Refugee Camp

I finally made my way into visiting my first refugee camp. It’s closed to tourists, and so I halfway figured I’d never even get to see it. But one of our contacts here happened to be going there to speak at the opening ceremony for a new “college,” and we were able to come along.
This might have been the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. Having said that, I should then mention that it’s home to some of the most brutally destroyed human beings that currently exist in the world, in that just about every member of the camp has had just about the worst thing imaginable happen to them. I didn’t get a chance to meet anybody personally, but I’m staying at this guesthouse with a couple who’s filming a documentary about the situation. They went to the same camp a few weeks ago on the specific mission to interview the new comers. The people they met were still shell-shocked, telling stories of their closest family members being raped and/or murdered while they were forced to watch, and then being forced to walk minefields by the Burmese military in order to clear them. It wasn’t that each person had their own story, it’s that each person had 10.
So I went expecting something out of a Save the Children ad about African refugee camps, or something I’ve seen on TV about the camps in Gaza. Instead, we drove into a mountain region with a gigantic sheer rock face on once side that rivals Yosemite in majesty, and the driver told us we were here. I didn’t see any buildings at first, and then as we drove further we saw little shacks that looked like Tiki huts nestled between the massive trees of the deep forest. As we drove further, more and more huts appeared, and closer together, and it became apparent that each hut was almost identical. A wooden platform, on stilts, with a floor, and an angled roof made from thatched leaves off some of the local trees. We drove on, and the huts got closer and closer together until we could see nothing but thatch leaf roofs, mud, bamboo struts, and kids behind a wire fence.
The driver took us in. It had been raining all week, so the packed dirt road had turned into the kind of terrain that I’d have thought only a 4wd would dare enter (I brought this point up later with our guide and he said they can drive any crappy car through it if you’re good, which realize how wimpy us Americans tend to be about these things). It was muddy, it was dirty, and the bamboo floors of the huts were wide open for us to see how they served as living room and bedroom for the whole family. But we got down to the basin to find a giant soccer field with a thousand people sitting around watching a match.
Just next to the soccer field was the local health clinic, which I got to tour and I’ll discuss in a later post.
But you could already tell the attitude was so much more complex than I’d ever imagined. As we walked up the hill to this school, people stared at us while children laughed at us and followed us around, while babies were screaming behind closed curtains of other huts. Meanwhile, we were slipping and sliding to try our best to get up this mountain, as the dirt road had turned completely into a mud road. I’d worn my more respectable clothes, it and it was a bit embarrassing to have to grab hold of huts to keep from falling over into the god-knows-what-its-made-of mud.
Then the weirdest thing happened. We got higher up and I swear I could hear the sound of a marching band. Then I climbed even higher and it got louder. Eventually, the mud cleared and I had a chance to wash my shoes, after which I climbed a bit higher and was greeted by a girl wearing a white schoolgirl outfit. She shook my hand and said “Welcome.” Marching band music was playing louder behind her. My guides have gone ahead, and I was completely baffled. The mud path became a dirt path and eventually became a paved walkway that led to more concrete and eventually real buildings. Then another school girl shook my hand. Then a very important looking person in a suit shook my hand and pointed me upwards towards a bigger building. By then I was very sure there was a marching band in this building. I got to the entrance and started taking off my shoes by the large pile of shoes outside the doorway. I took one shoe off, and then was stopped by a very embarrassed, polite, super smiley person who also looked important, who told me it was not necessary for me to take off my shoes. So I put them back on, even more confused, and walked into a room of barefoot people with muddy disgusting shoes on (were they being THAT polite to a foreigner?). The noise of the awful marching band was deafening. They were also sitting down, not marching, in a closed room. The tuba missed every third note. Then I was approached to sit in one of the chairs on stage, where I’d noticed my host was sitting next to some important looking Karen people and a white guy. The white guy organized the funding for this school. We sat next to him because I think they thought we were other funders. Whoops.
Anyway, I had to sit through a very long and tedious opening ceremony in the front row on stage, which meant I wasn’t even allowed to close my eyes to rest them. However, it gave me a great vantage point to take several videos of some of the musical performances the students had put together, and some of them were awesome. I’m going to compress them and put them with a pack of photos to send out, but I don’t feel comfortable putting them up on a public space like a this. Anybody who wants them, please email me so I can send them out to you.
I gotta go get some dinner, but there should be a lot more to say tomorrow after this meeting. We’re also training our translators for this survey in the afternoon. If I have any energy left, I’ll write it all up.