One Day the Soldiers Came

by Charles London

  We emerged onto another street below an even more ominous concrete building. A whole gang of mangy dogs waited by the front door. Their skin hung off their faces; their ribs were visible and their fur was matted and bald in patches. One of them looked up at me with bloodshot eyes, raising its muzzle from the dirt and growling as I passed the entrance to their building. The way their thin limbs twisted and splayed together made me think of Cerberus guarding the gates of Hell. This building was not our destination either, and the dogs did not bother to follow us. We slipped into a narrow alley. There was a small Buddhist shrine at the entrance to the alley, decorated with flowers and burned-out candles. Just beyond it, two red-faced Americans in dark blue jackets were speaking to a man about the Book of Mormon. They must have sweltered under their blazers. I nodded at them, acting as if we knew each other and creating a credible alibi if someone became suspicious of my presence.

  Through the alley was another building, more decrepit than the two before it. This was our destination. Again, sickly dogs acted as sentinels. A woman standing in the shade of the doorway came over to us. My guide and translator, himself an illegal refugee, spoke to her very quickly. She joined her palms together in front of her lips in greeting, and I did the same. Then she shuffled us inside and up to the twelfth floor. It was very quiet.

  The last door on our left opened to an unfurnished room lit by buzzing fluorescent lights. We removed our shoes in the hallway and entered. There were mats on the floor to sit on, and I could see a small kitchen and bathroom. Compared to the privations of Africa, this urban refugee setting seemed almost desirable. Five children assembled in front of me with their parents. Their father’s right leg was made of plastic. Very quickly, soda and crackers were brought in. The family welcomed me gracefully. No one seemed too fearful. Then the door was shut firmly and locked from the inside. My translator introduced me, explained that I would like to speak with the children about their lives and their perceptions of refugee life, and have them draw some pictures. The father and mother joined their palms in front of their lips, and I did the same in return. Then the children and I returned the gesture. The kids giggled hysterically, and the father and mother shot them a glance. It seems I had joined my hands together at the bridge of my nose, a sign of respect reserved for monks. The children thought it was one of the funniest things they had ever seen. When I smiled at the explanation from the translator, the parents relaxed. They would not want me to be offended.

  The children were eager to draw and the parents were eager to talk. The family had not left the building and had hardly left the room in several months, not for school or work or play. I rapidly learned of the slow torture that this life entails. While these kids are not in the combat zones of Congolese child soldiers or even the children internally displaced in Burma, they have their own battle to fight, against depression, silence, and disappearance.

  “A few days ago our neighbor threatened my oldest daughter,” the father said. “She was singing too loudly, and the neighbor threatened to call the police and send us back to Burma or to the border area. This cannot happen, of course.”

  The children remained quiet while their father spoke, concentrating on their drawings, signaling each other with looks to exchange colors.

  “We are at the mercy of our neighbors because we are not recognized by the government. We registered with UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), but they said that the government was not recognizing any more refugees at this time. I am not legally allowed to work, but that matters little….” He gestured at his leg, shaking his head. “None of us speak the Thai language. The children cannot learn it. They cannot go to school.” He rubbed his eyes with weariness. “They do not leave the house. It is too dangerous. If they play too loudly and annoy someone, we can be arrested.”

  I felt lost here in a world without play. There was a chasm of experience between these children and me. I wanted to leap it with a game, if not soccer something quiet, something mindless and fun that we could do together, but no one felt much like playing.

  My translator, who drives around the city for one of the aid organizations delivering monetary assistance to the illegal Burmese refugees, leaned over and told me that this family would have to be moved.

  “People complain that they have too many children and they cannot pay their electricity bill. We give them some money, but it is not enough. We have to be careful, because our assistance program is also illegal. No one here wants these people to be helped. No one wants them to stay.”

  “Do you know where you will go next?” I asked.

  “We will go where we find a place. We do not know where,” the father said. He leaned back on his hands, stretching his fake leg and rubbing the area above it.

  “Why did you leave the border area? Is it not safer there?”

  “I fought the Burmese government with the KNU. I disagreed with my commander and he tried to kill me. I was shot in the leg. I cannot go back to Burma because I am their enemy. I fought for democracy. I cannot go to the border area because of the KNU. I must seek shelter in Bangkok, even though we must live like this.” He gestured at the room around him. In the half hour I had been with this family so far, I felt the light squeezing my eyeballs more and more. The walls inched in around me from minute to minute. They were bare and white. This was a prison cell.

  “I want to study,” said Thinzanoo, the oldest daughter, the singer whose song had put the family in a precarious situation. “Now I help my mother all day and raise my little brothers. I don’t see any other people. I want to have a good education.”

  Education, schooling, the bane of so many children in the “developed” world, is Thinzanoo’s hope, as it is the hope of so many of the children I met in Africa who had been uprooted by war. School gave children companionship and a space to act like children. It represented their best hopes for the future and an alternative to their present suffering, exposed to the adult hardships around them.

  A few days later, another girl Thinzanoo’s age drew a picture that illustrated the role school plays in the inner lives of these dispossessed children. May eagerly showed me her skills in English when she drew a picture of a girl named Susu and labeled it: “I am going to school.” Then she drew a picture of another girl, her hair done up, in nice clothes with a professional air about her, happy and pretty. This drawing said: “I went to school.” May looked like the first girl, Susu, but dreamed of the future in which she would evolve into the other girl in the picture, the one who had gone to school (Figure 8).

  The kids in hiding want stability and opportunity. School shows them a way into a good job, into security and comfort, and into the society that they see and hear other children entering every day and that they are forbidden to enter. When the days stretch out without any change, without any hope, the simple wish for education can become an escape route, a route that their parents can rarely provide.

  Thinzanoo was ashamed of how her family lives. When I asked about the war in Burma, she gave no answer, and tears formed in her eyes. When I asked what she likes to do, what she wants to do when she is older, the tears burst.

  “She weeps,” my translator whispered, “because she is ashamed. She cannot think of an answer.” Her attitude echoed the somber mood of her father, and I thought of Siha, how he took his cues from his mother, and I looked at Thinzanoo’s father. Her younger brother, Ostar, drew a picture of their father (Figure 9). In the picture, he has short, neat hair. He wears a tie and a clean pink shirt. The man sitting beside us looked nothing like this. His prosthetic leg was dirty and chipped a bit. His hair was long and tangled. He had heavy, dark bags around his eyes. The children, very hesitant to speak with an outsider, deferred everything to their father. They looked on him with respect and admiration. In his face I saw weariness. He was not the man in the picture anymore. Fleeing his homeland, he had left that man behind. Now he found himself helpless to protect his family, depressed and uncertain. His own fear of the bor
der, of the outside world infected his children and made them extremely nervous as well. I wondered how greatly their outlook would improve if their father could receive counseling or an opportunity to restore some of the confidence he lost when he lost his leg.

  The children have no future. They cannot go home, they cannot settle in Thailand. Their entire world has shrunk to the size of the room on the twelfth floor of a Bangkok tenement, their worldview shaped by their melancholy and anxious father. They do not fear the mangy dogs outside or the crime in the bustling metropolis because they do not know it; they never experience it. They never experience anything outside.

  I asked them to draw pictures of Bangkok as they saw it. The children’s drawings showed no resemblance to the city itself.

  “I drew a mountain and the sun rising over clouds. I drew our house and a tree with a woman. The woman is growing a flower,” said Thinzanoo. She drew rural Burma, essentially, a pleasant scene from a life she desires, a life that has been closed off to her (Figure 10). Without the ability to assimilate into the new country, her only resource for images in her imagination is the memory of the past.

  Their father looked at the drawing and smiled, his own eyes growing moist. His children were being erased from the earth, disappearing from reality in their fluorescent little room, and he was helpless to stop it happening. He looked at the drawing of Burma for a long time without speaking. The whole family looked quietly at the serene pictures of home, drawn from imaginations battered and bruised by loneliness. The whole family was homesick for the land in their imaginations, homesick for the land of pictures.

  Another family I met later that day found themselves in an even worse situation. They were not registered with UNHCR and were running out of time. M——and his wife worked for a pro-democracy organization in Burma, fighting for freedom of expression and the people’s right to self-determination. They are members of the Burmese ethnic group, the majority group in Burma. When economic conditions became too harsh and the threat to his family due to his political activities became too great, M——fled Burma and arrived with his wife and two children in Bangkok. They lived in a windowless eight-by-ten room, also under the harsh glow of fluorescent lights. The neighbor’s television blared through their walls. It sounded like a violent action movie was on. The family had lived in Thailand for five months.

  “I can’t play too loud or the police will come,” M——’s ten-year-old son, Caleb, said. M——explained that just the day before, one of his neighbors was arrested and sent back to Burma with his family because the Thai neighbors complained to the police. The children were playing too loudly, shouting during a hiding game, which annoyed the older people on the floor who just wanted to watch television in peace.

  “I do not know what will happen to them now,” M——said.

  “I’m afraid of the police and the Thais,” Caleb said as he played with the toys his parents brought with them. “I want to go to school.” Even if it was legal for him to attend a Thai school, even if he spoke Thai, he could be arrested if he ventured out onto the street, or even lingered in the hallway of his building for too long. An aid agency that provides help to these families told me that of the 160 children under their care in Bangkok, they have successfully managed, with the help of UNHCR, to get two enrolled in school, with no guarantees for the children’s security from the police.

  Caleb’s only forays into the outside world involved going across the street to the market with his mother. He did this about four times a week. The trips lasted about forty-five minutes. They were his only time in the sunlight. His skin had grown sallow.

  “We leave the light on all the time because there are no windows and it is so dark in here. There is no ventilation. I worry about the health of my sons. We have moved four times already, to avoid the authorities,” M——said. “The children do not feel safe, as they know we will move again very soon. We are always moving.”

  M——cannot work in Thailand so his family relies on the assistance of NGO’s illegal operations to help them. These programs can be shut down at any moment. Their offices, like all the NGO offices, are watched. The families receive cash assistance for food and health care, but there are no programs to help the children, no opportunities for the illegal children in Bangkok to socialize and interact with other children. They live in fear and in hiding. Now, after five months, M——can no longer receive assistance as an unregistered migrant. UNHCR, at least, must recognize him so his family can continue to receive aid. For now, he has to try and find work, where he will most likely be exploited. If he is not paid, if the conditions are unsafe, he has no recourse with the law. There is nowhere he can turn.

  For these children there is little hope for the future. Their parents fear returning to Burma, yet Thailand will not accept them. Of the twenty children I interviewed in Bangkok, not one felt safe in their new surroundings and every one wanted only to go to school and to play with other children. They have no homeland, no community. Their parents are nearly helpless to support them. The outlook for their future extends only as far as the four walls of the rooms in which they try to survive. Their drawings all look the same: dream worlds of home, as it probably never was, with the peaceful hills of Burma gently fading into the sky (Figure 11).

  Outside of the cities, in the areas near the Thai-Burma border, the problems faced by the children were similar but the mechanisms for survival changed, and support from a larger community of migrants strengthened them. In border areas, entire economies have developed around the refugees, economies that support the police, a variety of smugglers, border guards, and gangsters.

  The border town of Mae Sot is a rough and tumble place. According to the Lonely Planet guidebook, there used to be a billboard in the center of town that read: “Have fun, but if you carry a gun, you go to jail.” The illegal gem trade flourishes. In a café where I liked to spend my afternoons sipping beer and pretending to be a tourist, I watched many packages of gold and jewels change hands. Men were always coming and going, drinking a beer or eating quickly while they juggled cell phone calls and exchanged glances at the street.

  During the day, the town was charming. Twenty-foot-tall golden statues of the Buddha rose from the jungle, their heads jutting out above the tree line and glistening with beads of water. It rained every day in September. The white minarets of the Masjit noor-ul-Islam mosque rise behind the low buildings. Every day I would hear the muezzin issuing the call to prayers, which echoed through the streets, through the trees, and drifted to the hills in the distance.

  Allah-u-Akbar Allah-u-Akbar! Hayya ‘alas salah Hayya ‘alas salah.

  The municipal market sat behind one of the three mosques in the city. On my way into a narrow alley that opened into the market, a group of street kids surrounded me, poking and pulling at my clothes. I love markets because they tell you secrets about a new city, and they are always filled with eager children. This market was no exception.

  Their faces were smeared with sandalwood powder, a traditional Burmese practice. The powder has many functions: it’s good for the skin, it keeps one cool, and it’s a fashionable thing to wear. It also expresses certain cultural affiliations. In Bangkok, the Burmese could not have worn it on the street, even if they spoke Thai. It would have been a dead giveaway and gotten them thrown right into jail or deported. In Mae Sot, I noticed the Burmese walked openly on the streets, speaking their language without fear. I gave the kids a little candy that I kept in my pocket, made a few faces that they didn’t think were very funny, and turned into the market. The kids were having a great time laughing at me as I walked away, though they quickly returned to the main street where they had more room to kick around the ball that one of them held under his arm.

  In the market the smells were overwhelming. The tables overflowed with roasting meats, raw fish, fried fish, salted fish, raw chickens, live chickens squawking and pooping in baskets. Women shoved roti and chapati in my face, ladles full of curry, buckets of live eels.
They offered T-shirts and cassettes and sandals. The street burst with shops, tables, stands, and carts. People squeezed between them, bikes dodged through the crowd. Everyone cleared the way for a passing police motorcycle, keeping his or her head down until the bike got through.

  “Security service,” a boy selling T-shirts said to me in English, making a little gun with his hand and laughing. “Boom-boom,” he said for some reason. His T-shirts intrigued me. They bore hagiographic images of Thai and American pop stars and beatified pictures of Osama bin Laden. The boy behind the table wore one of the Bin Laden T-shirts, perhaps oblivious to its meaning to me. He made a peace sign. It happened to be September 11, 2002, exactly one year since the terrorist attacks. When I walked away, the boy shouted after me, still in English, “Have a nice day!”

  Everyone I passed gave me a once-over. There were a few beggars, but mostly the shops bustled with loud commerce and peals of laughter. Over half the people I saw wore face powder. Discussions cascaded over each other. After Bangkok, I was shocked to see so many people living unafraid. It was not until nightfall when I saw the security services again that I understood the way the town really worked.

  Two colleagues and I were crowded onto the back of a little motorbike. I was the most junior of the group, so I hung precariously off the back. We set out to get a drink at a local bar popular among expatriates. The roads in Mae Sot all seemed to be one way. I marveled that the same malicious urban planner that made driving in Boston impossible had found his way out to this Southeast Asian border post. In order to get where we wanted to be, we had to go down the main road past our destination, turn onto a small side street, and cross to the other main road that went the opposite direction. The side streets were unlit, and our hearts froze for a moment when we saw a group of uniformed policemen standing in the middle of the small bridge that we had to cross. My mind raced back to the checkpoints of the Congo and unscrupulous soldiers with submachine guns. Checkpoints can be the most dangerous places in the world. In the Congo, a few wrong words at a checkpoint had nearly landed me in jail.