Well, kind of.

I arrived back in Bangkok yesterday from Mae Usu. I can't get a train back to Bangkok until Sunday and I have at least 4 meetings in Bangkok this week. It might also afford me some time to use the big university libraries.

It will also give me some time to get my feet back on the ground a bit more firmly after spending nearly a week in the hospital with typhoid. Not a disease I would recommend.

The time was good. It was bad. It was wonderful. It was horrible. I want to go back and work there. I never want to go back ever again.

Isn't that how it is when we are living lives on the edge and facing big problems?

I spent the last 3 weeks living in a dormitory with 128 girls from 5 to 15. They are amazing girls. But, you need some background I think.

The western part of Thailand is marked with high hills/low mountains - rugged either way.

The people living along the border with Burma (Myanmar) are often referred to as the Hill Tribes. One of the largest of these groups are the Karen. They are originally refugees from Tibet who settled in the northern part of Burma in 739 BC.

The Karen are much more than a national minority. They are a nation with a population of 7 million, having all the essential qualities of a nation. They have their own history, their own language, their own culture, their own land of settlement and their own economic system of life. By nature the Karen are simple, quiet, unassuming and peace loving people, who uphold the high moral qualities of honesty, purity, brotherly love, co-operative living and loyalty, and are devout in their Buddhist or Christian religious beliefs.

Historically, the Karen descend from the same ancestors as the Mongolian people. The earliest Karens (or Yangs, as called by the Thais) settled in Htee-mset Met Ywa (land of Flowing Sands: a land bordering the source of the Yang-Tse-Kiang river in the Gobi Desert. From there, they migrated southwards and gradually entered the land now known as Burma about 739 BC.

They were, according to most historians, the first settlers in this new land. The Karen named this land kaw-lah, meaning the Green Land. They began to peacefully clear and till the land free from all hindrances. Their labors were fruitful and they were very happy with their lot. So they changed the name of the land to Kawthoolei, a land free of all evils, famine, misery and strife: Kawthoolei, a pleasant, plentiful and peaceful country. Here they lived characteristically uneventful and peaceful lives, before the advent of the Burman.

There has been constant strife between the Burmese and all of the Ethnic minorities in the northern part of Burma since colonial times. Currently, more than 100,000 Karen refugees are living in camps on the Thai-Burmese border. Some have lived in the camps for more than 20 years, and the numbers have grown as thousands have fled from attacks by the Burmese army over the last 10 years.

These people living in the UN camps are housed like animals. Houses upon houses. Their food is supplied by the UN and their movement is restricted. The Thais have traditionally more or less ignored the existence of a problem and have not granted ID cards to Karen who have lived in Thailand even for generations. Without the ID cards the people are totally disenfranchised and have no right to move around, to work or to go to school.

In recent months, under the coup government, there was a very low profile action to register all Karen who had been born in Thailand and could evidence that. They were provided some economic incentives (a free solar panel) and for the first time got to vote. This has allowed the children to go to school which has increased the problems in communities such as the one I was staying in.

Karen traditionally live in small farming villages. The first week-end we were in Mae Usu, Luang Por, the abbot at Wat Mae Usu, took us out in the countryside to visit a number of the small villages and attend the "dedication" of a new temple. I am anxious to get back to Ubon to look at some serious maps. I do not believe that we went more than a couple of KM from the temple as the crow flies but it was up hills and down, over wooden bridges (where there were bridges) and some of the scariest grades I have seen in my life and took us some 3.5 hours. We were in a wonderful new 4 wheel drive vehicle but the ride was most comparable to the boda bodas in Uganda as the roads were so horrible. These villages, many of which have been here for decades, speak Karen and no Thai. This alone isolates them.

Luang Por has gone out into these communities and recruited students to go to the Thai government school in Mae Usu which is right across the road from his temple. There are now 40 boys living at the temple dormitory and 128 girls living in a dormitory built several years ago by Tsu Chi from Taiwan.

These children are separated from their parents for about 10 months a year and go to a traditional Thai school. Understand that the children do not speak Thai and have never been to school. All but about 2 of the girls are years below grade level. Thai is being taught as a first language and none of the teachers speak Karen. Their education is a disaster but they muddle through helping each other out.

I was impressed with the fact that my student, Nat, noted that the Karen children were very different than Thai children. All of these children have goals and dreams unlike their Thai counterparts. The children might want to be teachers or doctors to help in their communities or even if they haven't got a firm idea yet of what they want to do, they know that they want to go back to their villages and help make life there better.

They do all of this in conditions that most children (and adults) would find abhorrent. The 128 girls share 4 (yes, FOUR) toilets. They bath from a community water reservoir out in the open. (I learned more ways to do private things privately in public than you can imagine!).

These girls do all of the cleaning, cooking, laundry, child care, AND their homework every day. How many 10 year olds do you know who can prepare a meal for over 100 people? They deal with the community animals - goats, pigs, dogs and chickens have free range over the kitchen and dining area.

(Please don't ask about the satellite dish)

The cows wander through their laundry dragging it literally down the side of the mountain so that they have to track down their limited clothes and then re-wash them. All of the children are malnourished (though no more so than they would be at home). They all sleep on the floor (most on mats provided by the school).

In spite of all of this, they are upbeat and loving. They cherish their parents and miss them terribly.

The problems facing my friends who are working with this project particularly since Tsu Chi pulled out, are enormous. We had a meeting last night with Nat, myself, 2 medical doctors, a dentist, a former Thai minister, the head of the FTBI Foundation and several other business people. How do you make development in this situation sustainable? How do you work with these people and their communities in a way that is most productive and least destructive of the existing community structures? I worry about separating the children from their parents for such long periods of time and what the effects of that will be on the community structure. We taught them how to make tofu and supplied them with the necessary equipment. Also taught them how to make some other hi protein, hi calcium soy products to supplement their diets. There is still a huge gap in being able to provide them with vitamins and minerals. With all of the facilities for the girls being outside, in the rainy season, the girls are constantly wet and more vulnerable. We need to work on that. Big problems.

I had been working on finding Nat an internship dealing with social entrepreneurs. I had though of approaching Mark or Meron but I think that she wants to work with this NGO and Luang Por in setting up a program that is better defined and then being able to approach larger corporations with possible plug in CSR packages. Also the internship would involve doing some political lobbying I think - mainly with the ministry of Education to get a program of Thai as a second language to help these children get the language easier.

OK....enough for now. I have reports to write, surveys to analyze.

Will add more pictures as they get up-loaded onto flickr

Edit: changed went to wet (makes some sense now) and added pictures.