Burmese encounter

It is gloomy and rainy.  The path to the school is slippery with mud, but a dry hall awaits us.  Some 60 kids assemble, and as soon as we settle down in front, they burst into song.

It is a Christian song sung in Burmese accents, so there are syllables we cannot understand.   They look at us while they sing, some simply mouthing the words, obviously curious as to our presence.  The sounds reach us as enormous waves.

This is Love & Care, a halfway house for Burmese refugees.  We are at the border of Thailand, where the children are allowed to stay by the sufferance of local authorities.  The children carry I.D. cards naming them as students of the school, but once in a while, if they make the mistake of wandering around, they are picked up by Thai military.  Sometimes the I.D.s work, sometimes they don’t.  Then they call a friendly policeman, and since he is a decent fellow, he intercedes.  The kids are bailed by paying 500 baht.

One of the teachers is Lanke, she is Slovakian.  The pastor is Korean, and there is also a teaching assistant from Hong Kong.  Sometimes they receive a salary, sometimes they don’t.  They teach grades 10 to 12.  The mission is to give the kids enough education and English skills to win scholarships to Bangkok colleges.

They tell us their dreams.  A fair majority want to be doctors.  Some want to be teachers, a couple even say they want to be lawyers.  One surprisingly says he wants to be an environmentalist, another, a good politician.  There is also one that wants to be a general, and one crows he wants to be rich.

Lanke says the viable options for them are only to either become teachers, or nurses or medic aides.  These are the only futures available.  Lanke says Aung San Suu Kyi might have been released, but mountain folk at the border don’t even know that.  The impact hasn’t been felt yet.  Meanwhile, developmental organizations want to enter Myanmar directly, which means funding for organizations established outside Myanmar, like Love & Care, which are currently serving those who have fled to the border, may dry up.

A story written in pentel upon cartolina is posted up on the wall.  It seems too brutal to be real, but it could be true for all of them.  It is a story by a student named Malik. He says his family was attacked by soldiers.  He had to escape to the forest, and members of his family were killed.  He was sold as a slave, and once, his owner threw an axe at him, wounding him.  He was saved by a stranger named James, and brought to a safe house.  He found his father in town, and got a happy ending.  But happy endings are not necessarily true for all of them.  Nor is his ending necessarily the end, as he still has to make his way through life.

We haul out the food and school supplies we have brought.  Someone had the brilliant idea of buying an oven toaster, and we’ve also tossed in a DVD player.  Purely as a teaching material, of course.  Although I am uncomfortable with promoting the dole-out mentality, a companion distributes small red packets with Thai baht inside to each child.  We also give a small amount of money that’s shockingly enough to run the school for a quarter of the year.

The kids are in good spirits, and all of them gather at the school gate to wave our van off.  They are happy to have seen us, perhaps also because today, due to our interruption, they were spared from their daily lessons.

We drive down the hill, and are forced to stop at a checkpoint.  The soldier looks at each of us, and queries our driver.  We probably look foreign enough, not more Burmese refugees headed to town.  After a couple of minutes, and some nervous jokes, we are waved through.  That ends our good deed for the morning. Unfortunately, we all realize it is not enough.