Mae Sot Hotels
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Burmese Youth Project: Opportunity, not Aid
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It was a slightly dubious start when Lynda and I set off to go to Mae Sot from Phitsanulok. We started off the day by taking a very unnecessary detour to have one last scrumptious banana roti for breakfast: a yummy crepe-like concoction grilled before your eyes in oil and bright orangey-yellow ?butter? with eggs and fresh nanners, then drizzled with sweetened condensed milk (plus chocolate and sugar if ya want) and served up with a toothpick for easy, sloppy, dripping eating--talk about heaven on a stick!!
But the roti place was closed. Ooops. The 'short walk around the corner' we'd planned from there to the bus station didn't materialize after that either-it was km's away, so we ended up taking a local bus, piling in among the local with our huge packs-ooof! We saw our first smoking monk while sitting around waiting for our bus (i.e. he had a ciggie, he wasn't on fire!). Interesting, considering the Buddhist precepts of forgoing pleasures and enhancing/addictive substances. We all have our weaknesses, I guess.
We soon discovered that our bus was actually a mini van, cool! But that sentiment was soon to be overshadowed by more and more people piling in with us. So we ended up crammed into a 9-seater 'A/C' (HA HA) mini van with 15 other people, not including the driver!
I was scrunched in the back seat with two women (one of whom was sick out the window for much of the last hour of the ride thru the mountains--oi, it's horrible to be a sympathetic vomit-er!!!) and their two little kids. Well, besides gazing at the gorgeous scenery, it was a good opportunity to distract myself and mentally practice the Thai numbers I've been trying to memorize...
Mae Sot is an interesting little border town, lots of things going on and people bustling around doing who knows what (rumour has it you shouldn't ask too many questions about that, as a lot of the business here is of the black, smuggling type).
But my main reason to come here is not to do smuggler-watching, but to visit some friends of friends back in Boulder.
The Burmese Youth Project
Curt and Cathy are great, groovy people who sold their sucessful engineering business in Colorado to bike around the world. The stopped over in Mae Sot to rest their legs and have been living here ever since, for about 7 years! They met Dr. Cynthia, a Mother Theresa for thousands of mostly Karen refugees who have left Myanmar/Burma, and decided to do their part in helping out if they could. The result is the development of The Burmese Youth Project, a variety of very practical and very needed vocational/educational projects like carpentry, bicycle maintenance, computer skills, English, pottery, electronics and sewing and weaving, just to name a few. Their philosophy is creating opportunities instead of simply giving aid, and many of the original projects they started are now self-sufficient with trained refugees running them.
It's estimated that there are over a million refugees in Thailand from neighboring SE Asian countries, a staggering number, with Burmese refugees being the largest group. There are something like 100,000 refugees in the Mae Sot area alone, though understandably it's virtually impossible to get an accurate count. Many of them live outside of Mae Sot in designated refugee camps, at least one of which has an incredible 40,000+ people in it, more of a town than a camp (shades of Palestine??). But many of them also live in the town illegally and are often rounded up and taken back across the border to very uncertain and often very dangerous futures back in Burma/Myanmar, which has been under a very cruel and repressive military junta rule for over 40 years. While in Thailand, they are often subject to sometimes cruel abuse by the Thai authorities themselves, ranging from verbal and physical abuse to rape, torture and murder--check out this article for some good info about the situation (though it's from 2001) as well as akha.org dedicated to Akha people's rights. This is also a very interesting series of articles and interviews about Dr. Cynthis and Burmese refugees.
While I was in Mae Sot, I was lucky enough to see a new vocational project of Curt and Cathy's, a ceramic water filter operation built entirely from scratch with locally obtainable materials and (hopefully) easily reproduced by the refugees when (and if) they can safely go back to their homes.
a hand-carved teak mold for pressing the filters; there are some freshly pressed filters drying behind
Clean drinking water is such a major issue throughout the developing world, with poor hygeine and water-borne diseases a real danger to a mind-blowing number of people. An estimate from a few years ago is that one sixth of the developing world--1.1 billion people--don't have access to clean water. It's such a simple thing we all take for granted, isn't it? But these effective filters are easy to make and cheap to buy, so this project could potentially help tens and then hundreds of thousands of people if it can take off in the way they're hoping it might. Groovy work, Curt & Cathy, best of luck!! (btw, there are some more pictures of the filter project at the top of this entry)
If you're interested in this particular project, Curt+Cathy's work in general, or can make a donation of time, skills, material or much-needed cash by sponsoring or donating, check out their site at Burmese Youth Project, or jump right to the adopt-a-project page.
Next stop, Chiang Mai in the north...
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| 5. | Burmese Youth Project: Opportunity, not Aid - Mae Sot, Thailand Mar 24, 2004 (  14 ) |
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