When it was still raining

I wrote this at the end of June, a little over a month after arriving in Mae Sot.

A breeze so sudden cools the room that I think the electricity has come back on. But the ceiling fan is stationary in its wire cage and the new air in my living room is rain-fresh and bright. The sound of a passing motorcycle on the road at the end of the soi reminds me that the world is still happening out there; in town, people are eating at road-side stalls. Others stop for essentials—beer, soap, salted nuts, slurpees—at the fluorescent-lit 7-11. Teenaged girls riding side-saddle hold onto their boyfriends’ waists on the back of battered motorbikes. But here on the outskirts of Mae Sot, the electricity has been out for hours and hours and it’s easy to believe this candle-lit place is the entire world.

But it’s not. Up the road, only a mile or so, my students are going to sleep in their makeshift beds under well-used mosquito nets, pop songs cooing from their metallic mobile phones. The stragglers talk politics or eat post-dinner helpings of rice and fish paste in the damp kitchen. A young man speaks in his tribal language into a cell phone, spitting mouthfuls of discarded betel nut between sentences. Is it his mother or his girlfriend on the line? No one else here speaks his language so no one knows.

Today, one of the youngest students said, “I was born in Thailand and I’ve never been to Burma. If I go back, am I returning?” It’s World Refugee Day, it’s 2012, Angelina Jolie is on the television asking us to remember the plight of displaced people. After a reading of the 1951 Convention, my students wanted to know why victims of famine aren’t considered refugees. What else are they supposed to do, they wanted to know? I wish I could give them satisfying answers. And other things: identity documents, doctors appointments, safe passage between here and the refugee camps where their uncles and sisters live. The best I can give them is my word that if they’re arrested for living illegally on this side of the border, I’ll bail them out of the detention center in the middle of town, just down the street from a place where I like to eat breakfast. I'll do it, I tell them, I promise.