Shan State Army

 They're peasants and teachers, spread too thin over too much jungle to scare anyone. Every man in the village owns a machete, but they're still just school teachers and skinny farmers in uniform. I would give a lot if I thought it would get me embedded with this army. Kang Hseng says growing up in Taunggyi he'd never heard of the SSA, not until it was time for him to pick a career and his uncle told him about coming here to be a medic, under guard of the SSA. They have few weapons. A pair of AKs seem to be floating around town for special occasions, that and gardening machetes is about it for Loi Kaw Wan. A radio tower, a small cinder block house for the Commander, one flat bed truck, that's all I've seen. 
Do they have international support? Why should they? They make money only from taxing the people they mingle with, and corruption, like opium traffic, maybe some lumber like all the others. Corporal Hsuo said he didn't know how many SSA soldiers exist. I guessed 25,000 for him and he agreed that was possible, and that 50,000 isn't possible. The vice principal says it's hard to get new soldiers, and I think it was hard to get them from the start. The intention is good, but with no pay, no food, no clothes, no strength, how many can they entice to join? That's why there's only 25,000 ill-armed farmers spread from Chiang Mai to Yunnan. Manyof the women here are married to a soldier, meaning most of the men here are soldiers, even the ones who look too old and hard-lived to be.

All day long they trickle by. One, ambling. Two if by motor bike. Sometimes wave, sometimes salute, and smile when they realize who they saluted. The SSA guard the Thai-Burma border before Loi Kaw Wan, posted in a sunny grass hut, with a lazy dog. I think they let anybody in, including the Thai guards. How can those two teenagers stop the Thai guards from walking down the road to take pictures of the whites in Loi Kaw Wan who aren't supposed to be here?

Bay Da

We arrived in Loi Kaw Wan in the afternoon. Once we came through town to the medic compound, we stood and looked around at things. Suddenly a tall young man running at full tilt leapt onto Dr. Semkuley and hugged him with his arms and legs. That's the most emotional reunion I've ever seen between two men. The man was Bay Da, whom everyone knows has the biggest smile since Eddie Murphy, and much nicer than Murphy's. Especially since the corners of Bay Da's mouth curve up, even when he stops smiling, which he eventually did. He smiled so much those first few days anyone would think he was the happiest man in the borderlands. Of course, his smile fell into disrepair over the next two weeks. It began with slow fractures, changing from joy at having Myron back, to worry, nervous smiling. Beaten dog smiling. Shorter smiles, frowning in between, right in front of us. It took two weeks for Bay Da to stop being formally gracious, open up, and say enough for me. Two weeks to say something to me that could make me cry. When the woman watching her mother die of AIDS in the clinic down the road only made me angry. Bay Da climbed down from the frame he and the others spent all day building to hold these mega big solar panels, so the clinic will finally have night light. We sat on the grass together and he took off his Chinese army boots, inside which his feet had stewed all day without socks. Man what a stink! Like grade C ham left under the deck for a week. I moved to sit up wind and we joked about the smell. He said I should write about how people in Loi Kaw Wan are too poor for soap so donors would send some for his feet. Then we headed off to bring the tools someplace for safe keeping.


“Sometimes when we walked in the forest for four or five...or seven days, very difficult to get clean. No soap and got very dirty.” “You mean you were in the forest for that long?” “Yes” “What were you doing in the forest for seven days?” “Hiding, from Burmese soldiers.” “Oh. You were one of those people.” “Yes.” “What would happen if they caught you?” “They want to make us porters. Porters carry their weapons and food, and big bombs. A big bomb... They burned my father.” My skin crawled. “They took cigarettes, pressed on his face. You know when cigarettes burn, and the end is red? They burned on his face, here,” he traced his finger along his cheeks, “here.” “They tortured.” “Yes, tortured. I was seven...or six. I never forget that in all my life.” Earlier we had also joked about how he would like to be president. The things he would do, notably enact litter laws. Bay Da is an environmentalist, dislikes litter, and takes the decimation of the local teak forests by the SPDC personally. As he should, the SPDC are raping his people in order to rape his land. Anyway, his president talk ends with a smile and he says “in my next life.” “I want to have some coffee.” “I want my freedom.” “And what will you do with your freedom?” “I will travel, and present about Burma's politics and the environment.”


I didn't expect him to have an answer so ready. After we put the tools away, and after he told me about his father's torture and I tried to keep my head tilted up so tears wouldn't fall out of my eyes and perhaps he was doing the same thing, he told me more. “I will tell you my real dream. This is real, what I wish. I want to go to a small village and teach English. Have maybe 50? students. I teach English and improve my English. At my home town we have waterfall,” he showed with his hands, “a beautiful waterfall. And land is flat and soil is very...good.” “It's no good here?” “No. Very hilly, and difficult to bring water.” The Shan aren't a mountain people. They are traditional farmers who are used to rich plains where they can grow just about anything. This place is Akha land. The Akha like the rugged land, but they had to move aside here to make room for the Shan refugees. 


“I want to have a house, and around the house, trees, because I like the environment. I would have trees. That is my real dream.” “Do you want this in Shan, or Thailand?” “Shan. If I can, I don't like in Thailand.” 


The whole time, his nervous smile would flicker by. It's surprising how a face constructed to fall so naturally into a wide grin can drop into such exhausted despair. He'd mentioned even on the first day that he doesn't think about worrying things because it would just make him depressed. But I knew when he said that, even though I didn't know him, that he must think about those things all the time.

Uncle Sam

“Don't take my picture. Don't say where I take you. Don't call me my name, call me 'Uncle Sam,' I have enough problems before with foreigners.” Uncle Sam began his life when he was born in Rangoon in 1951. That was before the junta. His mother was a midwife and his father was a health assistant for the government. Even though they were Shan, they had little to fear from the government because of their jobs, and because things weren't so bad then. 


When he finished high school and had to choose a career, Uncle Sam chose jade trading. Moving gem stones out of Burma was a popular business. His dad gave him some start-up funds, which Sam quickly ran through. The trade wasn't as easy as he thought, so rather than face his father with the bad news, Sam went to work construction in Bangkok for three years. His father wasn't an idiot. He entreated Sam repeatedly to come home and try something else.


“You don't have a head for business Sam. My friend will set you up with a job in the hospital mixing drugs.” Sam took the job. Although he wasn't impressed with the pay he found he liked being in Health. Eventually he became a health administrator for the government as his father had been. As such he was assigned to government convoys sent to the Shan countryside, forcing development projects along the way. Much of what employees like himself told the Shan about the projects and the benefits was just propaganda. They never got much. Shan nationalism was growing then. The people weren't happy, not with the government, not with the union, not with the starvation. Kun Se's rebel Maung Tai army was getting stronger, really at its peak back then. They had real weaponry, real training, tens of thousands of volunteers. And of course, such a charismatic leader. Uncle Sam began to help them secretly. As a government employee, the son of a government employee, from Rangoon, he was above suspicion. He wasn't counted among the Shan, even while he stole medicine from the government and gave it away. 


Things were going fine and he wasn't particularly worried about being found out, until Kun Se surrendered to the Burmese in 1996 and went into house arrest in Rangoon. The Maung Tai army broke into pieces, and in the crumbling Uncle Sam was ratted out. “Betrayed me!” he says. He fled to Thailand. 


When he arrived there he found a reunion of rebels. A little disoriented, he served briefly in what was left of the rebel army. By 1997 he knew soldiering wasn't for him any more than gem trading. He learned of the medic training centre in Thailand, further south along the border. The Shan sent him there, where he trained for two years to become something of a rough and ready doctor. He was good at that. And ambitious with it. Before too long he brought his skills to camps of displaced Shan scattered along the northern Thai-Burma border, where the Shan were pushed by a furious Burmese army. Those refugees are still there. Uncle Sam still sends them medicine. 


Today he lives permanently in Thailand, fat and loquacious. Canadians bought him a migrant worker ID, and as long as he has that he can stay. He is happy in his young career. He takes Shan teenagers and makes field medics of them. He butts heads with rebel commanders who stew along the border in new villages of displaced ethnic minorities. Butts heads with well-meaning foreign doctors who come to help him train. Can't ever go back. He betrayed the Burmese government, and then was betrayed himself, so he cannot go back and keep his life.