Documenting Human Rights (and poo) from the Border .... by Adam (2001)

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Yep, I love my new neighbourhood. After a relaxing day of documentin' human rights abuses, I like to ease back in my deck chair, drink in hand, and breathe in the calming sights and sounds: An angry owner threatening Burmese illegals in the sweatshop out back. The gentle waft of burning plastic. Police bullying a group of refugees out of their milk money. The early-morning LOUDspeaker belting out distortion and propaganda to eager neighbourhood gun traffickers. Exhaust fumes and laughter as three nine-year-old boys swerve their Grandma's motorcycle around a pot hole. Snarling dogs raping each other in the green meadow behind the house, testicles swinging in the breeze and tails swaying above the long grass as one of them takes his turn on top of the next-door-neighbour's bitch.

Ok, so its not exactly the suburban tranquillity of my youth, but i am enjoying my new environs on the Burmese border. I finished my teaching career a few months ago and am now firmly entrenched in the wacky world of documentin' atrocities.

I work for an NGO (non-government organization) that is primarily concerned with the wellbeing of the Karen people. I guess I should explain. The Karen are an ethnic group living near the Thai-Burmese border. Most live within the borders of Burma, but the Burmese military government, who I will now refer to as "Jennifer", are systematically enslaving, starving, torturing and murdering the Karen villagers. 

Thus, many of the Karen are forced to take refuge with the Thais [who will subsequently be referred to as "Gary"]. Anyway, Gary is not happy that Karen is always coming over to his place, but Jennifer won't stop being a real bitch to Karen. My job is to tell everyone about Jennifer's behaviour towards Karen, but I have to do it from Gary’s place, because Jen is not into having anyone over right now.

Did that make it easier? I don’t know, but although the Karen people may be victims of forced starvation, that is all they have in common with the dead Carpenter. "Karen" is actually pronounced "ka-REN" (No, you don't shout the second syllable, stupid. Just stress it.), and I work for their human rights group. Got it?

The Karen's most famous sub-group is the "long neck Karen" - like you've seen in National Geographic, where the hickey-proofed, village gals wear tight, golden bands around their elongated necks. It gives them the appearance of being sexy, mechano-giraffes, but in reality, the bands mostly just smoosh down their collarbones. So if you're looking to elongate any "body parts", golden thumb rings aren't the best way to go. At one time, the tradition was supposedly to scare off tigers, but now it is mostly just a freak show for morbid tourists. But if you ask me, nerve damage and some minor warping of the skeletal structure is still a small price to pay for the ability to pound a nail in with your neck. And It's too bad more of them don't have hair on their feet, they would make great paint brushes for giants.

You may also have heard of the two cigar smoking, black-tongued twin boys who command "God's Army". They are a very, very small faction of Karen who are also fighting the Burmese government. I suppose the two M16 wielding tots would already be lording over their own homeland if wars were fought on cuteness alone. But if that theory were true, then Russia would have been renamed "New France" 200 years ago. In a true bit of trivia, I read that an ex-playboy bunny in Vancouver offered to adopt the twins (not a joke!). Which I think would serve as a great opening to combine TV's new reality based programming with the old sitcom format.

I am living in Mae Sot, right on the border of Burma. It is a somewhat lawless city with the stench of corruption and vice everywhere. Everyone seems to make their money off of selling drugs, guns or people. Or on the backs of exploited Burmese refugees. Our neighbourhood comes complete with its own huge sweatshop right behind the house where barefoot Burmese workers create some of the fine fashions available at your local Wal-Mart. On a good day, they can make nearly a dollar-and-a-half. And much of those earnings are often generously donated to members of the decent and hardworking Mae Sot police force, so that the nice officers won't detain, deport or beat them.

Anyway, I miss teaching a little bit, and my Thai kids, for sure. But things were getting a bit wack'd at St. Rancid Expiry. The new teachers were disappointing - a squad of leering, pot-bellied septuagenarians, each with their own little Thai wife. The average age jumped so high that I became the youngest male teacher. When I left, there was more ear hair in the St. Fran’s staffroom than on the shower floor at my Dad’s curling club. Ben, who was the oldest male on the staff last year, isn't even the oldest "Ben" anymore. The other Ben, a crusty senior who says "goddammit" and "sonofabitch" a lot, hasn’t been seen outside his classroom since prep week. It’s a shame because it’s a known fact that children are scared of the elderly. But now their classrooms are home to more swinging arm fat than a Tom Jones concert. Anyhow, I will miss many people from St. Frans, but I get to Bangkok every few weeks so I will catch up now and then.

Classes went well before I left. The only real happenings of note: I had two chair-smeared-with-bodily-discharge incidents. The first discharge was of the post-digestion variety. The class filed into my room and it was obvious someone was covered in something. The boys were all covering their noses and saying "Teacher Adam, someone drop, someone drop!!". I wasn't quite sure how to handle this without embarrassing the offender. Another teacher came in, took a look at the brown clowd surrounding my students and starting barking "Who is it? Who's not healthy?" Surprisingly, the 13-year-old girl responsible did not thrust her arm into the air and start shouting "It is I!! It is I who have pooped upon my chair and now I would like to go rinse my skirt and wipe my bum while you soak this mess off of my seat." So I sent the entire class to the bathroom and they came back smelling a little better. At the end of the period the kids left and I went over to the area containing the majority of the odour and found some randomly placed brown smears blotting one of the chairs. Unfortunately, I was able to figure out which little teen was responsible and had a hard time not thinking about it whenever I saw her afterwards.

A week or two later, another class was doing group activities when a girl asked to go to the toilet. Upon her return, she picked up her chair, walked it over to the other side of the classroom, and then returned to her desk with a different one. They continued with their activities and I casually took a glance at the rejected chair and noticed a set of smudges. This time they were dark red.

How is it that two events such as this could happen to the same teacher in the span of a couple of weeks? No matter what age you teach, you figure you probably won't see both of those substances. Most little kids don't menstruate and most teens don't poo on a chair. I'm just lucky, i guess. I suppose it was some kind of weird creative visualization - karma thing. If you talk about something enough, it is bound to follow you into your life. And in my case, the shit hit the fan.

St. Francis' head-nun Sister Regina is trying her best to live up to her nickname of "Sinister Vagina" by pulling all sorts of playful shenanigans. For example some computer parts were missing, so she brought all the Thai teachers in on a Saturday to get fingerprinted and then forced them to work building her botanical garden. Actually the botanical gardens itself is a telling story. Sinister and her entourage jetted off to Singapore on a book buying mission. But while in Singapore, she discovered that she didn't have the $40 needed to create a real, book-based curriculum for high school. But after returning, she knocked down the front gates, tore up the football field and the brand new parking lot to accommodate a series of much needed fountains and the botanical garden. It seems Sinister witnessed a similar setup in Singapore and just had to have her own. It's time there was an NGO devoted to stopping this woman. There are many at the school who would like to pull up the back of her habit and smack the dickens out of her sisterly butt.

So my teaching career is over. I taught abroad for over two years and she didn't learned a damned thing. (That's my favourite joke.)

Back to my new job. Here is the coolest thing I have done for work so far: A couple weeks ago, I snuck over rivers and past rice fields, across the border into Burma's Karen state. It was nighttime, and once near the border, we were met by KNLA resistance soldiers [the good guys] and were taken to their army camp. It was their Martyrs Day, for remembering fallen soldiers, so they had a party [hopefully they fight better than they sing]. I slept in the barracks, fingered M16's etc.. It was a little chilling knowing that just beyond the fringes of the camp lay thousands of landmines and booby-traps (I love that term) to fend off Burmese SPDC units who are encamped a mere hour's walk away. The unit consisted of about 40 young Karen men with a rag tag assortment of weaponry and uniforms. We went with the leader of the Karen military [and former political leader as well] who kind of looks like a Karen version of the pre-slimfast Tommy Lasorda, but much less jovial.

Beginning in a couple of weeks I will be moving to a beach resort town near Bangkok [Hua Hin] for eight weeks to take some Thai language training. Actually, my Thai language skills are already spectacular. You might even say I speak better Thai than a lot of Thai people. Babies, for example - I speak better Thai than many infants. I also speak it better than Thai people who have had recent throat surgery. I can pontificate on a variety of subjects including, but not exclusive to, my first and last names, the location of the restrooms and whether I want another Sprite or not. But perhaps I can find some use for even further knowledge. It's never good for one to become complacent with one's skills.

Anyway, in my last email I worried about how the rather serious human rights work would affect my light-hearted and sarcastic look at life. Nobody sent me any good refugee jokes, but I thought of a couple myself. They are included here, before I sign off, in order to ensure you that the sombre tone of my work has not sucked away my sense of humour. Please move any coffee cups away from the keyboard, because these instant classics are bound to send you into arm swinging convulsions of laughter and merriment. Here they are:

Q: How many refugees does it take to change a light bulb?

A: Two. One to change the bulb and the other to forage through the jungle for anything to feed their starving children.

Q: Why did the refugee cross the road?

A: To escape the brutal and violent oppression heaped upon his people by the ruling military junta.

Chuckle.