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.

Burma's Thai Babies

The families in Loi Kaw Wan know there are advantages in their children having Thai citizenship. Citizenship isn't something countries just hand out, and in Thailand even the newborns have to work for it.

When we arrived in Loi Kaw Wan early Sunday morning, Homm Noon was waiting to greet us. She was at the end of her pregnancy, her face had become fat and freckled. The greeting was brief, because she was holding out just long enough to see us and then with her mom climbed into the tinny pick-up truck that dropped us off at the border post, and was driven away to the nearest Thai hospital to give birth.

Since she and her mother are the only trained midwives in the village, it made sense that she wouldn't want to deliver her first child alone in Loi Kaw Wan. The other benefits were realized later on. If Homm Noon's children are born in Thailand, they're Thais. In an area where you're either a Thai or an illegal refugee, the choice seems obvious.

It isn't a simple matter of being born in Thailand though – the babies need a Thai parent. There are men in Thailand, usually old men, who each take money to claim he is the father of a woman's baby. Homm Noon and her husband found such a man to do this for them, as did every other family in Loi Kaw Wan who's children are Thai citizens.

It must be a terrible choice for these families, for the father to give up any official connection he has to his own children, replacing his name with some grasping stranger's. Surely it isn't a secret either. The doctors who register the births can't believe for very long that the old men who come in with young Burmese women are really the fathers of all those children. The Thai government must be aware of the trick as well, still it continues. After the birth the women return home with a newborn, probably hoping never to meet the official father of their child again.

At the end of our time in Loi Kaw Wan we returned to Thailand and paid a visit to Homm Noon. She had delivered a baby boy and was resting in a safe house in Thailand until the baby could get some vaccinations. The safe house is used for Burmese patients sent to the Thai hospital. It's a small warehouse among a line of other warehouses and loading docks.

Homm Noon, her husbadn and the baby had blankets laid out on the floor of the empty storage unit, with some clothes hung up in the corner. She introduced her healthy little baby. We asked his name, and she gave one but said it's only his Thai name, for the birth certificate. He doesn't have a real name yet.

Mae Tao Clinic's HIV Program

For the past seven years the Mae Tao Clinic has run a voluntary HIV counselling and testing program. Every month the clinic hosts a get-together for the program members, usually to the Tai Watanaram monastery. Today, about forty patients came, some with their families. They took a yoga class at the foot of the monastery's three-story reclining Buddha while their children ran around.

Naturally the program members are all HIV positive, and many have additional problems like tuberculosis, liver disease and gynaecological problems, but they all look young and healthy. They're in their twenties, many with children. Of course those who are very sick probably don't come to the group outings, nonetheless all the vibrant looking people here are infected.

Saw Than Iwin is the program manager. He's an angular young man from Burma, living here and working for the Mae Tao Clinic illegally. He says that when the program started between 60 and 80 people volunteered to be tested for HIV every month. Over the past few years it's levelled off at 100 at month. Since the Mae Tao Clinic caters to the Burmese border community, it's Burmese who are in this AIDS group. About half of them live in Burma and cross over for treatment, and outings like today's.


“A very small percent knows about HIV and how it's transmitted,” says Iwin of the patients coming from Burma. There is some HIV-AIDS education within Burma, but it is only delivered by NGOs like UNICEF, mainly on TV. “Still not enough,” Iwin says.

Iwin and the program's staff are busy with counselling, explaining treatment and organizing program events. The members are like people anywhere else in the world. They complain if outings aren't interesting, make excuses about not using condoms. As each patient is different (some have other illnesses, some are less diligent about taking the anti-retroviral drugs supplied by the city hospital, some can afford a better diet and more relaxed lifestyle than others) no one can predict how long any of them will live.

The commonest way to become infected in the Mae Sot-Myawaddy area is through sexual transmission, but some others are victims of poisonous blood transfusions. That's how one 14-year-old girl in the group became infected several years ago. Iwin says her family brought her in for testing after she became mysteriously ill following her transfusion. The tests came back negative, but she continued to get inexplicably sick. When the family brought her back for another HIV test they learned she was indeed infected. Still, Iwin says the patients are all counselled not to worry about the future.

Mae Sot

The streets of Mae Sot are always hot. I can't tell if it's humid or not. The heat makes me sweat so fast that I'm always sticky even if the air's not.

Unlike in the north, cultural differences, ethnic differences are pronounced here. There are different ethnic groups in Shan, but the differences are hard for an outsider to notice unless they're in traditional dress. Mae Sot is a town of migrants, refugees, aid workers, tourists excited about a day trip into Burma on the other side of the bridge. 

The Burmese don't try to hide. Some are pale, round faced women, their cheeks painted yellow with home made sunscreen. The men wear their longgyi – the Burmese name for sarong. Muslim Burmese are here too. They look like Malay, East Indian, something I can't place. They wear embroidered fezzes and the women wear the kind of hijab that makes a circle of their face.