I've spent all my time so far posting ramblings about my situation, so I guess I should probably back up and state what it is actually that I'm here to be doing.

I somehow managed to convince my University that it would be an "investment towards my medical education," as well as maybe even for the world as a whole, to fund a summer trip to Thailand on the Burmese/Thai border to study traditional medicine use among the recently (illegal) immigrants who've been raped, pillaged, and chased out of their homes through minefields to come seek refuge in a country that so adamantly doesn't want them that they forbid them to be anywhere outside of home, with the lights off, and not even use cellphones, after 9PM.  So there's a public health clinic here that was setup by a Burmese doctor 20 years ago (who has since been named the "Mother Teresa of Burma"), that treats people for a dollar.  About half of the patients are immigrants or displaced people, and the rest are simply migrants who cross the border daily for work (or sometimes just for treatment at the clinic).  Come to think of it, it'd be kind of like a public health clinic in San Diego.  Except with more malaria and amputees.  And (I think) more fouled up penis oil injections that end up in thigh skin grafts (see that post).

So there's a war going on that nobody I know has ever heard about, that's been going for over 40 years.  The Karen (car-REN), an ethnic "minority" group that was considered by the British to encompass several sub-groups to categorize about 50% of the Burmese population, has been fighting one of the most brutal military totalitarian regimes since the end of the second world war.  Burma, with it's 500,000 troops and endless workforce of villagers forced at gunpoint to be their workhorses, have almost completely routed the Karen insurgency and terrorized millions of villagers out of their homes.  The Karen still have a complete government, that exists in exile in Thailand, and they control everything from their army to their healthcare system. 

Of the whole team of Westerners who've come from far and away to help the exiled government re-organize their infrastructure, teach their medics, build schools for refugees, and buy drugs to put on the backs of medics who make 3-6 month treks into Burma to provide medical care to the remote villages, my job has very little to do with any of that.  Instead, I'm focusing on making the helping the displaced people and not-yet-emmigrated people more self sufficient in a way that doesn't involve a constant stream of international goodwill and aid money. What we're about is bringing back self-sustainable healthcare to these villages who've had it for thousands of years in the form of herbal medicine. Until the Burmese military government cuts down all their trees, the Karen people have one of the largest pharmacies in the world growing right out their front door. Unfortunately, with a 40 year conflict such as this one, the teacher-pupil relationship that carried this information through the ages has become severely endangered. Now there's a push by the exiled Karen government to centralize all this information, re-test it, and distribute it among the villagers through a program of herbalist training centers and spreading handbooks of traditional medicine to the villages directly.

I'm here to conduct a survey at the local "almost-free" clinic to see what kind of information I can extract from the patients about what should be done to the healtcare system once they get here. In the meantime, I found out about an herb that cures Hepatitis B, and another herb that apparently treats HIV. These are all stories that I'll cover later. For now, I'll say that the Hepatitis B herb is currently being studied, and that the HIV treatment has been somewhat lost because the member of the clinic who was able to find the herbalist who administered the treatment was shipped off to another country for resettlement (another victim of the brain drain), and so the herbalists that were able to treat this woman (who did gain weight and apperaed significanty healthier in the same way HAART therapy would appear) cannot be found. India's been launching an investigation about herbs that could potentially treat HIV as well, but we'll see either how much it works or how much the profiteers don't want us to know about it in the coming years...

I know that didn't answer much about what I'm doing here but it gives you a tip. For now, I'm drunk and I'm tired and I can't be bothered to write anymore and there are two people who want to use my computer. I'll do my best to finish this idea later.