted windowed BMW sedan.

“Thai employers, they like the Burmese,” Lwin had told me in our interview. “Burmese workers are oppressed already and seldom demand their rights.”

There are about 400 factories operating in and around Mae Sot, tapping into a continual supply of cheap and quiet labor fleeing the dictatorship next door. They make everything from Maidenform bras to Marlboro jackets to Walt Disney apparel.

Many in Thailand realize the country’s economy needs Burmese labor. Some say this is why the Thai government offered to build the Friendship Bridge to Burma at its own expense.

I spoke to the Mae Sot police and the Ministry of Labor, and the number of illegal workers in town is no secret. But it’s a tenuous system, where timely bribes keep authorities’ heads turned until a publicized crackdown proves even timelier. The driver told me the owner of the sweatshop I visited paid 20,000 baht ($570) a month to keep the police from prying.

But even when workers are caught and sent back to Burma, they find a way to return.

“We cannot control it,” the local police captain told me. “If you send them away one day, tomorrow they’re back.” He denied any police involvement in the illegal labor economy.

“The police’s duty is to keep security,” he told me. “Their duty is not to check on workers.”

But raids are still common. The captain told me the police had sent 5,000 illegal workers back to Burma this year. Still, each year the number of Burmese crossing the border increases.

Millions have already fled the abuses and economic mismanagement of Burma ruling junta by crossing into Bangladesh, India, China and Thailand.

Before human rights or justice or peace, the majority of these evacuees are looking for the most basic thing they can no longer find in their homeland: a livelihood.

Click here to see a slideshow of images from the sweatshop: http://www.flickr.com/photos/14504395@N07/sets/72157602999644422/

The Next Movement

2007-11-05T00:59:00.000-08:00

My contact was a man of few words, and when the expected call to my mobile came, our conversation was predictably brief.

"I'm outside your guest house," he said. "There's a car. Come out and get in. Bye."

I picked up my notebook and walked out in time to see him zip off on a motorbike. I got in the waiting sedan. Its windows were black.

Inside I met Zue Hlaing Hten, 27, and Min Youn Thwe, 23, two Burmese student activists who were involved in September's uprisings in Rangoon. My contact had arranged the meeting, but in this edgy border town of spies and mercenaries, security was paramount.

We exchanged names, and then were silent. I didn't know how much the driver knew, or should know. He was wearing sunglasses. He followed my contact at a distance through the backstreets of Mae Sot. Spaghetti parlor piano spilled from the speakers.

On the outskirts of town, we pulled into the parking lot of a nice restaurant. I was about to open the door when the driver stopped me and said in clear English, "Wait." He kept the car running. Still, not a word was spoken.

Twenty minutes later, my contact pulled up beside us, and the driver told us to get out. We walked through the restaurant to a secluded table in the corner. Finally we could talk.

Zue Hlaing and Min Youn, who fled Burma just last week, told me about the state of fear currently gripping their country.

“The government set up many roadblocks to check on people and ask what they are doing,” Zue Hlaing said.

These two activists passed more than 10 police checkpoints in their bus journey from Rangoon to Myawaddy, before escaping across the border last Thursday into the relative safety of Thailand. But unlike many Burmese seeking a better life in this town, they aren’t planning their exile.

Zue Hlaing and Min Youn came instead to enroll themselves in an underground, four-day course on political defiance. The course is based on previous movements in Poland, Chile and Serbia, and teaches organization, operational strategy and leadership of mass protests. It is taught by a member and ex-rebel fighter of the All Burma Students Democratic Front, a militant group that formed after the Burmese military put the student uprisings of 1988 to a brutal end.

The course has been taught for 10 years now, and its teacher estimates 2,000 monks, students and teachers have been taught and sent back to Burma. Five students enrolled in the latest course, which finished today. Three of them have already returned to Burma. Zue Hlaing and Min Youn are waiting for word from inside on when it is safe to return.

Zue Hlaing, a petite young woman, with short-cropped hair, is nervous.

“When we came, they asked no questions. But when we go back, there will be questions,” she said.

They will tell the police they crossed into Thailand for the school holidays. But once they reach Rangoon, they will gather their friends and talk about Burma’s next uprising.

“We know that the student leaders of the movement were arrested. We wanted to come here, to learn, so that we could replace them,” Zue Hlaing said.

Zue Hlaing and Min Youn gave me a detailed account of the days of protest and its sudden bloody climax in Rangoon. Min Youn said when he heard of the government troops beating up protesting monks in early September in the central city of Pakokku, he was furious.

“The government calls themselves Buddhist. How can they treat monks like that?” he said.

On Sept. 23, when the protests were building in Rangoon, Min Youn was on his way back from a computer class when he rounded a corner and saw a small group of monks and lay people marching.

“I dropped to the ground, paid my respects to the monks and followed them,” he said.

Min Youn joined the protests each day after that. They were growing successively larger. He said he was thinking about the uprisings of 1988, which he had been told about by his parents who participated, and read about in smuggled books. But he could see no soldiers on the street, and he was proud and glad to march.

“I felt a tension release in my heart,” he said. “In Burma, there is so much tension because of the government pressure. We were not afraid. We were thinking we would get what we wanted.”

By Sept. 25 the protests had swelled to 100,000 people, including several prominent actors and writers. The crowd gathered around the Sule Pagoda, where a monk, a student leader and a member of the opposition party, the National League for Democracy, addressed the crowd.

“I couldn’t hear them,” Min Youn said. “I just heard we had to be disciplined and continue the struggle. We were so many people. It looked like a human sea. We were so happy to be taking action. We didn’t think the government could do anything.”

But that night, when the crowds had dispersed, government troops patrolled neighborhoods, announcing a curfew and banning groups of more than five people. Min Youn stopped in an internet café to chat with his friend in Singapore. She told him the international rumor that had been circulating.

“Be careful,” she said. “Tomorrow they will shoot.”

The next morning, Min Youn walked to the movement’s agreed meeting place, the Shwe Dagon Pagoda. Overnight, barbed wire had been rolled out in the streets. There were soldiers on the corners, and the gates to the Pagoda were locked.

Min Youn separated from the gathering crowd to look for a group of friends. As he was looking, he heard shots, and later found the crowd on the move, shouting ‘They killed a monk! There is blood on the Shwe Dagon!’ He joined them.

“At that time, all the people dared to die,” he said. “They didn’t care. They were not afraid.”

The crowd was followed by two trucks full of soldiers. At the Ahlone Dockyard they were stopped by another truck of troops in front of them. The soldiers shouted for them to stop. The crowd of about 300 monks and 200 lay people sat down, and started chanting prayers of compassion.

Suddenly the troops on both sides of the crowd shot their guns into the air. Min Youn and most of the others were able to flee in the chaos that followed, but 30 students were put in a truck and taken away.

The next day, Zue Hlaing said she saw the police beating protesters. She said she saw two people who were beaten to death and two that died from gunshots wounds. The protests continued over the next days, though smaller, and by Sept. 30th, they were finished.

After hearing news from their friends, Zue Hlaing and Min Youn estimate that in total, 50 to 100 people were killed in the Rangoon protests, and 5,000 people were arrested.

“I felt bad,” Zue Hlaing said. “I wanted to continue.”

But for these two students, who will return to Burma sometime in the next 10 days, the democracy movement is far from dead. Once back in Rangoon, they will use what they have learned in Thailand to start organizing the students for the next movement.

Zue Hlaing’s young face is proud and defiant.

“We’re not worried. We’re not afraid,” she said. “We will continue. We will try again.”

With that my contact cut in and said the car was waiting to take us home. I scribbled the last of my notes down and then quickly asked if they could give me false names that I could use in my story for their safety.

"Don't worry," they told me. "We already did."

Children of the Bridge

2007-11-02T21:07:00.000-07:00

Aung Htu is seven years old. He has no parents and sleeps on the banks of the river separating Burma from Thailand. He begs for his food. Here he plays with a dead snake he found in the grass.

The Thai/Myanmar Friendship Bridge, from Mae Sot to Myawaddy, built with Thai money in 1996. Some Burmese pay 30 baht ($1) to cross it to find work in Thailand. Others take a boat to go around it for free.

Shaliman is a Burmese girl of Muslim, Indian origin. She likes to play with her friends under the bridge, beside the older boys and girls hawking bottles of smuggled whiskey and cartons of cigarettes.

Behind the Gates

2007-10-29T21:22:00.000-07:00

We jumped off the pickup truck an hour outside of Mae Sot, after the police checkpoint and in front of the gates of Mae La Refugee Camp.

With a mouth full of betel nut, Pathi, my guide and passport into the camp, looked both ways before crossing the street. An ex-spy for the Karen rebel army, Pathi knew how to be quiet. He motioned me to follow, quickening his pace to duck into the gate, turn some corners, and enter the jungle. We stopped. He slapped me on the back and said, “There. Now we’re safe.”

With over 40,000 refugees, Mae La is the biggest camp in Thailand for refugees from Burma. Accessing it legally as a foreigner costs time, money and a lot of bureaucratic wrangling. Pathi told me he could take me through the back door.

Mae La is a sprawling camp, with over 8,000 bamboo and leaf-thatch houses scattered over a hillside. Its road front stretches three kilometers. While some refugees are being resettled in third countries, even more are coming from Burma each year. There are 154,000 spread across nine camps along the border. For two years now, Thailand has declared a ban on new refugees. They still come. Only now they don’t have the benefit of registration cards and the NGO food rations that come with them.

Saw Lu Hu, his wife Naw Ko Weh and their two young twins are one such invisible family. Five months ago they fled Burma’s eastern Karen state, where a war between an ethnic army and the Burmese military has raged for 50 years, because their village was about to be destroyed. Now in the refugee camp, they sit in the bamboo hut Lu Hu built. They have no refugee cards. They have no food rations. Their bone-thin twins are squirming in their laps.

“We had no place to live,” Lu Hu says. “We had to pay many taxes to the [military]. The troops called us to be porters, and if we couldn’t go, we had to pay. I was a porter three times.”

Lu Hu fled through the jungle with seven other families, finally crossing the border to seek refuge in Thailand. But the problems didn’t end there. Now his family has a roof over their heads, but food is scarce. For that, Lu Hu and his wife Ko Weh sneak out of the camp to work in the fields of a neighboring farm. The Thai farmer pays them 60 baht ($1.70) for a 10-hour shift. It pays for rice, fish paste and yellow beans, but little else.

“No, it’s not enough. But it’s better here than there,” Lu Hu says, nodding towards Burma.

I gave one of his sons half a pack of biscuits. He took them quickly, blankly. I smiled and reached down to squeeze his arm. It was more bone than flesh. He turned into his mother and curled the biscuits into his chest.

Some of the refugees are given UNHCR refugee status and resettled in third countries. Saw Pu Keh, 44, is preparing to take his family of four to Australia. He doesn’t know what to expect, but is happy that his daughters will get an education.

“I’m afraid of the plane,” he told me. “And I’m afraid of arriving in Australia without knowing any English.”

I asked him what work he would like to do. His answer was quick.

“I would like to prepare a field to plant rice and vegetables. Can you do that there?”

Pu Keh and his family have lived in the camp for eight years. It hasn’t been much of a life.

“It has been very difficult here. We can’t go outside. But we can’t work in the camp either, there are no jobs,” he said. “I think it will be better in Australia.”

Pu Keh has supplemented the NGO-donated rations of rice, fish paste and yellow beans by buying fish at a shop on one end of the camp, and walking it to the other end to sell for a small profit. He too makes about 60 baht a day. He is sad to have had to leave his home in Burma, but is happy his daughters will have a future.

“I want my daughters to be educated, he said. Our hopes are for our children.”

Down the dirt path is a shop selling outdated tins of food, betel nut and braziers for 30 baht a bag. Beyond it, Manday Tu, 50, steps out of her hut with a basket to collect edible leaves from the jungle to put in a soup for her family.

Her smile shines in the squalor, and belies the struggle of her 22 years as a refugee.

Manday Tu left her village when she was 28. The military had come, demanding rice and money. Unhappy with their spoils, they took a group of 15 villagers captive. Manday watched 3 have their ears cut off with a knife. They were tortured further, and later she saw them hanging from a tree. She took her family and ran.

She lived for 12 years in jungle camps with other displaced villagers, under the protection of the rebel army. When the camps were attacked, she would flee again. Eventually she arrived at the Salween River separating Burma and Thailand. With nowhere else to go, she crossed the border. She has lived with her family in three refugee camps before coming to Mae La.

“I am sad to think of my home,” Manday Tu says. Her hair is tied neatly in buns and there is grace in her eyes. “In our village we had to go to the fields and take care of the animals, we were very busy. Here we can’t go anywhere. Here we have no work.”

Manday Tu is looking after her ailing parents. When they pass away she says she wants to apply for resettlement in the United States. She, too, wants a future for her children. And, despite the pain, she’s come to terms with her exile.

“When I think about the military and what they did to our village, I get sad,” she says. “But we have no power. Everything the military does they do with a gun and no one can do anything.”

And then the shadow in her face passes. She looks at me and smiles generously. Even after everything has been taken from her, Manday Tu can’t stop giving.

“If I get to America, you must visit me,” she says. “You must come to stay with me.”

Through the Lens

2007-10-26T20:31:00.000-07:00

Have a look at my Flickr account to see what I've been photographing recently. I have three sets of photographs posted...

A Night in Bangkok... I was out one evening and before I knew it was caught up in the climax of a 10-day Chinese festival. http://www.flickr.com/photos/14504395@N07/sets/72157602728225390/

Mae Sot, Thailand... The town I am in now is on the border with Burma. These are some shots of the bridge, the army and the unrelated but delicious snacks. http://www.flickr.com/photos/14504395@N07/sets/72157602728272070/

Mae La Refugee Camp... This is the largest camp for Burmese refugees in Thailand. It has 45,000 inhabitants who have fled the scorched earth offensives of the Burmese military. It's a place of squalour and smiles. http://www.flickr.com/photos/14504395@N07/sets/72157602731294077/

When you're at the sites, click on the link at the top right-hand corner of the page to view them as a slideshow. Click the photograph to display its description. I hope you enjoy them.

Thawno's Love

2007-10-24T10:14:00.000-07:00

Like many stories, Thawno’s started with a hello.

I was walking out of an important interview in the dusty, dog-ruled streets of Mae Sot, running the quotes over in my head and imagining the article to come, when Thawno stepped out into the street, all baggy pants and broad-smiled swagger, and stuck out his hand.

“Hello!”

He motioned me into the storefront church where he worked, whirled out two plastic chairs, and we sat.

He told me a little about his life. He was 35, from the Chin state of western Burma, once taught martial arts in Mandalay and was convinced he was in love with Jenna Bush, George W.’s daughter.

“I saw her first in Rangoon,” he said. “She was using a Swedish passport, but it was probably fake, because she didn’t speak Swedish very well.”

“Are you sure it was her?” I asked Thawno. “Many foreigners have faces that look alike.”

“I knew her face from the pictures on MSN and NBC. She was wearing the same dress as the picture of her dancing with her father. It was her.”

It sounded like a case of mistaken-identity-celebrity-infatuation. I doubted Thawno would have known good Swedish from bad Swedish, but he was convinced and I was intrigued. Even more so when I learned that his love for Miss Bush would later be the cause of his arrest, torture and nine months of forced labor in a Burmese prison.

“I saw her first in Rangoon in April, 2003. She was smiling, sitting on a car, very lovely. I couldn’t talk to her, but I saw her again in Mandalay, in November, 2004. We walked to the top of Mandalay Hill together, she was beautiful and lovely. Too much I was loving her. That time she was using a Belgian passport and speaking French. ‘Why does she lie to me, and use a different passport every time?’ I asked her friend. She told me it was probably for security.

“I got her e-mail address and wrote to her, when I was living in Rangoon. I didn’t have an address to give her, but I told her to come anyway. Fortunately, I met her on the street one day. She told me, ‘I’m not Jenna Bush,’ but she laughed, and asked me what I thought of George Bush. She probably lied because of security. And if she wasn’t his daughter, why would she ask me about George Bush? I asked her to marry me. She told me maybe, if I come to her country.

“When she left I wrote her e-mails asking her to come back to marry me. It is not so difficult for her to come back to Burma to marry me, but for me to go to America, it is very difficult! I asked her to come back to be my wife. She was angry sometimes, she wrote back and called me a “wacko” – you know what is “wacko?” – and said I didn’t know about the world.

“I wrote letters to her father, to George Bush, asking for her hand in marriage. I thought maybe it is difficult for her to come back to Burma, so I decided to meet her in Thailand. I was getting on the bridge to cross over when the military police stopped me. They looked in my bag, and found copies of my letters to George Bush.

‘Why are you writing to George Bush?’ they asked me.

“They arrested me and took me to jail. They tied me up in a chair and beat me.

‘Why are you sending letters to George Bush?’ they asked.

‘“Because I am in love with his daughter,’ I told them.

‘“You are a fool,’ they said. ‘She is the highest of the high, and you are the lowest of the low, how can you think you could be together?”

‘“I love her because it is my right!’ I told them.

‘“What are your rights!’ they shouted, and beat me more.

“For nine months I was in prison. My hair and my beard turned white. The food was bad. I lived like an animal, because of the wicked government. The top generals, they did not beat me, but it was because of them that I was beaten. It was like they were behind the door.”

After nine months, Thawno escaped, and fled to Thailand, where a pastor took pity on him and gave him a job in the church. He still wrote e-mails to Jenna Bush, the real or imagined, but her replies were few. He sent his biography to the White House and the UN, hoping to get refugee status, but the e-mails didn’t go through. He suspected an intelligence agency blocked it. Thawno was tired of being toyed with.

Just recently he saw something on the news that had him disturbed.

“Tell me, I saw the White House press release that said she is engaged, do you think it’s true? It’s not good to lie to the world like that. I saw on an NBC interview, she said she was engaged, but then she laughed, and said she hasn’t set a date yet. So I think maybe it’s not true. I think maybe someone knew about us and got jealous. Do you think it’s true that she's engaged?”

I couldn’t lie to him. It was clear that he was delusional in his obsession with Jenna Bush, but I saw no reason to disbelieve his 9 months in prison. People had been imprisoned in Burma for less. Thawno was earnest in his questions. I told him, yes, I did think her engagement was true, but that there were plenty of other girls out there. Thawno looked away and didn’t speak for a while.

“Maybe it’s better for her,” he said, finally. “It’s hard to live in Burma. The government is very wicked. But I would like to hear from her personally, honestly. I love the truth. I love pure, hard and good character. I love freedom.”

I left Thawno to his reverie. A doctor I talked to later told me his celebrity obsession was a classic symptom of bipolar disorder.

Thawno had fled a country where dreams were beaten from people before they could even take seed. But you couldn’t beat a dream from Thawno. His had taken root, and Jenna Bush, the real or imagined, was in his heart for good.

Snapshot of a Life: Bangkok

2007-10-19T06:54:00.001-07:00

I met Pon yesterday morning when I was wandering the maze of streets around my guest house, looking for food. I was hungry, and she was grilling chicken and mashing up green papaya with roasted garlic and chilies and lime. I stopped for a chat and some sticky rice and salad at her corner stall:

Pon is from Laos. She came to Bangkok two years ago because she could earn more money here. She likes to joke. She exaggerates figures when she speaks, then hastily backtracks when called out. Hers is not the most remarkable of lives. But it’s a life. One of Bangkok’s 10 million. And, as far as lives go, it’s a consistent one. You can find her on the same street corner in Bangkok’s grimy automotive repair district every morning of the week except Sunday, when she rests. She’s there at six and she’s gone by two.

This is Pon:

She’s in her twenties, has two children and a boyfriend. She comes from the countryside of southern Laos, where she planted rice with her family. She came to Bangkok looking for opportunity. She misses her family and country, but is able to go back to visit five times every year.

“It’s better in Laos,” she said, “it’s peaceful, and the living is comfortable. But it’s hard to find money.”

Her family of nine is still in Laos, keeping goats, cows and buffaloes, and planting just enough rice to eat.

“It’s not like Thailand,” she said, “where they harvest two to three times a year and sell what they don’t eat. In Laos you harvest once and you eat what you grow.”

Here in Bangkok, she says, she makes 1,000 baht (US$30) on a good day, selling food like this:

Some days she only makes 300 baht, about US$10. Those numbers went up and down as we talked. Whatever the case, it’s not a lot, and she sends much of it back to her mother in Laos, who is looking after her son.

Pon wants a house to live in, (she’s renting a room in Bangkok) and a stable income. She wants enough money to take care of her children well. And she wants some rest. She doesn’t have much time for that now. She’s up at three every morning, preparing food, on the street by six, and at two she’s off to the market to buy the next day’s supplies. After that she goes home, makes food for her boyfriend and daughter, and is asleep by eight.

“I have a lot of difficulties,” she said. “I want a life with less difficulty.”

As for now, she’ll be on the same nameless street corner eking out a living. Across the street from her, old axles and engines and suspension springs are coaxed back to life by a group of laconic young men sitting beneath two six-foot mountains of bolts. In other parts of the world, these auto parts would already be rusting in a scrap heap. Here they will be reincarnated.

The air between Pon’s stand and the auto shop smells alternately of tangy grease and grilled chicken, depending on which way the wind is blowing.

This is Pon’s view, from six to two, every day of the week except Sunday, when she rests.

Loving Hong Kong's Unwanted

2007-10-17T04:50:00.000-07:00

HONG KONG – Jackie Pullinger doesn’t look like your typical Christian missionary. Popping out of a car in the traffic-choked streets of Hong Kong, she wears stylish sunglasses and long strings of pink beads over a shirt that sparkles.

She’s in her sixties. Her cheeks are rouged and her hair is dyed gold. Unorthodox is an understatement.

And Pullinger isn’t your typical missionary. In fact, she doesn’t even like the word. She tires of "professional Christians" and their vocab. She’s spent the past 41 years picking gang members, prostitutes and heroin junkies off of Hong Kong’s streets, but she’ll glare if you refer to it as her "work."

"I never thought of this as work. It’s a journey," she says instead. "It’s a can’t-lose journey."

Nor will she bear to hear pastors or church groups talk about her "anointing" or "ministry" or people being "saved."

Pullinger’s is a simpler lexicon, filled with words like "poor," "hurt" and "love." In a city with 40,000 known heroin addicts sharing the streets with rampant gang violence and forced prostitution, Pullinger has no time for religious dogma.

What remains is the raw reality of an unshakable woman who might be this city’s Mother Teresa. But she wouldn’t let you say that either.

In 1966, when she was in her early twenties, Pullinger got on a boat in her native England with the intention of going to another country to help people. She won’t talk about it as a "calling" or a "burden" or any of that nonsense.

"It was more, Jesus is coming back, whenever, and when he comes, I’d like to answer well," she says.

But she didn’t know exactly where she was going. The boat called in at eight different ports before it got to Hong Kong, where Pullinger felt it was the right place to step off.

"I walked around Hong Kong and saw people dying, kids in the street, old people with begging bowls," she says. "I thought maybe I could manage one street."

She started talking to people. She gave them food and took them to the hospital when they needed a doctor. She stepped into the middle of alleyway gang-fights alone, pleading for them to stop.

One street turned into one slum, which turned into one district and then, as her projects grew, the whole city. Now she organizes weekly meetings in one of the roughest parts of Hong Kong and invites the junkies, the whores, the street kids, and anyone else that might be hurting. There are always more people needing help than her facilities have space for.

But she never turns anyone away. When her complexes of buildings in various parts of the city are all filled up, she rents out brothels to house the newcomers. She once helped a woman get off heroin in a cupboard.

Getting people off drugs is a specialty of Pullinger’s. Over the years, she’s developed a technique for bunking a heroin addiction. She doesn’t use medication, or phased withdrawal. Instead she finds a room for the addict and puts them in pajamas. For 10 days there is someone beside them constantly, whether they are awake, asleep or going to the bathroom. They are prayed for and surrounded by a supportive community of ex-junkies. When the 10 days are up, most are no longer addicts. After that, they are trained for a job and can stay in the community as long as they like.

"We treat them like newborn babies," Pullinger says. "There’s always someone with them. They can eat what they want, when they want. There’s absolutely no advice or counseling. They’re the center of the world."

It’s worked so far for Chi Kong, a 51-year-old father of three, and heroin addict for 30 years.
Chi was once in the Triads, Hong Kong’s notorious gang responsible for most of the city’s drug-running and organized crime. There are whispers of it in his face, and a stamp of membership crawling up his arm in the form of a dragon tattoo that ends in a snarling head just above his heart. Chi was a fighter. He once broke his right arm in a street fight. But five months ago, he changed all that.

"It was very hard," he says. "I wanted to run away in the beginning. I was very temperamental. I wanted to fight the others."

But he was soon off the drugs and into a family of ex-addicts.

"My character has changed," he says. "I’m not as angry."

Chi said he’d stay another year or so recovering at the center. Then he’ll leave and find his children again. And if he runs into his old friends, he says with a smile, he’ll tell them he knows of a place they should visit.

Pullinger says the response is always positive at the weekly addicts meetings. It’s one of her favorite parts of what she does.

"They all know Jesus within a few minutes," she says. "They speak in tongues in five."

Tim Berringer, a young Briton volunteering at the home for addicts, says Pullinger has been an inspiration to him.

"Jackie’s one of those people who does what they believe," he says. "I’m not really into empty religion, but there’s something happening here."

Sai Kit would agree. Sai was a father at 15, and a heroin addict and Triad member by 19. He spent most of the salary he earned working at a hotel on drugs. Three slash scars on his forearm are a reminder of his days of fighting.

"I always wanted to change," he says, "but I was bound up by heroin."

Sai’s been off the drug for one month now, and says coming to live with his new "brothers" was the best decision he’s ever made.

"I found my father," he says, pointing to the sky. "I found my family. I found some self confidence. And I found my smile again."

These days Pullinger travels a lot. In the past three weeks she’s been in America twice and the U.K. once. She’s developed a celebrity status amongst Christians in the West, and many churches ask her to speak to their congregations. She hates it. She’d much rather give a three-day seminar on how to alleviate poverty than an hour-long speech. She’s after inspiration, not admiration.

"You’ll find the world around that people who help the poor are happily pushed to the side and admired," she says. "You have a whole bunch of Christians with houses and money enjoying a great feast and the poor remain elsewhere."

Instead, Pullinger tries to model her life on Christ-like love.

"If you’ve got an orange, and someone’s hungry, you give them half," she says.

It’s what she calls the "normal gospel."

"Living in a world where one-third of the population is destitute," she says, "most Christians don’t do normal gospel."

In Pride and Pain

2007-09-26T08:52:00.000-07:00

In Pride and Pain - a Guatemalan Journey

Victor is an auto mechanic. Sitting in the shade of Guatemala City's Parque Central, he talks politely about elections and evangelism. His vote in the Sept. 9 first round presidential elections was a fatalistic one. At the mention of Otto Perez Molina and Alvaro Colom, he upturns his palm and scrunches his face in indifference.

Neither candidate gives him much hope. For that, Victor points to the sky, to the perennial incumbent.

"Jesus Cristo," he says, "is all that really matters."

Behind him a massive blue and white Guatemalan flag cracks in the wind in front of the Palacio Nacional. The Parque Central is decorated for independence day on Sept. 15. But when the happy music of the marimba fades and the flag flutter and fanfare die away, Guatemala's history still echoes for those who listen.

Not 30 meters from the flag in Parque Central stand the pillars surrounding the Cathedral, on which are written the names of the 200,000 people who were killed or disappeared in Guatemala's 36-year civil war. The names etched in the stones remain a painful stain on the country's nationalism. It's a stain that lingers. Eleven years after the 1996 peace accords ended the civil war, the perpetrators of the massacres of the indigenous Mayan remain at large. One of the worst, Efrain Rios Montt, just won a seat in Guatemala's Congress, and hopes this will ensure him immunity from prosecution for another four years.

The two main contenders, Otto Perez Molina and Alvaro Colom, campaigned on slogans of security and hope, respectively. Molina promised to rule Guatemala with a 'mano dura,' a strong fist, to crack down on a crime rate that is one of the worst in the Americas. In 2006, Guatemala's murder rate was 110 per 100,000, over twice that of Colombia's. But as an ex-general in the army, Molina also generates frightening memories of the army's role in the civil war massacres.

Colom is accused of being backed by narco-traffickers. About 75 percent of the cocaine that ends up in the U.S. passes through Guatemala.

And both candidates can attribute their success to backing from Guatemala's wealthy, powerful industry-owning families.

The only Mayan candidate in the running, the Nobel-peace-prize-winning Rigoberta Menchu, lacked the resources to splash her party's name along the roadsides like the other parties. She also lacked the money to buy villagers machetes and promise them bridges and other projects in exchange for votes. In this fiscal democracy, the promised bridges are seldom built, but a new machete is nice, and the villagers have scant hopes for change anyway.

The runoff elections between Molina and Colom are scheduled for Nov. 4. But as both candidates tour the country and paint billboards the orange and green of their parties, few in Guatemala are holding their breath.

'We are made from corn'

Leaving Guatemala City in any direction, the countryside is a patchwork of agriculture draped across the lumpy mountains. Coffee, beans and corn are major crops in this fertile, volcanic soil. Guatemala is the primary exporter of coffee for Starbucks. The Mayans say they were made from corn. They eat it in tortillas, tamales, and straight off the cobb, and drink it liquified in a variety of hot drinks called atol.

In March, 2005, the Guatemalan government ostensibly opened the country's markets to trade with the U.S. by ratifying the Central American Free Trade Agreement. But two years on, CAFTA has only benefited the rich plantation owners, like the vast banana fincas of Dole and Del Monte.

Moreover, in a country that founded its civilization on corn and pulls two harvests a year from stalks that grow to 15 feet, Guatemala ironically imports the crop from the U.S. The American government subsidizes corn so heavily that when it hits the market, the value of Guatemala's corn drops to almost nothing. As a result, villages cannot compete in the free markets of the globalized economy, and instead languish in poverty.

But not everyone stays. Some choose to risk the dangers and pay the $2-3,000 to pay for a coyote to bring them into the U.S. If they make it across the desert, they send back money to their families, constituting a major part of the national economy. In 2005, these remittances amounted to $3 billion, 10 percent of the country's GDP.

Travel through Guatemala as a gringo and issues of immigration are always close at hand. One street food vendor in Guatemala City half-jokingly asked if I had a sister he could marry so he could get a green card.

Another young boy, the conductor of a small bus weaving through the central Guatemalan hills, talked to me as he hung on at the doorway. He was 15, perhaps, in boots, jeans, tucked tee-shirt and a Levis cap. Shouting our destination out the door, at various passerby, he was still learning about the reflexes of the world. He turned to look at me in earnest.

"Can I come back with you, to the States?" he asked. "I can work for you for three years, I'm a hard worker, and fast."