Saturday at 12:57 pm in Mae Sot. Still in my pajamas. House cleaned, coffee drank, lots of quiet except for the street noise--too-big trucks and small dog fights. Almost casual in their violence towards each other.
This town isn't big enough to to be big and (of course) not small enough to be small. Going on six months here and I still wonder what this place is about. Last night, I drank watered down whiskey and coke with a woman I met in India and a table-full of her Burmese friends. There's a new string of bars lining the suburban-wide street that connects one side of the highway to the other. People are calling it Mae Sot, Sukhumvit, to pretend we live in more of a city than we actually do. But then again, the Thai women in high-waisted short-shorts, the neat mess of motorcycles against the sidewalk, the three-piece band in skinny, skinny jeans all do hint at a kind of urbanism I didn't know existed here. See? Six months and I'm still not sure what kind of town this is.
I'm here to teach twenty-four people from Burma about community development. We over-use the word 'community' in the classroom to the point where I don't know what it means anymore. My students come from community-based organizations along the Thai-Burma border. We are currently undergoing data collection for a community development project, to be implemented over the next few months in a local, migrant community. We prepare for our community visits, we meet with community leaders, we identify characteristics of communities.
Guess what? Some of the members of the communities we're working in don't speak to each other. They don't share a common language. Or an interest in speaking. Some of them say, this isn't a community at all. This isn't my land. The Thai government doesn't recognize us. I'm a day laborer. Look somewhere else. Some of the community members are the wrong religion, the wrong colors, came from the wrong place in Burma for the wrong reasons. They made too much money, they didn't make enough money. Trying to understand these people and the places they occupy verges on impossible--for me. Luckily, it's not my job. I just need to pass on what I know about getting to know people, about actually talking and actually listening and resisting the urge to oversimplify. On good days, it's not so hard. On better days, I love it.
From years of moving to new places I know nothing about, I've learned it's the little things that make you truly happy. Clean sheets, good take-out, evenings free. I try to cultivate familiarity so that I can better guide my students (and myself) through the unknown. Of course, the world is so small and there's familiarity even in strange, uncomfortable places. Sitting on a bamboo floor, talking (in translation) with an elderly Karen Buddhist man, I saw in his face--in its expressions more than its features--elements of Tibetan faces, of Tibetan people I've known and loved. Extended gazes, pronounced blinking at the end of a sentence--I've seen these before. Once, when I was twenty years old, I sat on a hard, flat cushion on the floor of an upstairs apartment at a Tibetan medical clinic in India, drinking tea and looking awkwardly at the woman in front of me. Nine years later, I still call that woman mother and I love her like it's true.
Sometimes I think: if I just kept sitting on that bamboo floor, maybe something would grow. Syllables would distinguish themselves into words and I'd piece them together and remember that learning a language is more ambiguous than any high school Spanish teacher will ever tell you. It's not as if one day you don't know and the next day you do. There is so much in-between space to live and work in. If I sat and sat and sat there on that bamboo floor, maybe one day I'd reach a point where I wouldn't understand the community-that-is-not-a-community of which the old man is (not) the leader, but I'd understand how much I don't understand, and all the complexities and un-nameables would open up before me, and I'd be able to finally ask the right questions.
This town isn't big enough to to be big and (of course) not small enough to be small. Going on six months here and I still wonder what this place is about. Last night, I drank watered down whiskey and coke with a woman I met in India and a table-full of her Burmese friends. There's a new string of bars lining the suburban-wide street that connects one side of the highway to the other. People are calling it Mae Sot, Sukhumvit, to pretend we live in more of a city than we actually do. But then again, the Thai women in high-waisted short-shorts, the neat mess of motorcycles against the sidewalk, the three-piece band in skinny, skinny jeans all do hint at a kind of urbanism I didn't know existed here. See? Six months and I'm still not sure what kind of town this is.
I'm here to teach twenty-four people from Burma about community development. We over-use the word 'community' in the classroom to the point where I don't know what it means anymore. My students come from community-based organizations along the Thai-Burma border. We are currently undergoing data collection for a community development project, to be implemented over the next few months in a local, migrant community. We prepare for our community visits, we meet with community leaders, we identify characteristics of communities.
Guess what? Some of the members of the communities we're working in don't speak to each other. They don't share a common language. Or an interest in speaking. Some of them say, this isn't a community at all. This isn't my land. The Thai government doesn't recognize us. I'm a day laborer. Look somewhere else. Some of the community members are the wrong religion, the wrong colors, came from the wrong place in Burma for the wrong reasons. They made too much money, they didn't make enough money. Trying to understand these people and the places they occupy verges on impossible--for me. Luckily, it's not my job. I just need to pass on what I know about getting to know people, about actually talking and actually listening and resisting the urge to oversimplify. On good days, it's not so hard. On better days, I love it.
From years of moving to new places I know nothing about, I've learned it's the little things that make you truly happy. Clean sheets, good take-out, evenings free. I try to cultivate familiarity so that I can better guide my students (and myself) through the unknown. Of course, the world is so small and there's familiarity even in strange, uncomfortable places. Sitting on a bamboo floor, talking (in translation) with an elderly Karen Buddhist man, I saw in his face--in its expressions more than its features--elements of Tibetan faces, of Tibetan people I've known and loved. Extended gazes, pronounced blinking at the end of a sentence--I've seen these before. Once, when I was twenty years old, I sat on a hard, flat cushion on the floor of an upstairs apartment at a Tibetan medical clinic in India, drinking tea and looking awkwardly at the woman in front of me. Nine years later, I still call that woman mother and I love her like it's true.
Sometimes I think: if I just kept sitting on that bamboo floor, maybe something would grow. Syllables would distinguish themselves into words and I'd piece them together and remember that learning a language is more ambiguous than any high school Spanish teacher will ever tell you. It's not as if one day you don't know and the next day you do. There is so much in-between space to live and work in. If I sat and sat and sat there on that bamboo floor, maybe one day I'd reach a point where I wouldn't understand the community-that-is-not-a-community of which the old man is (not) the leader, but I'd understand how much I don't understand, and all the complexities and un-nameables would open up before me, and I'd be able to finally ask the right questions.
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