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i just wrote this in an email to someone:
i should be asleep right now since it's almost two in the morning, i.e. late'o'clock. but the rain, which i find usually has a lulling effect, woke me up. to be more specific, it is raining on me.
the past week, mae sot, along with most of thailand (with the notable exception of bangkok. yikes.) and burma, celebrated their new year by what else, dowsing each other with an obscene amount of water.
when i asked why here is the explanation i got: "now it is very hot. it can make the dirty and everything make the dusty. so we pour the water to make cool and also not dirty and no more for the dusty."
makes sense to me.
i was hoping to find a quiet and dry place to witness said festivities, but as they (and by they, specifically i mean oglethorpe from aqua teen hunger force) say, "plans are for fools."
the first group of people who came unannounced to pick me up for a water-filled fun time was my old students. surprise!
we are all soaked here. we drove around town splashing people and getting really really water-logged.
here we are filling our ammunition back up.
i really wish i could have taken more pictures. tons of people were in the streets dancing and throwing water and rubbing colored powder on each other. there was music playing and a lot of screaming and laughing. it was fun. however, had i had my camera out, the camera would certainly be no more as they were literally dumping whole buckets of water on you.
my school dropped me off sopping wet, and i was just about to get in the shower to clean off when a truck full of people from kdhw (one of the health groups i work with) came to pick up me and my friend tyler, who was working downstairs. the director, eh kalu, said he wouldn't take no for an answer, and so we went.
these people were even more serious about it. one of the data girls i work with who's super demure and shy was pegging people right and left. they were dancing in the truck and singing. they even took their water up a notch to include a huge blocks of ice. it was so cold!
i can safely say that i definitely feel life is fuller having stood in the back of a pickup truck, with a bunch of people fighting for the health of burma's ethnic minorities, holding on for dear life and splashing the hell out of people in what was the largest water fight i've ever seen.
after exhausting our water supply, eh kalu annouced that we were going to the hot springs, where we cooked eggs (pictured below and which i did not eat. eww.), ate ice cream, and had lunch before returning home.
number of days without sunburn: approximately 12.
it is late at night and i'm analyzing data for our donor reports - not the most exciting reason to be looking at numbers, but informative nonetheless.
in the last few months we helped start a feeding program for malnourished children. the program screens children for malnutrition and then referrs them into the feeding programs if they are deemed moderate or severe. one of the areas the program operates in is called ei tu ta, which is an idp camp on the burmese side of the border. the camp was set up a few years ago for a maximum of 1,000 burmese people that had to flee their villages, and now houses over 4,000.
this number isn't necessarily reflective of the general population because the screening wasn't randomly selected. rather, people came to the clinic for screening and thus there's likely some self-selection bias at hand. HOWEVER, nearly 9% of the children under five that showed up were malnourished.
children under five year old malnourished, going to bed hungry every night, for the sole reason that their government denies them access to food supplies, burns their crops, and forces them to flee to overcrowded camps where there aren't enough resources to go around. burma used to be the world's largest exporter rice for chrissakes.
my idealism levels are particularly low right now... on to the reproductive health data.
"Family of environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, hanged by his country's rulers in 1995, take oil giant to court in New York.
Ken Saro-Wiwa swore that one day Shell, the oil giant, would answer for his death in a court of law. Next month, 14 years after his execution, the Nigerian environmental activist's dying wish is to be fulfilled.
In a New York federal court, Shell and one of its senior executives are to face charges that in the early 1990s in Nigeria they were complicit in human rights abuses, including summary execution and torture.
The Anglo-Dutch company, if found liable, could be forced to pay hundreds of millions of pounds in damages. No multinational has ever been found guilty of human rights abuses, although two previous cases saw major claims settled outside court.
Saro-Wiwa became famous as a campaigner on behalf of the Ogoni people, leading peaceful protests against the environmental damage caused by oil companies in the Niger Delta. There was worldwide condemnation when, along with eight other activists, he was hanged by the Nigerian military government in 1995 after being charged with incitement to murder after the death of four Ogoni elders. Many of the prosecution witnesses later admitted that they had been bribed to give evidence against Saro-Wiwa, who was a respected television writer and businessman."
keep reading here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/apr/05/shell-saro-wiwa-execution-charges/print
i saw this late, as i unfortunately see a lot of news these days. it was worth the wait! for those of you who have not seen, here is the president's council on women and girls:
thanks for sending, cath!
one of my friends just told me this crazy story today.
last week she went to myawaddy to see a friend of hers. they stayed with her friend's sister whose husband is in the army. they are very poor and live on a base in the forest.
everyday there is an announcement over a loudspeaker that calls all of the soldier's wives to get up very early in the morning and report to the office. the recording tells them that if they are late, they will be in serious trouble. all day the women must do manual labor. sometimes they must look after highranking officer's wives if they are sick and tend their children. a few times a week they are forced to attend military training where they learn combat skills. earlier this month they made the women compete in compulsary games against other battalion's wives.
the women are not allowed to leave the base, and their husbands are not allowed to leave the army after their original contracted term of duty; they are now told they must serve until they are 60 years old. they all have an agreement that they will not leave, because they've been told the entire base will be punished.
the women are scared they will be forced to fight, which seems like a pretty reasonable fear. why else would they spend time and resources training them? they are also scared since the new rumors are that they will start training the children next. they feel stuck and afraid and voiceless, even though they want to speak out.
my friend is also afraid to make a report about what she saw. i told her that since she saw these things first-hand, she could tell people who document human rights abuses. she will be resettled sometime in the near future, and i asked her to consider doing it a few days before she leaves.
in honor of the semester ending and one of their other volunteer teachers returning home to canada, my old school decided to have a farewell ceremony. that morning i got a call that it included me as well. surprise! it was adorable. they gave speeches (so did i, in fact. here's how i was informed: "and now, teacher jenn will give an encouraging speech!"), gave me little presents, prepared entertainment, and had delicious food. it was a ton of fun, and i was super glad i had brought my camera.
this is two of my favorite students doing a funny traditional dance in our classroom. i've seen it performed on several different occasions, though this was the first performance i'd seen involving drag. note aye aye in the back laughing. it was hilarious.
dance, teacher jenn, dance! this is a picture of me being forced to dance. several of the girl students wove that scarf for me.
two minutes after this was taken the boy students, as a warm-up to water festival, decided to drench all the girls with water. i was soaked for pretty much the rest of the day.
and of course, there was food. this is a potato curry with some roti, and the requisite sugary drink of choice for the day, orange soda.
i had a busy work week this week filled with analyzing a lot of program data for donor reports, spending three hours teaching one person what a percent was, building a database for a new program we have to feed malnourished children, and getting pumped for information by a spy.
(please note: if you're related to me, no need to worry. it was interesting more than anything else.)
"spies" are known to be pretty common in mae sot (junta's spies active among ethnic, exiled groups) and i think most people who stay here long enough eventually run into them. they're not scary and they're not interested in hurting you. what typically happens is that the spdc will put out bounties on certain information, causing people who otherwise have nothing to do with the government to become interested in the information too.
spies come in two main flavors, the first being actual spies. their english is typically very good, they often operate alone (which is very abnormal in burmese culture - people typically don't do social things, like hang out in a restaurant by themselves), and they typically probe you for information, which is not very subtle. the other group of people, often desperate for money and food, fall more under the category of "informers." these people are just normal, everyday people who "overhear" information and report it to earn a few extra dollars.
i'm pretty sure the guy that i ran into was a spy, though there's really no way to prove it. i was meeting with a coworker at a cafe by my house when a guy who spoke english really well came over and started asking us a ton of questions about what we were doing in mae sot, who we worked for, and if his "friend" could intern with us. in other words, it was sketchy. my friend was really standoffish, but proceeded to give him her phone number. (???) i on the other hand thought it was better to be friendly, and smiled a lot, but gave him no information.
we both immediately thought he was a spy. true to form he called my friend several times from different numbers. classic spy behavior. i learned two things, the first being that i need to be more careful about where i'm discussing things. the second is to have a tailor made story to give out. i'm thinking of saying i'm doing mission work and that my church sent me here. seems pretty benign to me.
earlier this evening i was in the hong long market (think: target's thai cousin who's much smaller and crazier) where i saw that they had gotten in four toaster ovens. they will not last long. they cost 990 baht each. this is a little over 28 u.s. dollars.
should i purchase one? yes or no.
i would like to start a new feature, if you will, on the blog entitled, "things i never dreamed i would think." it has recently come to my attention that my brain has been normalizing some very odd thoughts, and i would like to keep track of these developments.
this is not about lessons learned. for instance, "don't give spies real information" (post to follow) doesn't count. it's also not about moderately contrived thoughts like "as payment for a warm, gooey, soft, fresh-baked cookie, i think i would be willing to give up one of my less important digits." no, no. this is for things that are so random and repeated that i've become inured to them:
"there's a gecko in the silverware again."
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