from rhaddon
MAE SOT, THAILAND
I didn’t take any photos in town, so these are all from somebody else’s flickr.
Remember John Yettaw, the American guy who swam across Lake Inya and destroyed any hope of democracy in Burma sort of? Mae Sot is the town where he had his first vision and formulated a plan. He stayed in the Highland Hotel and I wanted to go ask the staff if they remember him, but nobody knew where it was and I didn’t have the time to find it.
Mae Sot is a bizarre place for other reasons, though. It’s about three miles from the Burmese border, across which the longest-running civil war in the world is being fought. The conflict began in 1949, shortly after British decolonization, when the newly formed (and legitimate) democratic government of Burma refused to provide seven million Karen people with an independent state. They’ve been killing each other over it since, and the Burmese military may or may not have a nasty predilection towards ethnic cleansing.
It’s estimated that there are two million refugees in Thailand, many purely economic or from other conflicts, and about 160,000 are living around Mae Sot. There are something like eleven refugee camps in the area, including a vertiable city of 40,000 people that constitutes the largest camp in Thailand. Mae Sot itself is only a third Thai, the rest being Karen, Muslim or other ethnic minorities, and while it still has 7-11s and decent hotels it doesn’t feel at all like Thailand. It’s one thing to call a city diverse – New York, for example – but it’s another to go to a place where every aspect of that diversity is completely alien.
from rhaddon
In the middle of all this is a large group of Westerners living in guesthouses just outside the center. Some of them are undoubtedly overpaid consultants riding the wave of NGO corruption so pervasive in the third world (say a thousand bucks a day plus expenses, versus Karen jungle medics that make less than 30USD a month), but everyone I met seemed to be genuinely concerned, dedicated and absolutely fascinating.
I went to Mae Sot for another visa run into Burma, expecting little, but thanks to a couple different people those three days gave me more to think about than I’ve had in years. As an old Saigon compatriate I bumped into in a Costa Rica said about Colombia,
“It’s quite real, isn’t it?”
from rhaddon