“Jesus is with Me Always”:  

Thinh Thinh Kyi’s Story by Cynthia Zirkwitz

Those of you who know me in the flesh, or have read my Weighdown 'blog', realize that I have two biological children, both sons.  They are lovely young men.  I also have two other 'children', my daughter-friends.  I would like to tell you about one of them.

As near as I can figure, this daughter-friend has used three names at different stages in her life.  She was born in 1973 in the Karen State in Burma (Myanmar) to Karen parents. 

Karens[kurenz´] Pronunciation Key, members of a Thai-Chinese cultural group, one of the most important minorities in Myanmar, living in the Kayah State, Kayin State, Tanintharyi, and the Ayeyarwady delta. They form 7% of Myanmar's population. The Karen hill tribes have tended to remain animistic, but among those settled in the plains there are about 300,000 Christians and over a million Buddhists. The Karens speak the Karen languages of the Sino-Tibetan family. They are mostly farmers, but Karen tribespeople were superior soldiers in the military units raised in Myanmar under British rule. A major unifying element among the Karens is a strong opposition to Burmese political domination. Their revolt (1948–49) against the union government aimed at separation from Myanmar. They scored important successes, and the government was forced to grant the Karenni State (later Kayah State) a large measure of autonomy. The Karens continued their rebellion through the 1990s, by which time, however, there were only an estimated 4,000 active guerrillas. In 1996 government forces stepped up their attacks in an all-out effort to secure the Myanmar-Thailand border. http://www.1upinfo.com/encyclopedia/K/Karens.html

Her Buddhist mother gave her a name in the Karen language which she has never written in English and which I regrettably am not able to transcribe.... my ear cannot capture the tonal flittings and nuance.  When she was a teenager in Thailand she called herself Nu Nu Win, a Thai name.  When her first application as a U. N. refugee was turned down, she acquired a new name and reapplied.  This name, Thinh Thinh Kyi (pronounced Thin Thin Chee), became her passage to freedom in a new land.

Myanmar's largest ethnic minority--the Karen people--are bracing themselves for a military onslaught from the ruling junta for their refusal to traffic in narcotics. Nearly 40% Christian, the Karen people say, "It goes against Christian principles to deal in drugs to attain peace". The Karen number 2.6 million, and live in the dense jungles of northern Myanmar (formerly Burma). As a group, they have been at war with the Myanmar military government for 30 years in their desire to win autonomy. Over 17 other ethnic groups have reached individual agreements with the military, each receiving concessions in exchange for trafficking opium to the military. Only the Karen people have refused such a deal.--
Compass Direct May 1997   http://old.mbconf.ca/mb/mbh3610/people.htm

Thinh Thinh arrived in the Saskatoon airport in January 1996.  The settlement committee from the Open Door Society met her and the other refugees with smiles, hugs, and warm winter jackets.  She had never seen anything as funny as the down-filled jacket that, when put on, expanded her small frame to what seemed to her like blimp-like proportions.

 Like the other refugees from Burma, Thinh Thinh attended English classes when she first arrived.  She came to Church as soon as she found out there was a Seventh-day Adventist Church in Saskatoon.  I remember meeting her the first day.  She spoke no English.  A slim, smiling young woman who frequently put her hand over her mouth.  I found out later that she had very bad teeth and was subject to agonizing toothache.

The border between Thailand and Burma is part river jungle, part dry plain, part deforested, barren hills, where close to a million Burmese refugees struggle to survive. From mid-February until May it is unbearably hot. From June to mid-September the rain makes life messy and difficult. From October to January the damp cold can be bone-chilling, especially for the refugees, who live in makeshift camps without adequate food, water, medical care or clothing. Some of the camps have been inhabited for over a decade. These people cannot go back to Burma. Many of them are peasants or merchants who were born there but will not return. Some fled to Thailand after their villages and crops were razed by Burmese troops, while others left because their men are fighting with the KNU against the Burmese regime. Many fled after their families were tortured and killed in front of them, or stolen away to become weapons-porters and human mine-sweepers on the front line.

Thailand has tolerated them and non-governmental organizations have tried to supply them with sustenance rations. Thai farmers have used them for years as cheap labour. They have survived, a people apart, both exiled and hounded by the regime that caused them to flee.

Unfortunately for the refugees, the governments of Thailand and Burma are becoming friends. Burma is the supplier, Thailand the buyer of a gas pipeline, gems mined by slave labour, the last great teak forests on earth, or destitute virgins for the sex trade. Because of this new economic warmth between the businessmen and generals of the two countries, Thailand is no longer such a safe place for the refugees.

"They burned everything," Coleridge (a Karen) said quietly. His face literally darkened. "Everything was on fire. The market, schools, churches, mosques, clinics, the bamboo houses. Everything. SLORC. Dogs."

He was describing the refugee camp closest to Mae Sot, Huay Kaloke. Huay Kaloke and other camps were attacked by Burmese soldiers during the last days of January and early February, 1997. SLORC wants the refugees to return to Burma because they are becoming an international embarrassment. Burning their homes was a sort of early welcome.

"When the refugees ran to tell the Thai camp guards they were under fire, the guards told them that the officers in charge were sleeping. They couldn’t be disturbed. That is how Thai soldiers fight off the invaders. They go to bed." Coleridge looked grim. His rugged, good-looking toughness fell about him like a loose uniform.

..... He talked often about the difficult history of the Karen people, with a kind of deep exhaustion and formality I was beginning to recognize among all the people actively involved in Burma’s civil war. He had said it all before, many times, and the damage was there in his voice like a scratched record repeating itself.

..... He also told me he’d been shot numerous times, and survived.

"You must be lucky," he said. "If not, you die. I have a good fate." He looked thoughtful. "It’s funny your name is Karen," he said, accenting the second syllable. "Also fate."

Probably not. Probably just a coincidence, but it made an impression as we walked through the ruins of Huay Kaloke. The camp was filled with skeletal black trees, charred house frames, and hundreds upon hundreds of beautiful, filthy children. An ash as fine and white as snow covered parts of the ground. Coleridge introduced me to his friends and family. Everyone I met was living under tarpaulin and scorched tin in a gray, 40-degree-Celsius desert of ash and burned columns. The camp resembled an abandoned war zone. In fact, it was a zone of savage assault, but the 10,000 refugees couldn’t abandon it. It was the only place in the world for them to live and eat.

A refugee camp is a world detained, a tiny universe trapped in limbo. Children’s eyes glitter from the low doorways, from behind clumps of weeds and stunted banana trees, through chinks in bamboo-woven walls. Those eyes are like the eyes of children everywhere, brilliant, hungry, anxious to devour the world. But the confines of the camp are small. The food, both for the body and the imagination, is meager. Among the older adolescents and adults, frustrated energy floats in the air like a sickness, the sickness of accumulated anger, the starving sickness for justice, the sickness spawned by waiting for the great men of power to become sane. Years, with their bounty of youth and dreams, are irretrievably lost. No one can make a return on a wasted life.

On the road to Maw Ker refugee camp, the smell, the taste and the grit striking my face was dust, dust, dust. When I turned around to spit, what came out of my mouth was the same colour as the road. Foun is the word for dust in Thai, the language Coleridge and I spoke together. When he wasn’t shouting wrath down upon the dogs of SLORC he yelled, "Gin foun yuud yed, na? Ahan Thai arroi, na?" We’re eating a whole lot of dust, aren’t we? Isn’t Thai food delicious?

Yes, Coleridge, my poet of the obvious and the tragic.

Maw Ker is a camp some 60 kilometres away from Mae Sot, tucked safely in the sparsely-forested hills, not close enough to the border to be attacked easily by SLORC. It is a barren, messy but simultaneously orderly village of almost 9,000 souls, consisting of Karen, Burman and Indo-Burmese Muslims. In fact, it is a model refugee camp. Even the Thai King has visited it.

My meandering walk through the camp led me to the Maw Ker health clinic, which sits on a small rise with many leaf-thatched and bamboo houses before it. Behind, the forests of the surrounding hills are plucked clean of bananas and good wood. Wood is at a premium for fuel and for building, and the few trees left standing were naked of leaves – the leaves had become walls and roofs. A couple of scrawny dogs stood outside the clinic drinking from the rain-slick pools of mud below the entrance stairway. The narrow lanes I’d walked through off the main camp road were part open sewer, part stagnant black stream. Heavy, ochre and rust-coloured mud lay in wait, everywhere, for peoples’ feet.

The stairs into the clinic were made of roughly-halved trees. I tripped going up. The young medic laughed and asked me to sit down. "Not fall down," she said quietly, too modest to laugh at her own joke.

After we introduced ourselves, she asked me not to use her name in my writing. That is a core part of life for the people of Burma: hiding, necessary duplicity, constant vigilance against the powers that be. Which includes someone with a pen who will write something for a publication in a country with a Burmese embassy, who employ readers to read anything published about Burma, and to collect the names of the people mentioned. For the files, everything for the files.

She was 22, and had been a refugee for almost 20 years. She had exquisitely delicate feet and hands, a black waterfall of hair drawn back with a blue piece of string, and skin the colour of clover honey. Like many of the medics, she carried within her the pained silence and weary humour of a 60-year-old who’d lived on the hard edge of life. She had become a refugee at three years of age, when her father joined the KNU and became a soldier in the fight against the Burmese dictatorship. If SLORC knows a man is involved in armed insurgency, they will often torture and kill the rest of his family. When men become soldiers, women and children become refugees.

The stories of the Maw Ker residents were varied. Some had relatives fighting in the KNU, others were Muslim merchants whose mosques and homes had been burned down, some lost a son or daughter or husband to SLORC, and didn’t want to lose another. Some were peasants whose lives were threatened by Burmese soldiers who believed they were helping the KNU. Their houses inside Burma had been burnt down, their crops razed. They were afraid. They fled, carrying whatever they could carry on their backs. Some of them have been living at Maw Ker for as long as eight years.

The medic explained that the most common illness in the camp was malaria, and that the children suffered from chronic diarrhea. "We tell them to boil all the water they drink but it’s hard to find fire wood. The children get sick easily. They’re not strong to begin with. Some of the mothers think if a baby has diarrhea, it’s best not to give him water. So the babies die."

The clinic gets between 70 and 80 patients a day. The majority are children. "Malaria is worse for the children. The adults survive, but the children are so weak," she sighed. "I still get an attack every few months."

We talked about the different camps in the area. I told her I wanted to spend more time along the border, but that I didn’t want to get malaria.

I was struck by the way she looked at me then. Her expression emitted a physical force, a mixture of resigned anger and tired disappointment. A guest in the home of steady, unremarkable misery, I had the luxury of choice. She replied, very quietly, with a ghost of a smile on her mouth, "We also do not want to get malaria."

The central room of the clinic opened on either side of us into two large areas, lined with straw mats. A few men and a few women, mostly with children, were sitting or lying on the mats. Most of them appeared to be half asleep in the heavy heat, or quite sick. There were no curtains or attempts at privacy, so it was possible to see the patients and their saline drips hooked to the thatched bamboo walls that did not reach the roof. I looked out over the heads of the patients to the rest of the camp, and into the hills beyond, covered with razor grass and naked trees.

Three other young women joined us. One was also a medic and the other two were nurses. All were under 25. Though the clinic was quite far away from the hut where Coleridge went to sleep after our long journey, all four young women knew I had arrived on the back of his motorcycle. They were intensely curious about the nature of our relationship.

Aware that I was trying to pick up a few Karen phrases, one of the nurses slyly asked, "Is Coleridge your Karen dictionary?"

"I do not own and have never even opened a Karen dictionary. I’ve heard that Karen dictionaries can be dangerous, and sometimes don’t tell you if they’re married or not." The young nurses and medics laughed, clapping and shaking their heads. I laughed also. In the middle of our laughter, a woman screamed.

She was sitting only a few feet away. The sound was loud and guttural, not shrill. When I turned my head, I saw her and her child. In an anxious way she seemed to swallow her scream as soon as she saw the effect it had. She wiped her face with the back of her hand, perhaps to take away sweat or dust, but it was her own voice she removed. Jumping off the bamboo beds, the two medics went to her, quickly yet wearily, without surprise. She refused to let the child be taken from her arms. The struggle was plain and terrible on her face: she clearly knew she had to let the baby go to the medics, but more powerful than her knowledge was a primal force compelling her to hold the baby close and safe against her body. One of the medics simply yanked the baby away while she, his mother, clutched desperately at his legs. Having lost physical possession of the infant, she began to cry soundlessly, without moving.

I could not process the speed with which the scene had changed, while everything around it remained unaltered. The two nurses did not move, but stayed talking with me, chatting about something I didn’t understand. Accustomed to the events of the clinic, the sickness, the births, the deaths, they seemed unconcerned. I asked, "What’s wrong with the woman’s baby?"

They replied, in chorus, "Malaria."

"Go and see," one of them said, indicating with her head the medics and the woman and the baby just a few steps away. I slid off the bamboo bed and stepped into the women’s side of the clinic, where I sat on the floor opposite the medics, out of their way. The baby was a very small, thin child, perhaps three or even four years old. When his head lolled back, his eyes fell half open, exposing the whites and black-iris rims.

The 22-year-old medic I’d first met was in charge. She prepared a hypodermic needle, flipped the child over, and poked the large needle into his upper thigh. After laying the child out flat on the straw mat, the medic tried to slide a plastic tube down his throat. She kept pushing but it would not go down. We heard the plastic scratching the inside of the child’s esophagus. After the mother began to make a growling sound, the medic jumped up to get a smaller tube.

How unlike a hospital the place was, with the colour white non-existent, sterilization close to non-existent, or at best crude, both patient, mother and medic on the bamboo-strip floor, their bare feet folded beneath them. The dull eyes of the other patients betrayed no emotion. They had seen this struggle before; they had experienced the struggle themselves. I knew then that most of the world seeks medical attention in facilities similar to the Maw Ker clinic.

The mother sat watching her child, wiping her face dry. The child was completely still. The drug, I thought, will take effect now, and he will wake up. Perhaps another minute went by.

I glanced back through the door, into the rest of the camp. The four o’ clock light slathered everything in gold, even the mud on peoples’ shoes. As though exhaling, the heat had slackened, and sunlight gilded the edges of everything. The voices of the children, playing in the richness of that light, came to us through the thatched walls.

One of the nurses woke up the head medic. He came in rubbing his eyes, his whole countenance still wrapped in the hot, sticky skin of sleep. In less than a minute he was fully awake, sharp, quick, his hands full of urgency. Pushing the hair away from his face, he gave a series of orders in Karen. The other medic knelt, held open the little mouth, and pushed and poked with another tube until the narrow passage down the throat gave way. The length of the tube quickly disappeared into the child’s gut. ?

A simple accordion suction was attached to the tube. One of nurses pumped the apparatus with her foot. The gray, half-digested rice in the boy’s small stomach slowly appeared through the plastic. Once his stomach was empty, the head medic performed cardiac massage, pushing down with his large splayed hands on that narrow place where the child’s heart was buried. The shock of new blood, then new oxygen, made the small body contort and writhe before suddenly falling still.

The limbs shuddered, but did not move of their own accord. With a spent gesture, the head medic swatted a fly away from the child’s eyelid, and then sat back on his heels, swatting the same fly away from his own tired face.

The mother’s voice rose from the very core of her body and reverberated through the room. Saturated with love and grief, the cry seemed to change the colour of the air. The medics and nurses went about the business of cleaning up, rattling stethoscopes, pulling the suction apparatus apart, balling up the sticky tape from the child’s wrist. Life was already taking over her child’s death. The woman pulled her son off the mat and into her arms. One of the nurses slid the tube out of his pale mouth; the other unraveled the gauze from the small, bruised arm. The mother, desolate, still howling, clasped the body close to hers and began to rock back and forth in rhythm with her own voice. Leaning forward, almost against the woman’s shoulder, the medic clenched her jaws against the wailing and very carefully pulled the thick IV needle out the child’s upper wrist.

Refugee children appeared at the front and back entrances of the clinic to see who was crying. They leaned up the steps, inquisitive, some half-smiling, others with fear plain in their black eyes.

Beneath the bamboo slats, the scrawny chickens of the Maw Ker refugee camp scrounged for any edible thing. The nurses giggled because of something funny that I could not hear. Their laughter was strange but understandable. They live daily with death on the bamboo doorstep, waiting to come in, coming in often enough, and departing with the lives of innocents. I realized then I was crying, but it seemed out of place. No one but the grieving mother showed his or her emotions. Wiping my face, I stood up just as Coleridge appeared.

The medics explained to him what had happened, but he seemed to already know. He nodded away the explanations and turned to me. "Did you take photographs?"

"No."

"Why didn’t you? Why didn’t you take pictures so people can see?"

"I couldn’t, Coleridge."

"But we need pictures of this, this is the truth, this is how our children die. This is murder. This is the way SLORC kills our children. Why didn’t you take pictures?"

"I’m not a good enough photogra–"

"Yes, you are, you are, you have a good camera, you take good pictures."

"Coleridge, I couldn’t take pictures. I’ll write it down instead."

But the promise of the written word made little impression on him. In the propaganda fields of the world, the visible image is everything. He surveyed the scene, spoke briefly with the head medic, looked with tired concern at the child and mother. Coleridge had seen similar scenes before. I was unprepared for how small it seemed, how its inevitability stripped it of importance. In a place filled with suffering, where death claims victory casually and often, on an isolated hill near the border of a country largely unknown to the rest of the world, a child’s passing is hardly a passing at all.

Coleridge was moved not to sorrow but to unspoken rage. Like the medics, his weariness was palpable. I could see in their faces how this new death drained some life out of them. Yes, Coleridge had worked for several years on the front line, killing SLORC soldiers, who are themselves appallingly young men, often conscripted into the army against their will. Coleridge had been shot several times himself, and lived. He was lucky. But a child is not a soldier. A child is not supposed to need a soldier’s good luck.

"No oxygen. No oxygen tanks. So the babies die. Malaria. For nothing. Stupid malaria." Disgusted, he spat out this last word. Then he opened his wallet and placed 200 baht–about 10 dollars–in front of the mother.

This gesture seemed callous only to me, because I had no need of 10 dollars. To the others, 200 baht signified some generosity, a practical compensation in a moment of need.

"Shall we go?" he asked. When I moved toward the front entrance, the last of the camp children scattered away, not so much afraid of me as of what was inside the clinic: the body of a boy they probably had played with 10 days before.

We left. I walked behind Coleridge, who walked beside a friend who had accompanied him to the clinic. They spoke together quietly, in Karen. Coleridge needed to talk, but not to me, not in Thai, nor Burmese, nor English, but in his own language. The woman’s sobbing could still be heard through the first row of thatched huts.

Soon, her cries mixed with the sound of a child crying somewhere near the main road. Reaching as far as the heart of the camp, her voice wove through the rising voices of early evening. Her crying seemed to blend with Coleridge’s greeting to a woman washing dishes. A few huts later, he paused briefly to talk to a man layering dried leaves into a roof. I could still hear the pulse, the muted drumbeat, of the woman’s sobs.

When we arrived at Coleridge’s friend’s house, I sat outside in the falling light of dusk, watching the camp children play a game with stones. The darkness slowly ate away at the differences between their faces. In every child I could make out the features of the small boy. And I could still hear his mother’s voice, very faintly, through the voices of the children, though I wonder now if the sound was already an echo in my own mind.

On the journey back on the motorbike, through the surprisingly cool air of darkness, Coleridge did not yell, not even once, into the blasting wind. His body, as I held onto his waist, was completely rigid. When he dropped me off at my guesthouse, he offered serious, curt advice: "Sleep now. Don’t think. I’ll come to check on you tomorrow. Try not to think." He tramped away under the lurid blue lights of the guesthouse fence. Before reaching his motorcycle, he stopped abruptly and turned around. In the bluish dark, I couldn’t see the expression on his face, but I heard the strain in the half-whispered words, "It doesn’t matter. About the photographs. We have too many photographs already."

I was profoundly exhausted, but sleep was not a proper response to the day. Sleep was a distant territory. The child had died but his mother haunted me, a bony woman whose voice told the life and death not only of her son, but also of her people and her country. Coleridge’s uncharacteristic silence on the return journey to Mae Sot told the same story. I wondered what he was doing, where he had taken his grief and anger.

Lying down under a mosquito net that smelled of mould and dirty river, I heard the street dogs of Mae Sot fighting outside the temple. It is a sound of savage desolation, for the half-wild dogs cannot help but live within a hierarchy of viciousness and strength. Their barks ended in deep growls and guttural, shrieking howls. Repeatedly attacked, the weakest one among them stood yelping in the nearby lane. "Shhh," I whispered, folding my arms over the darkness. Curled up in the lumpy bed, finally alone, I felt my throat constrict and the sting of salt rise in my eyes.

I had never seen a child die before. He was three or four years old. Embarrassed just to be there, I had not asked his name.

What was the child’s name?

How could I not know his name?

Coleridge would come in the morning, to see how I was. His caring, for a stranger, struck me as ironically and almost unbearably tender. I was fine, fine. I had never been anything but fine. Coleridge would come, he wouldn’t want coffee, he never wanted coffee or a soft drink, he never wanted anything to eat, he just wanted to help me. Coleridge would know the boy’s name. Wouldn’t he?

The dog in the street repeated his pleading, high-pitched yelps. Once more, the other dogs attacked and the crying crescendoed, filling the temple yard with echoes.

"Shhh," I whispered again, more quietly, a beggar for silence.

Karen Connelly is a Canadian living in Greece. She has spent much of the last two years living in Asia and is currently working on a book about Burma. Connelly won a Governor General’s Award for Touch the Dragon, a book about her travels in Thailand. Disorder of Love is her most recent book of poetry. http://www.outpostmagazine.com/archives/op07/mawker.html

Thinh Thinh grew up mostly on her maternal Grandparent's subsistence farm.  Her mother had only one child.  When Thinh Thinh was an infant, her biological father chose to return to another family he had started in a nearby village.  Her parents divorced.  She has a vague recollection of her father visiting her as a very young child.  By the time she went to look for him in his village, he was deceased.  Her mother remarried when she was about ten, but years later, her daddy-hunger was still not satisfied and kept her in an abusive marriage so that she would not deprive her children of a father.

Thinh Thinh went to school in the nearby village up to fourth grade.  She loved school.  To do her homework she would climb a favourite tree with her slate, and her mother would have to go looking for her.  The life of the one pencil she received was extended with a piece of bamboo attached to the stub.  There were no books.  Lessons were taught by rote. 

Out behind Grandfather's house there were mango, pomelo, cashew and banana trees.  There was a vegetable garden and rice paddies where delicious red rice was harvested.  Thinh Thinh's mother hired out as a farm labourer to make extra income for the family.  Thinh Thinh was expected to pitch in from a very early age.  As a preschooler she fed the ducks, and by the time she was ten she knew how to work the rice paddies and do the other farm jobs.  It was a bitter experience for her when she had to discontinue school. 

The walk to the upper grades school was three hours through the jungle, and the tuition was beyond the means of her family.  A cousin in the village had an elephant that was the economic equivalent of our earth-mover equipment today.  His children were able to continue their education.

When she was about twelve she went to a city to work for an "auntie" who owned a large produce business.  With other children and adult labourers, Thinh Thinh worked a seven-day week, sleeping and cooking behind the produce area.  This was a particularly difficult time.  The adult workers would verbally savage the youngsters, and felt no restraints to physical abuses: jostling, pushing, or hitting them.  The "auntie's" children slept in the family's quarters, had a TV to watch, and went to school. 

When she was thirteen or fourteen, Thinh Thinh was selected to go through the jungle with her University-age male cousin to help him escape to the Thai border.  She now speculates that she was given this "privilege" because she, a girl-child, was, expendable.  If she were killed, it would be no great loss to the family.  If she weren't killed, she could cook and keep her ears and eyes open against any hostile approach. 

As a very young child Thinh Thinh would lie upon the ground and stare at the cloud pictures forming above her.  If she had just been beaten for not performing some work task, she would appeal to the god she knew listened.  This was not Buddha, who was not a living, caring god.  Buddha was not part of her cloud invocations.  The god she spoke to was gentle, tender, and watched over her from the heavens.  No one had shown her a Bible or told her about Jesus.  She just knew…

Eventually they reached Bangkok and lived as well as they could there among the millions of struggling people.  At Christmastime Thinh Thihn heard the beautiful sound of carols from a few homes she passed.  This was the music that matched her cloud prayers.  Her heart was thrilled and she felt peaceful when she remembered the music.  Someone told her “that is Christian music.”  She wondered, “What is a Christian?”

She had many menial jobs in Bangkok: sewing machine embroidery, cleaning, and making cheap jewelry in a factory.  During the time she worked in the jewelry factory she was around 15 or 16.  Bangkok’s torridly hot, humid summers combined with the chemical vapors and, intense machine heat to make her days exhausting.  She noticed that many of her workmates were ill, coughing and spitting as they worked.  She did not feel well herself, but chalked it up to the heat and exhaustion.

One day she collapsed at work.  Her friends advised her to go to the U.N. clinic.  The doctor there told her that she would need to go to a hospital.  Thinh Thinh was delirious.  Her friends took her to the best hospital they knew of.  As they drew near, Thinh Thinh heard the strains of hymns in the air.  She felt a little like she had died and gone to heaven, to quote a much-overused cliché.  This was a Seventh-day Adventist hospital.  

 Thinh Thinh learned that she had tuberculosis and would need to rest for about a month to regain her health.  Her roommate received regular visits from a man who studied with her from the Bible, and after each visit, she would say goodbye and “Pastor, please pray for me.”  Thinh Thinh listened in on the lessons, and felt such wonder and peace.  After one of the lessons she joined in the goodbye and asked the Pastor to pray for her also. 

Thinh Thinh went on to study with this Pastor also, and was baptized in a Seventh-day Adventist Church in Bangkok.  She was accepted to live in a refugee camp on the border of Thailand-Myanmar. She lived in what was called “the Christian compound”.  This was one of the happiest times of her life.  Everyday was a celebration of joy in the Lord.  There was daily prayer and worship.  On Saturday she, the only Seventh-day Adventist living in the camp, ‘came apart’ to observe the Sabbath, and on Sundays she joined in the worship services of her other Christian friends.

Tham Hin Refugee Camp is a small city of 9000 people including 3000 children, nestled deep in the hills of Western Thailand. It lies in a steep sided valley covered with lacy bamboo. A small stream winds its way through the valley and the Camp.

We stay overnight about 45 minutes away from Tham Hin in a small Thai town called Bambol. The road into Tham Hin is an adventure of steep slopes, narrow rocky roadbeds traversing steep slopes and narrow dams. The valleys are lush, beautiful and quiet. During the monsoon season the clouds are dramatic and alive. Downpours can be sudden and violent. After a rain the bamboo hills turn a deeper green and glisten in the sunlight as the sun pokes through the clouds.

The valleys are filled with small farms producing bananas, mangos, papaya, and pomello. The roadsides in the morning and afternoon are filled with Thai children in their neat school uniforms walking and riding their bikes to and from school. Many students stop and face the traffic with solemn faces and give a respectful 'wai' to the passing traffic.

Entrance to the Camp is controlled by a Thai Army check point. Passes are examined by the Army, and, if all is in order, the gate is raised and we are allowed to proceed to Tham Hin. After cresting a small hill we finally see Tham Hin. It is about a half mile of small, closely packed, sooty, black, tarpaulin roofed, bamboo houses surrounded by banana trees and gardens.

If you stop your vehicle and listen you can hear the shouts of children playing, choirs practicing, and the general hubbub of a small city. In the morning the valley is often hazy from the smoke of many charcoal fires. As we drive down the main street, the children come out to watch us pass by. They now call out "hello" to us. Sometimes they become confused and call out "good-bye." This is actually a sign of English training in the Camp. Three years ago you would never have heard English from the children.

Tham Hin appears safe and isolated from the turmoil of South-East Asia politics. One of our teacher friends in Tham Hin who has spent 25 years fighting the Burmese Army disabused us of that illusion: "Do you know that the Burmese border is only 12 kilometers over that hill", he told me. "And, do you know that the Burmese have a mortar emplacement there that would allow them to shell Tham Hin anytime." He was an artillery expert for the Karen Army. Now he is a very good English teacher who constantly questions me about the subtleties of the English language.

Like much of South-east Asia Tham Hin is a contradiction. Many of the teachers in Tham Hin have spent a lifetime fighting in the jungles of Burma. Their health shows the sacrifices they have made. They are tired of fighting and desperately want a peaceful solution to the conflict in Burma. At the same time they are adamant that the Karen people must survive with their culture and language intact. For them, their children are the future. There is no compromise in their minds on that issue. Written by Mavis and Jim Olesen http://www.burmawatch.org/com-olesen-educ-proj.html

During her time in the camp Thinh Thinh acquired a job cleaning for one of the Seventh-day Adventist teachers in Bangkok.  This gave her a little money to buy what she needed, and kept her in touch with the SDA community.  Like all of the Karen refugees, she felt quite sure that it would not be safe to return to her homeland for a good long time.  She applied to emigrate.  Her friends were excitedly talking about being accepted to live in the USA, Australia and Canada.  She did not much mind where she went, as long as she was safe and had an opportunity to get an education as a nurse or a teacher.  Then she planned to come back, to help her Karen people.

Before leaving for Canada, she desperately wanted to see her mother one more time.  She arranged for a meeting in a border city at a point called “the Gate”.  She took a bus there early in the morning and when she climbed out of the bus she was awe-struck by the majesty of the mist-covered forests, the lilac mountains.  This was a time of great danger.  If the patrolling Thai border guards found out that she was a Karen refugee, she would probably be jailed and deported back to Myanmar.  Everything she hoped for would be shoved aside.  She was quite sure that she would not again have the good fortune and health to flee through the jungle unscathed, and to go through the lengthy process of being selected to emigrate.

As she stood admiring the view, she was acutely aware of soldiers and border guards approaching her from three different directions.  She prayed that God would divert them, that they would think she was a Thai tourist out enjoying the scenery.  She felt a profound calm settle down to her very core.  One aggressive military person stuck his face into hers briefly, and then went on.  She studiously admired the flowers that grew along the pathway, breathing prayers of thanksgiving.  Had she been required to speak, her deficient Thai would have given her away.

She had the last meeting with her mother, memorable for the danger, God’s watch-care, and the tumble of emotions she felt. 

So, she arrived in Saskatoon on a frigid day in January, 1996.  So did her future husband.

He was a Burmese, the dominant language group in Myanmar.  He declares that at age fifteen he went into the jungle with several thousand other ‘rebels’ to fight for democracy in Burma.  He killed people, and saw people killed. 

He too made his way to Bangkok and was selected to immigrate to Canada.

Thinh Thinh and her husband-to-be met quite soon after arriving, and found themselves thrown together in English class and in social groupings.  Thinh Thinh was shy and lonely.  This baby-faced, handsome young man paid attention to her. 

At some point he began to attend Church with Thinh Thinh.  He studied the Bible with the Pastor.  He was charming with various church members, telling them his story of deprivation and struggle.  He attracted the attention of a volunteer English teacher, a retired British man who stepped into the gap, and acted as a ‘father’ of sorts. 

The Burmese doctor practicing in the city was alerted early on to violence in the relationship.  No one else seems to have known.  When it was discovered a baby was on the way, her fiancé was baptized one Sabbath and the next week there was a wedding.....

I remember how sad and wistful Thinh Thinh looked on her wedding day, flowers woven into her soft black hair. 

Many Church folk got involved with this attractive young family, as did teachers they studied with.  Within two years there were two babies.  Thinh Thinh was persuaded to seek shelter on more than one occasion.  When her second baby was under a year, she went to live in second stage housing and grew to see how much more peaceful her life could be away from the battering, drinking, and gambling that her marriage had become. 

At the end of a year in the second stage housing she returned to him to try one more time.  Another baby came along.  This time she was adamant that she would get an education so that she could take care of her children’s needs.  He contemptuously told her that she would never get an education.  He called down the Jesus she held so dear.  He stayed out, stopped going to AA and to the men’s group.  One night he came home in a red-eyed fury.  He woke the family up, herded them into the bathroom, and threatened her with a knife.  A neighbor heard the children shrieking.  He passed out in a drunken stupor.

The next morning she came to Church, bruised and frightened, and two of us took her to the doctor at the hospital to see to her injuries.  Then we called the police and she made a statement about the assault to them.  They went to the house and arrested him.  He spent some time in jail and again she went into a shelter.

This time she has an awareness of the effects this violence has had upon her children, particularly her oldest son.  He has demonstrated repeatedly that he is afraid of his father.  The family is healing.  The children have supervised visits with their father.  There is still a need to be cautious, but the terror that reigned in her life for the first six years is beginning to abate somewhat.

Thinh Thinh, who had never ridden in a private car before coming to Canada, got her driver’s license when her second child was a baby, and scrimped and saved up enough money to buy herself a nice little mini-van.  She goes to classes each day, working hard to complete her high school.  In 2000 she became a Canadian citizen.

Her older two children attend our local Seventh-day Adventist Christian School, and the baby, now two, spends the day with a Church friend whose children also attend the School.

I have had the great pleasure to take the little family with me to Camp Meeting for three summers.  This was a particularly sweet summer.  Thinh Thinh began to tell the story of her childhood to her children as we drifted off to sleep each night. 

Recently she heard from an Adventist Pastor in Burma.  He told her that it is possible that her mother is alive and living in a specific refugee camp on the Thai-Myanmar border.  She has not heard from her mother for the past three years.

Thinh Thinh is a dedicated Christian mother.  She prays with her children regularly and sacrifices what little money she has to give the older children a Christian education.  She has begun to read her Bible daily again, and is deriving great strength from that.  It is a blessing for her that another Adventist woman now lives in the same apartment complex that she does.  She is grateful for her support and for the support of many others in her Church family.

Thinh Thinh’s ongoing dream has been to become a nurse.  It is a terrific struggle for her as an impoverished single parent of three, but she continues to keep her eye on the goal.  I suggested that she apply to be part of the mission trip to Bangkok during December 2003-January 2004, to attend the World Youth Conference.  Our local Women’s Ministries is helping to defray some of the cost.  I personally have no doubt that God has a significant plan for Thinh Thinh that will begin to play out on or after this trip to Thailand.        

Thinh Thinh is studying computers at school this year and will share some of her ongoing adventures as she learns to use the Internet.  I am encouraging her to keep a journal when she takes her trip to share with Angel Co-op readers…. so, check back at the site!