For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question

by Mac McClelland

  That, Ta Mla, is how you resettle.

  The time between DHS approval and Ta Mla’s leaving for the United States would probably be four to six months. He could take anything he liked with him, so long as it all fit inside one bag and weighed less than twenty kilos. It’s not unlikely that he’d be given just a few days’ notice of his departure and assigned American city. This, combined with having to move to and sleep in the processing center for five days; plus the (true) stories circulating that on a couple of occasions Karen refugees have arrived in a United States airport to find no one from the way-overwhelmed and -underfunded stateside resettlement agencies waiting for them, prompting an ungodly panic; plus the fact that though their housing has been prearranged, they must start paying rent and utilities within ninety days, and they arrive already in the hole, having to start paying back the cost of their thousand-dollar plane tickets within six months has, some say, knocked the United States out of No. 1 most desirable place to resettle.

  Theoretically, Ta Mla didn’t really want to leave at all, not for the United States or anywhere. He’d been at BA for only a year, but he’d been on two different HRD trips, for a total of four and a half months working inside. In addition to documenting human rights violations, he conducted training sessions to help villagers document them on their own. Most of the time, no NGO workers like himself were there to write all the crucial information down, after all, so he taught people to do it and help others do it themselves in ten-day, six-hour-a-day training sessions. He loved going back to his country and meeting people who still lived there and feeling like he was doing something important for them.

  But the visits haunted him, too. In one village, the SPDC had just come and gone, and Ta Mla took down the story of Ler Moo, who had one child and a pregnant wife and owned literally just the clothes on his back. Ler Moo explained to Ta Mla that the SPDC had burned down his rice storage and house and everything in it. His wife needed medicine. “Nephew,” he said, as a matter of brotherhood, not bloodlines, “could you help me?”

  But Ta Mla couldn’t. He didn’t have any medicine, and where would he get it? He didn’t have any money. He had to move on to the next village. Before he left, he gave Ler Moo two of his three sets of clothes, though it meant Ta Mla wouldn’t be able to change for two months.

  Not that his laundry was near the top of his concerns. Two of the villages he visited that time came under attack, and he had to grab his shit and start running with everyone else. One of the villages was burned down; the other wasn’t, but its inhabitants were too afraid to move back into it, so the populations of both were absorbed into a jungle that already held hundreds of thousands of hapless IDPs. Ta Mla built two tents out of bamboo, as many as his hunger-depleted strength would allow, though he knew they wouldn’t be much use to three hundred stranded villagers. Some of the next villages he went to were already deserted. All he could do then was take pictures of the house-shaped piles of ash, charcoal shadows of what used to be there, big barren squares among the trees. Back in Thailand, he kept the pictures in a small plastic album, and he looked at them all the time, and he wondered, he said, what happened to the man who called him nephew, the man with the sick pregnant wife who was one of a number he couldn’t even count anymore that he had been powerless to help.

  “I love my country, and I love . . . my neighbor,” he told me. “I don’t want to separate from my country, but if I stay there, I can be ... unhappy, because we have no opportunity. I would like to go to US . . . so I can get . . . education. Practical . . . experience, and real education. Then I can organize with Karen people in US to . . . become activist. So they will pressure . . . international community about Burma. It’s not fair what they do to my people.” He was holding his stomach without seeming to realize it as he talked, the way he did when he got upset. “It makes me . . . very . . . unhappy.”

  So he wanted me to help him fill out an application for resettlement.

  Eh Soe did, too, and the next day, he brought me his paperwork for the Commonwealth of Australia. He was not waffling on the issue, and made no attempt to hide from anyone that he was fully ready to get the fuck out of Dodge. Together we debated how he should handle the FIRST NAME and LAST NAME lines, since Karen don’t have the latter. He marked down his birthday and his supposed address in camp and that no, he didn’t have any relatives in Australia.

  “What about your girlfriend?” I asked. “Is she applying too?”

  “I think she will apply. Maybe we will get married so we can go together. I don’t know what to do about this problem.”

  “Am I ever going to meet this girl? How often do you see her?”

  “Once a week.”

  I smiled and deepened my voice. “You guys make out?”

  Eh Soe blushed and smiled and looked at the floor. I’d taught them this phrase. He knew what I meant. “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “At her house. Or in the garden, you know the garden?”

  I did. The garden was better known to Abby and me as the park, between our house and downtown. It had a temple in it, the steps of which were lined with dozens of shin-high rooster statues. We called it the rooster park. “Really? There?”

  “Sure. A lot of Thai people go there to make out.”

  This, I did not know.

  Eh Soe studied his paper for a minute before handing it over. “I don’t understand this one,” he said. He pointed to the section in question.

  “It says that people in Australia enjoy some of the best health standards in the world, and they want to know if you have ever had any serious illnesses or have any now.”

  “No,” Eh Soe said. He did have wicked splashes of scars on his arms. They’d been caused by some sort of incredibly painful skin disease, but he didn’t know what it was, and that had been a long time ago anyway. “I am okay. I am just a little bit fat.”62

  When we finished, he picked up the papers and straightened them out, holding loosely to the stacked edges and tapping the bottoms against the reading bench. “I will be in Australia or US maybe 2010,” he said easily. It was 2006.

  I shook my head. “I wish I had a tenth of your guys’ patience.”

  Eh Soe stood up to leave. “What are you doing now?” he asked.

  “I think I need to lie down. I don’t feel totally great.” I’d earlier been talking to a guy who was glum because he’d heard that the village his parents lived in had had to flee from attack, and he wasn’t sure if they were okay, although the good news was that he didn’t think the village was burned down. It made me feel tired. Over at Office Two, before class, Wah Doh had told me that he was sad because he missed his family and couldn’t figure out how to enact his plan of becoming famous so that he could tell the world about his people so that he could save them. That had made me feel tired also. That, and the fact that Htoo Moo and That Khaing had got wasted the night before and found it hilarious to run into my room, where I was trying to sleep, and turn the lights on, which would make me yell and eventually get up and turn them off myself, which would then be followed by them popping in and turning them on again and laughing hysterically.

  “You shouldn’t think too much,” Eh Soe told me as he walked out of the room. “It will make you unhappy.”

  XV.

  ON THE Friday morning after Htan Dah left, as a thick rain poured fast onto Mae Sot in hard, fat drops, Abby and I followed Htoo Moo out of the house and into the cold and gray street. She and I were wrapped in plastic raincoats and high-top Gore-Tex and leather hiking boots. He stepped gingerly through deep puddles in flip-flops, denim capri pants, which, for some reason, he did not pull off so well as Htan Dah did, and a jean shirt with an embroidered breast pocket that I was almost positive was made for a woman. He held an umbrella as he rounded the side-street corners, stopping when we arrived at an intersection with the main road that led into town. We stood quietly, waiting, until a songthaew pulled up. Htoo Moo talked to the driver through the window in Thai, gesturing,
then gestured at Abby and me to climb into the back of the truck, which had benches lining the opposite lengths, under the metal arch that covered it.

  The road to Mae La, thirty-five miles north and a bit west, is winding and potholed. Abby and I sat on the wet, left bench, staying at the back of the empty truck rather than taking fuller shelter near its front; the more air that rushed over my face, the better my chances of not throwing up. I kept my eyes fixed on one corner of one leaky plastic sheet that had been drawn down over the usually open sides of the vehicle while we drove, my head lolling reluctantly with the motion as we stopped, picked up passengers, let them off, all carrying their cargo in the omnipresent woven plastic bags with multicolored stripes, the unofficial suitcase of the Third World. However damp the wind and cool the rain that whipped through the spaces in the plastic paneling and slapped our cheeks and foreheads, my insides felt too warm and dull. I swallowed hard in my increasingly tight throat when the driver hit the brakes, my insides lurching into the inside of my skin, my stomach up into my lungs, my head throbbing, bobbing with the lilt of the twisting hills. When, after an hour, we finally stepped off the truck next to Htan Dah, waiting with his hands in the pockets of a black track jacket, I made him stand still with me on the side of the road for a minute to keep from collapsing to my knees in a pool of vomit.

  From a distance, Mae La is a little bit gorgeous. The earth of the settlement slopes high up from the road, the neat thatched roofs of dwellings poking out of a vibrantly green forest, the border mountains a few miles to the west. You had to get right inside it to realize that there were fifty thousand people packed into those one and a half square miles. Though you probably couldn’t get right in it; Htan Dah had called me at Office One the night before to say that he’d confirmed a camp leader’s approval of our visit, who had in turn told the Thai soldiers guarding the camp to be on the lookout for two white girls who were coming to conduct business and to let them go about it.

  Abby and I followed our friend and host, learning within seconds that the terrain was as difficult as it was lush. Narrow, uneven paths ran around huts crammed helter-skelter on the hill. The rain had let up for the moment, but for the duration of the monsoon season, the steep trails are more like swamps, slick with rivers of mud and washing water and rainwater and pig and chicken shit streaming down toward the concrete road that skirts the settlement. The shelters were on stilts, little ladders connecting their doorless entryways to the oozing ground. Htan Dah was wearing mesh shorts, like a runner. He stepped careful and steady, his flip-flops sinking past their beds in muck before he lifted a bare calf and planted a foot farther up the slope. He gestured around him at things we could or couldn’t see from here—“There is school”; “Over there so-and-so used to live”—but we were concentrating too hard on not slipping to pay much attention. Though he kept his hands in his pockets, Abby and I grabbed on to trees, people’s houses, to keep our balance. Stuck flip-flops had been abandoned everywhere; Abby and I counted them until we lost track. We averted our eyes when we passed someone bathing clumsily, her clothes half off, at one of the communal pumps set among the huts, and we moved out of the way of others carrying water buckets back to their kitchens to cook or shower. Htan Dah turned around occasionally, checking on our progress, stopping so we had a chance to catch up. The treads of our boots had been overwhelmed by caked mud, rendered useless in seconds. I looked up at him while he waited for us a short ways up the hill without a trace of a smile on his face.

  “This sucks,” he said.

  “Yeah!” Abby, in front of me, panted. “You know how much it sucks, Htan Dah? A lot!” She stepped down in a place her balance didn’t like, and her leg skidded out from under her. Already in a wide stance, I put my hands out, helping to steady her by her ass.

  “We can go to the office, or we can visit there,” Htan Dah said. He pointed up the hill at a nondescript building, like every building, another bamboo-and-thatch number.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “A clinic. For TB.”

  They were never going to let us back through United States Customs. “That’s okay,” I said. I was still carsick, and exhausted. I looked at Abby. “I think we’ve had enough of a tour.”

  “Seriously,” she said.

  The Mae La BA office was also small and bamboo and stilted. The ladder to the front doorway led into the cooking area, where a charcoal fire glowed in a bucket on a concrete slab on the floor. The doorway at the back of the kitchen led to another room, a shallow one, with just enough space for a dining table with some benches, and at the back of that room was another doorway, to the rest of the house—an open, empty living room. It was compact and immaculately tidy. It was cold, having no windproofing or windows or doors. The split bamboo slatting the floor gave a little to my footstep. I wondered, walking across it with my feet unencumbered of my defiled socks and boots, glimpsing flickers of chickens wandering below through the spaces in the wood, whether my coworkers missed this spring under their steps when they walked the Mae Sot house’s tile.

  Htan Dah cooked for us, as usual, though he did it on his haunches, on the floor, over coals rather than standing at our gas range. Abby and I hovered in the doorway, chatting with him as he worked with the help of a couple of guys, the little kitchen filled to capacity with squatting men. They were making pork, but also stir-fried greens and omelets with onions, which Htan Dah often prepared for us in Mae Sot. Ta Eh Thaw, the only Karen girl in Office One, had been making similar meatless fare in Htan Dah’s absence, and we’d eventually realized that the detailed and extensive instructions he’d left her while he was gone included feeding us.

  After breakfast, we all retired to the cool semidarkness of the main room, cloud-filtered daylight seeping in through the hole for the door in the back wall. Htan Dah changed into a longyi of green, white, and black plaid. We sat cross-legged with the small group of calmly eager new staff members. They looked like teenagers. Some of them were.

  We went around in a circle. Abby and I introduced ourselves, and then the guys tried their best English to tell us their names and where they were from. Htan Dah drew a little map of Burma on a dry-erase board propped up on the floor, against the wall. He indicated with his marker where in the country the boys’ homes had been. Most of them were from the lowlands, further inland than the eastern hills of Karen State.

  Htan Dah had some training to do yet, so Abby and I sat quietly for a while as he sat on the floor and spoke, dry-erase marker in hand. I studied a large poster of cartoon depictions of the things you couldn’t do to a child per the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, then went to the other room to lie on the floor. Abby pulled out a book.

  When Htan Dah was done, the three of us retired onto the little back porch, he sitting on one side, leaning against the house, I sitting on the other, she leaning against one of the poles that supported the awning protecting us from the rain falling all around.

  “Are you done with your training?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “So you can come home with us?”

  “Yes(!).”

  “What were you guys talking about in there?”

  “I was telling them why they have to fight. In training, we do history, Burmese history, Karen history, because many people don’t know about the war.” Htan Dah had told me about this before. When he traveled to camp to give lectures and screen videos, there were always audience members, young ones, who didn’t realize there was a war on; they were so used to living in camp that some didn’t even know they were refugees.

  “Aren’t these guys Karen?”

  “Yes(!). But even Karen people, many Karen people do not understand what is the political situation in their country because they have no way to get information. You know, these guys are from the city. They do not even speak Karen.”

  “Really?” Abby and I asked.

  “Yes! The government does not allow them to teach Karen in the school, so they speak only Burmese.�
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  “So how do you talk to them?”

  “In Burmese.” He thought about this for a second and frowned. “I do not like to write on the board in Burmese. I fear that I will . . . spelling . . . incorrectly.”

  We listened to the rain. The sound came in layers, the pitch lower and denser, a wall of precipitation falling in the distance, the drops that slapped the leaves of the nearby flora higher and more distinctive. The chickens clucked lightly below us. I realized what had been giving the camp an eerie sense of emptiness.

  “It’s so quiet here,” I said. The silence was thoroughly penetrating. The most-reported number of people living in a Karen refugee camp household is six. Most Karen refugee camps in Thailand don’t meet the UNHCR’s minimum space standards. Fifty thousand refugees packed in here, and not a fucking sound.

  Htan Dah shrugged. “Yes,” he said. “Nothing to do.” He was looking out past the porch. Beyond it, bright trees on the close succession of hills shocked the gray of the sky. He was right that there was nothing to do in Mae La. But keeping up Mae La, which was more populous than some small countries, took a lot of doing. It had twenty-four primary and secondary schools. Aide Medicale Internationale had 250 workers there, and in addition to the aforementioned vast feeding and education infrastructure, nine international NGOs handled health and sanitation in the camps. Everything from eye care to prosthesis supply was provided on a budget of $6 million a year, to take 2007’s expenditures. Running the whole camp show required no fewer than twenty NGOs and added up to an annual price tag of $66 million, with the United States providing the biggest piece of the funding pie, 27 percent. But no amount of money was going to give the inhabitants something to do in them.

  “I prefer camp,” Htan Dah said quietly, apparently to no one. I looked at him, but he still looked off from the porch, into the distance.