You Can't Get There From Here

Mwe Leng, a slender 19 year old with intense sharp eyes, knows that she can't arrive at her dream of becoming a nurse from her home country, Myanmar, also known as Burma. She's a survivor of the long war the Burmese government has been waging on her people, the Shan, in its massive land grab that has been going on for the past fifty years. She's heard all the stories about how democracy is now coming to Burma but to her, it's window dressing. The government is still planting land mines in Shan fields, burning their villages, and killing all who resist.  She can't go home yet. She can only go forward.

I met Mwe Leng this past December through a foundation in Chiang Mai called We Women that helps promising young women from Burma get university educations in Thailand and elsewhere. "I want to become a nurse," she said so softly I could barely hear her. "My grandma died because there was no hospital or health care in the village in Burma where she lived." Mwe Leng's grandmother was in her fifties when she died of something people don't generally die from in the West.

What Mwe Leng didn't say, because she didn't have to since it was written all over her face, was "Please help me." So, I did. Tutored her in English, helped her get her American equivalency high school diploma known as the G.E.D., drilled her so she could pass the IELTS English proficiency exam, and assisted her in gaining admission to Chiang Mai University's International College School of Nursing. She's supposed to start in the fall.

Mai bpen rai as the Thais say.  No problem. Except for one thing. Her mom fled Burma to live in a refugee camp on the Thai Burmese border where people aren't allowed to work so she has no money. Her dad's whereabouts are unknown. Mwe Leng's in Thailand on an education visa and is prohibited from working. She has no money to pay for this chance at a new life.

Her other options are to go back to Burma where there are few jobs and where she'll be persecuted as an ethnic minority because she is a Shan or to work as an illegal immigrant in Thailand, which all too often for young women means prostitution.

This is an often repeated story all over the world. Regimes persecute their own people, steal their land, squash resistance, and sell their countries to the highest bidders. They have become more sophisticated about their tactics recently and make sure that they placate the West by talking a lot about democracy and reforms. But rest assured, it's still all about the money and business as usual.

You've heard these stories before, right? Sad, but what can you do? You can't save the world.

An acquaintance of mine recently rolled his eyes at me when I told him Mwe Leng's tale. "Connie", he said.
"If it's somehow depressing, I know you're gonna be involved in it. Survivors of war, sex slaves, abandoned dogs, refugees, people who live on garbage dumps--you always have to be rescuing some creature or promoting a cause."

Yeah, yeah. Probably guilty on all counts. Yet, here I live in a part of the world where I can see clearly how small amounts of money directly put to beneficial use on a person's behalf --sans middlemen in the form of charities and ngos who skim administrative costs off donations-- can change the world.

But you can change the world for Mwe Leng. And change the world for you. Because when you help Mwe Leng achieve her goal of becoming a nurse, the world becomes a better place for everyone. The thugs and bullies running her country's government do not win. She does. And so do you.

Here's the pitch:  Go direct. Five bucks. Ten bucks. Whatever you can spare. Please make a direct donation for Mwe Leng's education. www.gofundme.com/burmawarchiangmainurse  No charities or ngos involved.

You have my promise that I won't make these appeals too often.

I'm hoping I'll win the lottery.

Until then, please help this young woman become a nurse and have a chance at a better life.

Elephants Heal

Linda is down by the river laughing and bathing elephants. We're in northern Thailand at an elephant conservation park an hour outside of Chiang Mai. The valley here looks like it's right out of southern Wisconsin (except for the elephants.) It's hilly country covered with green forest. There's also a river that is brown and swift because it's the rainy season.

I'm sitting on a covered skywalk enjoying watching Linda enjoy herself. Linda and I are both widows. She is in her second year of grief and I am in my sixth. We are both our usual edgy selves. But all told, we seem OK. Maybe we are--especially here in this sanctuary.

It's cloudy. The mist has lingered all day-rising and then falling around the tops of the hills. There have been brief periods of rain. I've been here before in a different season when the sun beat down relentlessly and penetrated me like an x-ray. The clouds and rain feel better.

Our guide told us that there are now 34 rescued elephants and two babies who were born here. One is about a month old. There are also 450 dogs rescued in Bangkok from the gruesome dog meat trade. Plus a hundred water buffalo. There are lots of cats who have a their own place to live separate from elephants, dogs, and water buffalo. Cats come and go as they please and and so their numbers are hard to come by. I don't really need to know how many cats there are. It's just pleasant to see them.

A group of very sour smelling tourists have just surrounded me. They are speaking a European sounding language I don't recognize. Some of them are eyeing me. Or rather, hungrily viewing the comfortable wicker chair on which I'm sitting. Such acquisitive eyes!

Linda and I will be spending the night here in a hut. After most of the visitors leave when it grows dark, maybe we will hear the elephants snoring. The elephant sounds I have heard so far include trumpet, growl, roar, gurgle, and squeak. I'm a sound junky and want to hear more. And like elephants, I have poor eyesight, but keen hearing and a good sense of smell. Plus, I never forget. At least, I never forget when it comes to voices. Some people remember faces. Not me. Faces come and go. But voices. Those stick. And the voices of elephants are especially memorable.

I'm listening to those voices as well as the sound of splashing, gurgling, and laughing as people are filling buckets in the river and throwing the water on the elephants to bathe them and each other.

The elephants come here in various states of abuse but a tiny woman with a large heart named Lek Chailert rescued them and started a foundation/park to save elephants in Thailand and nearby Myanmar. In addition to saving elephants, this park supports the local economy by providing a consumer for locally grown produce (elephants are vegetarians and eat a lot every day) and giving jobs to unemployed mahouts (elephant handlers) who also mostly happen to be refugees from Myanmar.

Linda and friend

All the elephants have stories. Linda and I have been able to walk around and meet and touch and communicate with the animals who are highly social and tend to live in families or with female companions. All the elephant females (our guide calls them ladies) have friends and the babies are protected by mommies and nannies. If there is any potential threat to a baby, there is much trumpeting and jostling as the females form a protective circle around the little one.

Mommy, nanny, baby

The three rescued males are kept chained because they are so aggressive they hurt the females. But the female led families visit the males and keep them company so they don't get too lonely.

One lady we met on one of our walks was Mae Tee who was born between 1945-50. Her name is the Myanmar Karen ethnic group's name for river. She was forced into logging in Myanmar and was made to take amphetamines so she would not stop working. This overwork has left her with stiff wrist joints and deteriorated ankle joints. As a result, Mae Tee is unable to lay down so she only sleeps a couple of hours every day while standing and putting her head in a wooden headrest the mahouts have constructed. She goes to the onsite elephant clinic twice a day to get treatment for her injuries. Mae Tee's best friend and companion was an elephant named Mae Kham Geao who died a year ago and is buried on the facility. Mae Tee visits the grave each day and doesn't tend to roam too far away from it. I now foster Mae Tee in memory of my mom who died a few years ago.

Mae Tee

Another lady we met was Mae Jokia who was blinded in both of her eyes by her logging mahout. Born around 1960, she suffered a miscarriage while pulling a log uphill. She wasn't allowed to stop working to see if her calf was dead or alive so she sat down and refused to get up. And that was when her handler blinded her by hurling rocks into her eyes.

Mae Jokia

There are many more stories about the elephants who are now in this place where they are loved and cared for. And being healed. Linda and I fit right in with the rescued creatures here for in fact, we are being healed as well.

Share and support goodness. Learn more. Donate. Spread the news. Foster an elephant. Visit.
www.elephantnaturefoundation.org

Number of elephants left in the world

Piggy Bank

Lots of people spend spring break on a beach in Thailand. Not me. Last spring break, I went to a Thai garbage dump. It’s not that garbage dumps are my thing. Quite the contrary. But a group of people in Chiang Mai, where I live, invited me to join them on a service trip to a medical clinic for Burmese refugees run by a remarkable woman named Dr. Cynthia, sometimes called the Mother Teresa of Thailand. I was eager to see her clinic and to meet her.

The clinic is located in the city of Mae Sot on the Thai/Burmese border. The trip to the garbage dump was a last minute add-on. One of the women in our group said she had heard there was a community of Burmese refugees, including many children, working and living in the Mae Sot municipal dump. She had been told the community was very poor and in need of everything.

We bought a bunch of children’s’ clothes and went to the dump. And that was where I met a little girl named Suu. Suu and her mom, along with 500,000 other Burmese, have fled their country to escape the war that has been waging there for sixty years. Suu and her mom had learned that there was work and a safe (compared to Burma) place to live in Mae Sot. The place was the Mae Sot municipal garbage dump. They decided it was better to live with trash than to be treated like trash in their native country. So they moved to the dump, constructed a shack to shelter from the rain, and now sift through the trash to make money from recycling bits of plastic.

Hundreds of other Burmese refugees also live at the dump even though there are no toilets, food is scarce, and the water is polluted. Often people get sick. The recycler does not pay much so everyone, including Suu and the other children, work long into the night. Despite working hard, people go hungry. Suu and her mom get by as best they can.

Suu and her mom invited me into their “house” and offered me-- by the way they handled it-- a precious cup of soda pop. We couldn’t speak the same language but we communicated anyway. I was touched by their generosity.

Many of the people who flee Burma have little but the clothes on their backs. They labor as illegal immigrants in Thailand and elsewhere and live as unwelcome guests wherever they can. They do the backbreaking labor no one else wants to do. The situation in Burma is changing but it is still not safe for many refugees, like Suu, to return home due to continued military action against them there.

Many people visit the dump when they come to Mae Sot. They take a lot of pictures as though they are in a zoo. “How can people live like this?” they ask with disgust. “Why don’t they go back to their own country?” Suu and her mom and the others at the dump are friendly to all the visitors even though they do not ask permission to take photos or understand why the refugees live at a dump. 

What I learned from Suu and her mom is that no one wants to live in a garbage dump, but it is safer and offers more opportunity to work than Burma. At the dump, Suu and her mom and the others can live with less fear. At the dump, they have community.

But what they do not have is clean water, sanitation, or much food.

The stench and flies overwhelmed the group of visitors I was with. In addition to the squalor, the fact that the people living at the dump were refugees made the situation seem too complicated to do anything long term to help. The group also knew that many well-meaning people in the past had seen this poverty and tried to assist but had failed.

Unfortunately, the well intentioned projects the people brought were not discussed with those who lived at the dump. Not being of or rooted in the community, the projects did not gain ground and withered.

After meeting Suu, her mom, and the others, it was impossible for me to walk away without trying to do something that would be effective and not repeat past mistakes. Through a process of trial and error and a lot of research, I met an expat here in Chiang Mai who had international development experience and an approach that made sense to me. It’s an approach that is deceptively simple: in order to do effective development in a community, it’s important to communicate with the people who live there. It’s vital to find out what kind of help the community thinks will be effective and then to partner with it to bring about change.

Raising pigs at the dump for extra income to help alleviate hunger is the community’s idea and goal. Pigletsforprogress.org is a grassroots group of progress minded people including Christina, the community leaders at the dump, and others like me who want to help the community reach its goal.

I think of pigletsforprogress.org  as a piggybank for Suu.