The Chili Bomb Diaries: Karaoke Time is Good Time

Dear Friends and Loves,

As I come to the end of my first two months in Thailand, I’ve settled in enough to report a little more thoroughly on life and times.

Working in camp is rough but really a great experience. To get to camp we pile into ancient trucks and go bumping and winding for at least an hour and a half. I call it the Indiana Jones Truck Ride of Death. It can be pretty brutal and a lot of people get sick. Depending on the driver it can be a terrifying ride or just a painful one. I find them rather adventurous myself. Camp itself is such an interesting place. All kinds of people from Myanmar/Burma live there. The majority is Karen but there are actually a lot of different ethnic groups and religions in camp, a lot of languages, cultures, and types of traditional dress. In each camp there is a Muslim Market, a couple of Christian Churches, and meeting spaces of all kinds. There are little shops and restaurants and schools and the list goes on.

The job that I do in microenterprise development is so interesting because there is this very small economy in camp but we’re so limited by the Thai government as to what we can do to help them grow or to help new ones start. It’s a huge challenge to come up with programs that can address the needs of camp residents and meet the constraints of working within the camp and within Thai law. It’s also really difficult to encourage growth of income generation projects when people’s basic needs are being met by NGOs and when many of the more ambitious leave camp illegally to work elsewhere. Challenges galore! It’s really nice to have business meetings with camp organizations sitting barefoot on a mat while eating cookies and drinking hot chocolate and coffee. Usually when we have these meetings we, the NGO workers, offer to pay for the refreshments and usually we do. I didn’t think about it much until last week when a woman on the leadership board for the Karen Women’s Organization insisted we let her pay. She said that she may not have much but that it was her honor to invite us to coffee. It made me think back to the last time I saw some contention over a dinner bill in the states and how interesting it is to see where true generosity is found.

Outside of camp life is good. I live out in a rice paddy and I have a trusty orange bike that gets me around town. It’s very odd living with my housemates. I really didn’t envision myself at the age of 23 living with two forty-something Thais but that’s life. Generally it’s ok, sometimes they sort of parent me and, really, I can’t see what business it is of theirs whether I go for a run at 6am or 4pm on a Sunday. Why hassle me? We do get along well though and have a lot of fun doing weird things. They’re sort of teaching me to cook in this really passive aggressive way, (“oh, you’re going to use that sauce?” or “I would have put in more sugar, but that’s just me”) but the important thing is that I’m slowly learning to cook. Other people who work with ARC are really great and we have our own special fun as best we can. Usually this means karaoke on Saturday nights. Another thing I never saw for myself, karaoke, but it is so much more fun than I ever knew.

Food is excellent. A lot of you expressed concern about the whole chili bomb thing. I would like you all to know that training is going well and when I cook for myself I usually put 4 or 5 chilis in a dish now. My housemate Nuntiya is encouraging me on my quest to up the tolerance for spicy things and we’re hopeful that by December I’ll be touching a 4-star (her scale) rating.

So, before I end this chronicle there is something I would like to share with you all. I’m sure many of you have heard about the recent protests by monks in Myanmar and the violence and oppression that erupted in response. People have been killed, beaten, imprisoned and the internet in the country was even shut off to cut off the population. First of all, I’m nowhere near the actual events taking place. I am safely off in a Thai village a long way away even from the refugee camps that I work in. Second, these protests are directly related to the work that I’m doing. This week alone has seen a spike in refugee arrivals to camps all along the border and tension has been high besides. The people that I serve in camp are people who have left Myanmar because of the military dictatorship that the monks are marching against. Most of them are ethnic minorities who have been forced by the military to work or resettle, they have been raped, tortured, imprisoned, and have had family members killed in addition to countless other human rights abuses. They have been driven from their homes and into Thailand many still have family and friends back home.

Everyone I work with everyday has a story to tell. The three brothers who do our written translation work in Nu Po camp spent more than 25 years in prison between them for student activism. Popo spent two years in prison after her husband died because of his political activism. Tain Taw in Ban Don Yang camp had to leave with his wife because of his work as a journalist. Zapo has been in Nu Po for 11 years. He left Myanmar with his parents when he was 13 after his mother and father were forced to work for the military carrying arms and his whole village was forced to relocate twice in four years. These stories remain largely untold and I feel it’s important that I share with you some of what I see here.

I don’t mean to get preachy but this is a very intense situation. I’m safe but a lot of people aren’t. I encourage you all to take the time to read an article if you see a headline and ask me if you would like more information. A few people have asked me already and I’m putting together some information slowly but surely. Don’t worry, I’ll only send it to people who ask for it.

So with this chronicle, I send you all much love from the “land of the free.” Keep happy and healthy and let me know what you’re up to when you get the chance.

LOVE like a chili bomb!

Mollie