My Laptop got infested with ants. There's one running over the screen right now. It guess it comes with the territory, but somehow they're only there for a few seconds after I open it up, but as soon as they get exposed to the light of the outside world, the all scurry in between the keys immediately, except for the dumber ones who stay out long enough for me to crush. The funny part is that they run away from the cursor whenever they do come out...

Anyway, I wrote the following post when I was drunk the other night. I saved it as a word document until I had the chance to edit it while sober. However, I don't have no idea if anybody's reading this right now, so I'll just post it in case I get to use it later. I've since changed my opinion about the particular NGO people, since they sent me an email after our meeting thanking me for the meeting. I never knew how simple niceties could be so nice.

Wow.... I can't find the file on my computer. Must have been THAT drunk. Anyway, I'll consider this a post until I find the file anyway...

More to come: I've been shadowing at the clinic for the past few days, and just tonight I met some Burmese guy who had been detentioned for the 10 years and invited me over to his office tomorrow because I was interested in hearing his story. So much to say, so little spare time drunk...

I finally started to meet some of the NGO people around here. I’ve developed quite a strange perspective about them, mostly because they don’t fit any other stereotypical traveler I’d encountered so far. First of all the NGO worker, unlike the budget backpacker, has the money to spend on decent hotels and meals. Case and point, we were having dinner with The Professor at his hotel a few hours after arrival and during a discussion about malaria, a Canadian aid worker rolled her eyes and said “oh, I wouldn’t worry about Malaria, just be sure to keep your air conditioner on. The mosquitoes become lethargic under 21 degrees.” Yeah, I know. She was 28 and pretty until she opened her mouth, then she invited herself to our table and wouldn’t stop talking about her condo in Bangkok (with her eyes closed). I've just been so used to Israeli travelers fighting tooth and nail to stay in the absolute worst hotel for virtually no money, it's a little strange to see a rich white girl unable automatically assuming that we had a hotel with air conditioning.
But tonight I got to really appreciate how much more educated the Westerners are here than anywhere else I’ve traveled in Asia. In my guest house alone, for example, there are three medical students, two law students (one at NYU), a doctor, and it seems like everybody else I meet is either a graduate or PhD student writing their thesis in Public Health. At the bar, I met up with two of the medical students who work at the clinic (both from Liverpool), and got a further appreciation for the relative strength of the USC medical curriculum. They were good people, don’t get me wrong, but they somehow got by without ever learning Anatomy, Physiology, or anything else important until they got to have a case presented with it. Somehow they started their clinical rotations with less than one year of didactic training. Nevertheless, within a few minutes of arriving at the bar, I was engaged in some of the worst, most interesting, embarassingly scientific discussion about "doctor stuff." It's a conversation I got so used to having that I didn't even realize I'd been going through withdrawal until the opportunity came to come back to it. We were on fire. One girl had a paperback British medical textbook that essentially was a "what you need to know for the test" about everything there was to know about medicine, in extremely concise terms. I was so impressed by it that I couldn't help but excuse myself from the conversation to review material from the past year. It makes me a little frustrated I didn't bring anything like that here, and even more frustrated that I wish I had.
There was a newly graduated English doctor there who I spoke to for a while. Very cool guy, but are also absolutely overwhelmed at how little he can help in the face of these medics who have less training than nurses, but have learned so much more about tropical disease than any doctor from the Developed world would ever encounter. In any case, the fire sparked again and I found myself deeply engaged in dorky conversation, but learning and teaching with a fury that I'd completely lost during the last two weeks of intense studying for the cumulative exam. But I wasn't the only one who was glad to rekindle that fury. The doc, or recent grad to be more precise, offered to be my private tutor for any subject I wanted, as it would really help him fully understand the concepts. I told him I'll skipping a week of Cardiology (a 5-week course) to go to Burning Man, and it would really help to learn some of it before I start. He seemed happy about that, but I passed it off as late night drunken conversation. Instead, I offered what I really wanted to do: shadow him around the clinic and have him explain cases to me. This way I could pimp him for information, he could teach me what he knows, and most importantly, I'd get to weasel my way into the a clinic that otherwise wouldn't have room for me. We set a date for him to show me around on Tuesday. We’ll see how things go.
I realize I never introduced what I'm doing here or how I got here. I started writing that entry in Word, but was somehow so spun around by the jetlag and the whirlwind of introductions, meetings, and discussion that writing a blog was the last thing on my mind. I'll finish that up and publish it shortly, but for now I'll sum it up as saying I met this professor at Oxford (with an added professorship at Columbia) and this girl from Texas, and the three of us went around meeting all these heads of governmental and non-governmental organizations for a week before settling into what it was I'm going to be doing here. The end product is a survey I'll be conducting at the local refugee clinic, studying traditional medicine use among migrant workers and refugees, so that I could present this information to the clinic to help them decide whether they could use an herbalist among their staff. There's a much larger story behind all this, but I'll get to that all later.
Oh, and I ran into Shogo on my second night in Chiang Mai. Anybody who knows who Shogo is would think that's funny. It's funnier that, despite being surprised to see me, he still spent all of his time hitting on girls (unsuccessfully). Actually, better than that I ran into Shogo and then later ran into the same girl that called the police on me because she saw me leave the club with another girl one year and a half before, the last time I was in Chiang Mai. Her new boyfriend was there, and after everything was said and done she was happy to see me and things were good, except that she'd gone off the deep end with alcohol when I saw her, and I later heard she'd lost control of the bar that she used to own. That was her livelihood. Now she has her boyfriend to depend on. He's and American, extremely cool, and slightly bummed. Glad I got out of that one... Another great night in Chiang Mai.

Secretive, so secretive. I’m not even doing anything important, and here I go worrying about everything I say to anyone because I’ve been told so many times by my coordinators that Burmese spies are everywhere. Not that it benefits or threatens me at all, but supposedly Rangoon has spies all over this town wanting to know who’s working for the NGOs. A Burmese translator from five years ago supposedly had the Burmese Secret Police come to his family’s house within Burma and demand his son’s return upon immediate threat to the family. He went to Burma, was taken prisoner, and was threatened in no peaceful way to never again work with their enemy, the Karen, or else… He blames it on a chatty waiter here in Mae Sot.
This place does kinda read like a spy novel. Except that so far people seem so happy, who’d ever think anything wrong? I think the answer lies in my ignorance about the situation, and that since I’m only just starting to be able to tell the difference between Burmese and Thai, I haven’t yet noticed that the Thais are all cheery and happy, whereas the Burmese are serious and determined. When I walk the streets at night, it’s the Thai singing songs and drinking beer. It’s the Burmese that are slower and deliberate. Also it’s the Burmese that spend all their time either starving or helping.
It turns out there’s also a significant Muslim population, which was the first time I’ve ever seen Muslims in Southeast Asia (and no, I haven’t been to Malaysia or Indonesia). Thankfully, from what I understand anyway, there’s no solidarity with the Muslim separatist movement in the south (the terrorists causing all the headlines in Thailand). In any case, they’ve been here for generations and represent a much longer history than I first gave this town credit for.
But coming over the hills the first time on Wednesday gave this city, in fact this entire province, a new light. It’s a serious mountain range between the rest of Thailand and this long valley of borderland called Tak province. Beyond the valley rests another mountain range and Karen State in Burma, the site of the longest currently-running conflict in the world. So much of it is covered in landmines that it’s almost impossible to move anywhere without severely detailed maps. I guess that’s the point.
Mae Sot rests right before this mountain range, and is protected from the rest of Thailand by the other range. All the refugees that make it settle down into this limbo of a valley, only to be picked on by Thai police who refuse their entry into the rest of Thailand and occasionally raid the camps for “illegals,” which are most of them. So, Mae Sot is the fastest growing city in all of Thailand. And merchants are really taking advantage of it. Some of the COOLEST antique stores I’ve ever seen exist here, old colonial treasures left over by the British, though in order to buy anything it takes quite a leap of consentual negligence to forgo thinking about who had to flee the border in what kind of hurry and with what desperation with their family heirlooms to sell once they arrive in Thailand. Again, this place reads like a spy novel.

I woke up in the middle of the night upset that I had to leave the game-show Pathology quiz because of an urgent need to urinate. About halfway to the bathroom, I realized that not only I'd been dreaming about some sort of Jeopardy styled Path-test, but I was still processing the images in my head as I stood over the toilet. i went back to sleep with the pictures still in my head.
It's been happening all week. All year, in fact, especially during these times just before a test when I need to cram as much information as humanly possible into my head in a short period of time. It's pretty interesting to get to see the the process of learning so vividly, and so real-time. One theory of dreams is that it's a time for all your short-term knowledge from the day to resurface to the forefront of your consciousness so that they could be filed away into more permanent areas of your brain. Kinda like taking the papers from the back, sides, and additional surfaces of your desk and bringing them to the main working area to read and sort them before putting them away in your filing cabinet for their more permanent storage. Your dreams are the re-experiencing of your days experiences as you're sorting them to pack them away to clean your desk for a new day. Kind of a neat thing to see firsthand in the middle of the night...