“Hmp, it might not even be fresh…” was her self-resolution. This helped her to pretend it’s not there at all. Pla flicked her brochure open. “This waterfall is on the way to the border area. We can swim.” she started. “How much to rent a car to go to the camp?” I asked as if I didn’t care for the waterfall. “Not much. I could share.” Pla was more into the swimming so I suggested going to the waterfall after the camp, on the way back to town.
The next day was my first refugee camp visit in Thailand. The last refugees I remembered seeing were in Palawan, Southern Philippines, where so-called “boat people”- refugees reaching the Philippines by boat- used to live. But that was hardly a ‘refugee camp’. It looked more like a settlement. Back then, Vietnamese refugees in the Philippines were completely free to roam around the city, establish businesses, and integrate with the local population. Their children were even partly supported to go to school. That was more than twenty years ago. I don’t know whether they are still there or had gone back to Vietnam or moved on to the US.
This Karen camp near the border was like a fenced in WWII prison camp where bamboo huts and thatched roofs, wholly supplied by international humanitarian agencies, crowd each other behind twisted barbed wires. Food was brought in by aid groups as well. I asked if they did some planting but Pla said they needed land for that. The most they have are small patches of garden where vegetables for house consumption were grown.
Karen refugees are not allowed to work legally in Thailand. This camp alone has immobilized more than 1000 families, so that all they could put up were small stores and handicraft shops which could not be accessible to shoppers in Mae Sot unless they intentionally visited the camp. Still I observed some activity here and there. Sunday church, laundry washing and houses being built. Volleyball and basketball courts were empty, ice cream and other refreshments were being sold, but there weren’t many buyers.
The children were very small. Yellow powdered faces wore ready smiles for any English speaking visitor but they had very small voices and very small frames for their age. Pla started giving away sweets and pencils. Pla is one of the paralegals providing training to refugees on the laws of Thailand. Her country is not a party to the refugee convention but it has a lot of bilateral agreements with neighboring countries. She is learning Karen, and has to wear Karenni shirts to be able to train more effectively. She said more than 60% of her classes are male. The few women there always had to leave early to prepare for the meals of the day.
Khun Bom, our driver, is from far northern Mae Sariang, a very skilled driver who knows the various routes where refugees enter Thailand. He can get them and secure their safe delivery to the camps quickly. He doesn’t tell me any details but it was easy to see his popularity among some of the refugees. Tea is abundant where he stops.
In one of the few open snack benches in the camp, Pla didn’t eat her roti because it was too oily. She took time stirring the milk at the bottom of her tea. I didn’t take the milk tea at all. I preferred the clear tea beside it, which went well with the roti. At another table sat some Karens which Pla guessed were on security duty, and another had youths discussing the next game. Pla once mentioned that they used to beat up Burmese suspected of spying in the camps. How they are able to enter and spy in the highly guarded camp, or how they were able to distinguish Burmese from Karens, I did not ask.
Aside from the milk tea and roti, we had fried bread as well, and clear tea each. All in all it was only forty baht. “Where was the profit in that?” I asked. “They didn’t work, remember?” Khun Bom reminded that it might as well have been a friendly visit to an old friend’s house on a Sunday afternoon.
Pla was disappointed to have to swim alone in the Nam Tok Pacharoen that afternoon. Sundays were usually spent with families inside their homes so the few swimmers there were couples. Pla refused to waddle in the water with no one to talk to. I suggested climbing the falls instead. To get to the top I had to use the foot trail ala-Indiana Jones. I don’t know why I did not swim although I loved the water. I felt a depression which made me half-regret visiting the camp first before the waterfalls. Pla made up for the short swim by eating a whole half-kilo of very sweet mangoes grown right at the park grounds. They were really heavenly (next to the Philippine species of course) and she wished she brought some ice and her mother’s blender.
My weekend visit was almost finished. On the way back to town we stopped by a couple of rose gardens. Pla bought some for her house, where her mom runs a restaurant. She knew right away which my choices were because her daughter always went for the bright colors. Her mom’s cooking was the favorite in the village. Most of the houses there were rented by international humanitarian organizations in Mae Sot so they easily cornered the market. For a while, I tried my hand at waitressing, but found that the locals were more shy with foreigners serving at their tables, so that’s the end of that career option. Later that night I wanted simple
fried rice but somehow they managed to make it a special meal for us.
In the morning I said goodbye to Pla and her mom with a sincere invitation to visit me in the Philippines. It was the one time Pla’s motorcycle conked out, maybe because it didn’t want me to go… but my empty apartment and new laptop awaits in noisy and complicated Bangkok, so we persisted. Pla took her mom’s much smaller motorcycle and, balancing my pack in the front and my weight in the back seat, we reached the station and exchanged hugs. She was on her way to work so she didn’t stay long. I whispered a quick goodbye to the Karens and Khun Bom, and prepared for the eight hour-trip back with a bottle of water, my lunch coupon and cheese sticks.
