The diners waiting at the table watching me laughed at this. “No,” Htan Dah said, his son in his lap, his eyes on fire. “We don’t fuck. We eat.”
The guy who was bored in prison said the potatoes smelled burned. One of my students from Office Two said the curry tasted like Thai food, which it was. I asked him if he liked Thai food. “Some. Not all,” he said, then got up and walked away from the table, leaving his mostly full plate behind. Most of the other guys said the curry was too sweet (by which I believed them to mean that it didn’t contain fish paste), but Htan Dah and Abby and I ate ourselves sick. Htan Dah even asked me if I would make it again sometime, and I kept asking him if he wanted me to make it exactly the same, because I wanted him to keep telling me he really liked it, and he kept saying “Yes,” and I was happy, “because,” as I wrote in my notes, “I am Queen Dork.”
“What do you normally eat here?” Abby asked me. I told her that the guys ate only twice a day but that wasn’t enough for me, so I’d
been supplementing my Karen rations with dairy from 7-Eleven. After dinner, we went to pick up yogurt, and she tried to get a better lay of the land. Were you supposed to say Burma or Myanmar? (Burma.
21
) How was I managing to sleep on the floor? (I wasn’t. The air mattress I’d brought was the best fifteen bucks I ever spent.) So, what was going on in Burma? (That was kind of a long and intense story. I’d email her the synopsis I’d emailed my family and friends.) Okay, she’d look it up on Wikipedia. What was I doing here? (Who could say? Truly, I’d just come across a program for teaching in refugee camps on the Thai-Burma border a couple of years ago when I was dicking around on the Internet and hadn’t shaken the urge to get involved—and get informed about something that sounded like a pretty big deal but, for some reason, nobody seemed to have heard of. So here I was.)
I bought ten yogurts, and stuck them in the refrigerator when we got back to the house. Besides ants and an old melted popsicle, they were the only items in there; my roommates, who weren’t used to having refrigerators or electricity, didn’t keep leftovers around. There certainly wasn’t Tupperware in the house. But then, in just a few days, it was just ants and melted popsicle again. The yogurts had been eaten.
Abby told me that I should write my name on my food. There was no ownership in the house; if someone bought a bike, other people rode it. If someone bought food, people ate it. Marking my name on my goods seemed way too douchey. Bitching about my loss to a roomful of broke exiles, though, I was totally okay with.
A few hours after hearing me do so, Htan Dah walked me over to
the refrigerator. He opened it and, with a big smile, showed me what he’d bought: yogurt. Corn yogurt, with kernels of corn and also a few fat red beans in it. It was pretty good, if a little unsettling, though I mocked it to Abby at dinner that night when Htan Dah was talking to someone else in Karen, using English I thought was too fast for him to understand.
“You don’t like corn yogurt?” he asked, looking right at me when I looked up.
I swore that I did, that corn yogurt was my favorite yogurt, and had to start buying it to prove it, and to unburden my wretched conscience.
With two divas now dining at the house, Htan Dah started straying from his basically pork-and-green-bean-only market acquisitions and bringing home crazy ingredients: Cauliflower. Tofu (which he chose poorly, as the sopping bag of it smelled like so much ass that, however it broke our hearts, we had to throw it away). Tomatoes. Onion-filled omelets now made an appearance at every breakfast. Abby and I resolved to do some bridging of the cultural culinary gaps ourselves and make dessert as a lunchtime treat. At the end of the week, on Abby’s third day, we bought five apples, two pineapples, a cantaloupe, a watermelon, and five bars of shitty chocolate, the only kind of chocolate in Mae Sot (which still cost $4). It wasn’t like we could bake an apple pie in a wok, so fondue it was.
“We made lunch!” I said to Htan Dah, retrieving him from the computer room after we melted the chocolate over the range and set sliced-fruit-brimming bowls on the table.
“Who?” he asked. “You and the Jew?”
“Htan Dah.” I shook my head curtly and lowered my voice. “I already told you that you can’t call a person ‘the Jew.’”
“Why not?”
“We’ve talked about this!”
We had.
“She is not a Jew?”
“She is a Jew! But you can’t call her that.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know! It’s rude! It sounds racist or something! You just don’t do that in our culture.” He refrained from conceding that anything I was saying made sense. “Anyways, you know her name!”
Most of the guys had never had chocolate, which I’d anticipated based on Htan Dah’s reaction to the chocolate milk. But it went over way better than the pumpkin curry. “Very good,” Eh Soe said, stuffing a piece of watermelon dripping with juice and melted candy into his mouth. He nodded at the spread. “Once a week.”
Ta Mla exploded in, effulgent, positively glowing, from outside. He rattled off an excited story in rapid-fire Karen before translating very slowly for Abby and me. He’d run to the gas station, where he’d turned around and found himself face-to-face with a cop. “Come with me,” the officer said. Ta Mla panicked but followed him, since he didn’t have any choice. When they arrived at the cop’s truck, he asked Ta Mla to help him load some wood into it. After he did, the cop said “Thank you,” hopped in his vehicle, and drove away. Ta Mla had thought it was all over, right there, that he was getting arrested, again, on a bright Friday morning before lunchtime on the first rainless, sunshiny day in weeks. Close call. I’d never seen him happier. Still, he unconsciously clutched his gut while he talked. Abby and I winced; imagine the horror of a Thai cop coming up to you in a Thailand you weren’t supposed to be in and speaking to you in Thai that you barely understood. Ta Mla didn’t have the English to describe this feeling adequately, though he tried.
“The police,” he said, pausing lengthily to choose his words, “is ... suck.”
Abby’s eyebrows went up as she gave a somewhat confused laugh, then looked at me.
I shook my head. “I’ve been trying to teach them that it’s a verb.”
In class, we were plugging away at practical grammar. My afternoon beginner class seemed frustrated, at the scope of the work I was
doing in the amount of time I was attempting to do it, and at their inability to communicate with me on the level they wanted to. My being there speaking English in front of them every day just exacerbated their desire to master the language, and my trying to communicate with them made me frustrated that I didn’t speak Karen. But we were still making progress. Some of my morning sessions went swimmingly, continuing with workshops and writing exercises and covering verb tenses and number agreement that I often felt they comprehended, and the successes made them happy and upbeat and say “Thank you” afterward. In both classes, I got giant smiles whenever I said “Good!” like I meant it, which I did. My students were hard workers, attentive, incredibly eager, and their English skills, which they were getting more comfortable showing me, were at least as excellent as I imagine many Koreans’ must be. Htan Dah said something to me about present continuous tense, which, had I not looked it up practically the day before, I couldn’t have named to save my life. When, once, as I wrote a sentence on the dry-erase board, he said, “That’s passive voice,” I started laughing so hard that I had to put my marker down. “I love the shit that you know, baby,” I said, and if I could whistle, I would have.
Burma boasts one of the poorest education systems, monetarily—and dare I say
the
poorest, philosophically—in the world. A lot of its schooling amounts to an attempt at systematic brainwashing, and even that is underfunded, with education getting about 1 percent of GDP by even the sunnier estimates. The Burmese government reports that the nation’s adult literacy rate is more than 90 percent, which a lot of people think is a lie, and which seriously contradicts the government’s own estimate that less than 20 percent of its citizenry could read, reported in its 1986 application for Least Developed Country status in a bid to get special international support. The high figure seems further unlikely since only half of Burmese children are enrolled in secondary school.
That’s way more of the population than receives education in, say,
Afghanistan, but “education” in this case is something of a misnomer. Memoirist Pascal Khoo Thwe reported that when he enrolled in class in England after escaping Burma, he was weirded out by the exercise of expressing an opinion, for which he had no model or practice. Instruction in the schools is so inadequate that tens of thousands of students subscribed to magazines with names like
Educator
and
Goal
that contained grade-specific educational supplements—until 2008, when many of the publications were banned by the Ministry of Education via the Press Scrutiny and Registration Board. Parents who want their children to go to high school may have to pay in cash and labor, which many don’t have the means to provide. Teachers are so underpaid as to fall into the general population of desperate and starving, which makes them susceptible to Burma’s widespread culture of graft. To pay their bills, some wring bribes from their students by teaching only some of their lessons during the school day and the rest during expensive tutoring sessions after hours, or selling them overpriced goods they feel obligated to buy, or exam answers, or good grades on exams. One of my students, Wah Doh, a tiny twentysomething kid with energy entirely out of proportion to his size, started high school in a big city in Burma but moved to a refugee camp over the border when he couldn’t afford to pay his teacher for the next grade level.
And that’s in Burma proper. Karen villagers endure so many attacks and so much running and instability that they generally don’t even have enough food, much less school supplies or money to buy them. As we’ve established, the best place to get an education in Burma is in Thailand, where a force of Karen leaders and eager beavers and European and American nationals and local Thai workers and authorities and scruffy white bachelor’s-degree-holding volunteers and Christians and Jesuits and Japanese bust their asses to ensure the education of displaced Karen like Htan Dah—which is why he could articulate more grammatical rules than I could. Though it was all pretty slapdash at first, the NGOs have had a long time to get their incredibly complicated act together.
In 1996, the Committee for Coordination of Services to Displaced People in Thailand, the network umbrella of NGOs providing said services, conducted a survey to determine the educational needs of refugees from Burma on the Thai border. A year later, the Karen Education Project was launched. Today, school services are administered to the Karen refugee camps through a remarkably coordinated international NGO patchwork of immense scale and efficiency. The camps’ more than sixty schools and one thousand classrooms provide nursery, primary, secondary, and post-secondary instruction in which students are taught four languages (English, Karen, Burmese, Thai) and a standard range of subjects (math, science, health, social sciences, geography). There are courses outside of school, too: vocational skills from blacksmithing to baking to goat raising, crafts such as soapmaking, literacy programs, HIV awareness. Most schools offer two periods of art classes, including sewing and music and drawing, per week, which is more than my elementary school outside Cleveland had. World Education, based in Boston, offers money and materials and training for special ed and operates schools for deaf and blind students. More than half a dozen different organizations hold training for teachers in curriculum mapping, classroom management, general teaching skills, and more than a dozen other subjects. The Shanti Volunteer Association from Japan operates a library program. Handicap International works on mine-risk education and social inclusion, in addition to holding workshops on how to produce and use prosthetic devices.
Or as Ta Mla put it in his workshop essay, “Learning in Refugee Camp”:
In the camp, there are many different kinds of learning to learn. For example, agriculture, leadership management and teacher preparation course as so on. Therefore, if you want to join any courses you can chose, it is the student’s choice but you have to site entrance exam. The students who fail the entrance exam, they do not allow to attend even they really want to join in.
Through doing exercise, we can work together with our friends if we are not sure as well as we can ask teachers to explain. We can do separately if we feel that is no problem in it. If any students feel unhappy, we can inform teachers in order that to do something on us for preparing medicine. We are studying in school on Monday to Friday in every week. Every weekend, we have a holiday to relax ourselves and hand out with our friends as well. School started in the morning at 9:00 to 12:00 every day. In the lunchtime, we have time for an hour. In the evening at 1:00, we started again and the school is over at 3:00 in an evening. . . . In the evening at 6:00 to 9:00, we have to attend night study. We usually go to bed at 12:00 in every night and we feel very happy at school.
Together, these organizations serve some forty thousand students. That makes this education program bigger than at least 98 percent of school districts in the United States. Enrollment is near 100 percent, and the dropout rate as low as 3 percent. And they pull it all off in bamboo-and-leaf structures with no electricity. Thailand doesn’t allow refugees from Burma to erect permanent buildings on its soil. Karen refugee “schools” registered the highest proportion (100 percent) of temporary classrooms of all UNHCR-surveyed refugee education programs, including Iraq’s. Some of these Karen students are packed more than fifty to their classrooms, which are divided by bamboo screens. In an intensive 2005 education survey, the biggest student concern by far was that classrooms were too crowded and noisy. This, not surprisingly, was the same overwhelming complaint of the teachers, in addition to their salary being too low (a little more than $10 a month).