A Clever Lady and a Burmese Baby

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Burma is a closed off country. Before spending time on it’s border I’d never heard much in the way of specific news or descriptions of problems in Burma, only that it was a rough place. Indeed it is a rough place, particularly for those who born into the Karen people group. From what I understand the Karen sided with the Allies in WWII, which was fine until the war was over and the allies forgot them in the treaty writing and left them at the mercy of their Japan sympathizing countrymen. Ethnic cleansing is the name of the game the controlling party in Burma now plays. One of the best health decisions a Karen person can make is to sneak across the border into Thailand and try to make a new life. Life in Thailand is relatively safe, but not easy: no I.D., illegal status, no access to health care or property rights. Being a refugee is a real drag, but when the alternative might involve literally being dragged down the street behind a truck, beaten, and killed, you go the refugee route if you can manage.

Bamboo School, where we spent the last ten days, exists to help Karen refugees, particularly orphans and other option-less children. Catherine Riley-Bryan Is affectionately known as “Momo Cat” by her “Bamboo Kids” and friends in Thailand. She told us that even though she’s old enough to be grandmother to her bamboo children, she prefers the Thai word for motherly endearment (Momo) since grandmothers are called “Pee Pee” (grandfathers, as it so happens are called “Poo Poo,” perfect right?).

Before Momo came to work in Thailand she did everything from earning the prestigious honor of Business Woman of the Year in New Zealand and Australia, to piloting rescue helicopters, to marrying a Manchester United footballer and traveling the Premiere League circuit on the arm of an Athlete. As Jeremy put it, “this woman has really lived.” Eventually she and her footballer settled down happily on a ranch in New Zealand, but when her husband died God began leading her through another astonishing series of events that has ultimately landed her on the Thai-Burma border having a rip-roaring good time running an orphanage, clinic, and ambulance service.

Momo is the kind of lady who gets things done and has a good time doing it. For example (and examples abound -I can’t listen quite as fast as she can tell stories), she was having a problem with some of the villagers releasing their goats on her property and eat her seedlings at night. She didn’t know who the culprits were so she corralled the goats and spray painted them hot pink. The next morning she hopped in her truck and drove down the hill till she spotted the hot pink goats, then had some words with their darker pink (blushing) owners.

It was inspiring to see how Momo serves God, and to hear her excitedly explain how thankful she is that God has given her a purpose. Even the lady who has “lived” finds she’s getting a lot more out of life now, as a servant to the poor, than she was back in her wheeling dealing days.

For my part, with only ten days at Bamboo School, I caught the vision but couldn’t quite figure out my place in the work. Hard work is a value that Momo is instilling in her kids, and they‘re catching on. There’s a schedule for chores; by the time I’d go hunt down a broom I’d come back to find the girls had finished sweeping already. The boys took Jeremy and me to cut Bamboo in the jungle for a new wall in the main building (the dorms and guest houses are straight out of Swiss Family Robison: floors, walls, and ceilings all from bamboo -these are two story structures, too). We got schooled in machete technique, and learned that, at home in Burma, these boys would likely have been cutting teak wood in addition to bamboo, and loading it on the family elephant (evidently it’s quite common for a successful family group to have an elephant, a strong one runs about $2000).

If I said, “I learned more from the bamboo kids than I possibly could have taught them,” I wouldn’t be being philosophical, I didn’t know how to split bamboo to make flooring, how to cut jack fruit, or how to feed a baby. I’m slightly ashamed but largely relieved to say that I still don’t know how to change a diaper -a skill that’s important for the older bamboo kids to know since they take care of their baby brothers and sisters.

One thing Jeremy and I know a little bit about is pouring concrete without much in the way of tools. We were able to put some of our energy, and your “Good Samaritan” money, to that end. We spent a day running plumbing and building forms in preparation for the pour, but the pouring day was the most fun: Bucket brigades with a median age of nine. I had a good laugh when I remembered and hummed the “Little Rascals” theme song. After we finished the floor for the “club house,” we “he-men” took the afternoon off and headed for the swimming hole. Everything was O’Tay.

-bjorn2bwild

Squeeze the Throttle and Point ‘Er South

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I fell in love with traveling all over again on the second half of our two-wheeled Vietnamese odyssey. My South Vietnamese premonitions were unfounded. The dense, feverish, mosquito infested jungle I expected never showed itself. There were wide open spaces and green hills under blue skies that had me wondering if we’d taken a wrong turn and ended up in Tanzania. The mighty “former rain” which had so thoroughly inundated our first week on the road left us unimpressed by the “latter rain” (about 15 minutes of drizzling…refreshing, really) two days before we reached Saigon. Mostly it was blue skies and balmy breezes. Perfect riding weather.

Bike trips are for dreaming. With nothing to listen to but the wind and the sound of my own thoughts, my imagination went totally bonkers and I got really excited about life, and the things I’d like to do with mine. I changed prospective medical specialties three times during the 800km of Ho Chi Minh highway that separates Hoi An and Saigon. Also it became momentously important to me that I own and run several businesses before I die: hot dog stand, peach orchard, ergonomic design studio, and ice cream parlor. As if all that and medicine won’t keep me busy enough, I solemnly vowed I would learn to sew (well enough to make suits and gowns) and that my culinary repertoire was in grievous need of expansion and would require an ample dose of attention when I get home. Do they have online Home/Ec classes for travelers?

We covered half the length of Vietnam in the last three days of riding. We were up with the sun, and in the saddle almost until dark. Every couple of hours we’d stop to stretch our legs and treat the sweaty hinder regions to some revitalizing breezes. A motorcycle trip, as it turns out, isn‘t a bad past time for a guy who‘s foot is out of order. I could keep up fine as long as we were on the road, it was the stopovers where Jeremy would have to pick up the slack in running errands and getting food and water.

Jeremy, as a rule, makes excellent consumer decisions, so I was happy in my handicap state, to leave hunting and gathering up to him. Everything he scrounged up was great, with the exception of the onion ice cream. That was foul. However, the irony in the fact that the ice cream truck, in rural Vietnam, drove off with it’s speakers blaring “It’s a Small World After All” was sufficiently delicious to leave me with a palatable memory of the experience as a whole.

As we finally entered Saigon I remember thinking passively, “Don’t Crash! Don’t Crash! Aaah there are cars everywhere I‘m gonna die!!.” Luckily I was able to postpone my foray into the maniacal throng thanks to the fact that I ran out of gas. What luck! After I hop-pushed my bike (still in one foot mode) to the next gas station, I realized I was having electrical problems to boot and had to use the kick start to get her going again (her name was Christine by the way…I christened her Christine for the sheer joy of making such an alliterative declaration). .

The goal was to drive to Saigon and sell the bikes. Christine made it to Saigon, and I suppose I should be thankful, but upon arrival, as a bid farewell I suppose, she hit me with a $25 repair bill (this might not sound like much, but it was by far the most expensive tab I ever paid on her behalf…stuff’s cheap in Vietnam). Christine got a makeover and I posted her on Craigslist and also taped a for sale sign to her. She sold easily, and for a good price, as did Jeremy’s bike who’s name escapes me at the moment.

Speaking of paying tabs on behalf of girls, I had a date in Saigon with a Vietnamese girl. Her name translates as “Picture” and as far as those go I thought she is well composed. She has a really cute smile. My attempts to get her to smile turned quickly into flirting, which turned into a date. She picked me up on her motorbike and we went to a restaurant on the river for rice-paper wraps. I was worried that people would think she was a prostitute and that I had hired her (a tragic amount of that business does go on in Saigon), but I think our laughter was too genuine to create that sort of confusion. It was a really fun date, her English vocabulary can‘t keep up with her sassiness. I thought it was cute when she would talk herself into a corner and want to express herself so badly that it looked as if she might explode. She said I could only be her boyfriend if I stay to live in Saigon. It didn’t work out.

Crash

“Uh oh. I’m gonna hit him.” I said to myself as a topsy turvy motorbike laden with a towering bundle of sugar cane veered unexpectedly into the full illumination of my headlight. My next thought was, “huh, so this is what it’s like to slide on asphalt.” By the time friction had finished grating me to a stop my main thought was, “man, I‘m afraid that may not have been healthy for my skin.”
Nothing hurt too badly as my body automatically dragged my motorbike to the side of the road and felt around for belongings that had escaped their bungees during the main event. I was happy to be alive and conscious, and it wasn’t until I managed to move my whole junk-show off of the tarmac that I realized the gravity of my situation: It was dark (we hadn’t yet reached a town with a hotel…so we had continued into the night), Jeremy was gone, my motorbike didn’t look good, I was in a very rural part of a third world country, I could feel my shoe was filling with blood, I had no idea where the nearest clinic was, no one around me knew any words in English or had any way to help me get anywhere.
Thankfully the guy I hit was fine (had he been hurt I might have found myself in jail or the recipient of some vigilante justice). He pulled his motorcycle to the side of the road and started giving me emphatic instructions. He may as well have been speaking Vietnamese (uummmm.) Another guy came along and picked my bike up off of it’s side. He started bending and kicking mangled parts back into alignment. He pressed the starter and, hallelujah, it started!
I fumbled around for ten minutes, reattaching my belongings to my motorbike and wondering what I should do. I hoped Jeremy would realize I wasn’t behind him anymore and come back. Every time a bike would pass I would shout his name. I couldn’t see who was on the passing bikes behind their blinding headlights, and since I was off to the side of the road I wanted to make sure Jeremy didn’t pass me if he came back looking for me.
Jeremy hadn’t returned and I knew I needed to get some medical attention. I didn’t know how bad I was bleeding, so I was worried that if I was really bleeding I might get light-headed and crash again if I tried to ride to the next town. I had a prayer and started down the road.
Jeremy was waiting on the side of the road less than a mile away, it was a big relief to see him. I took my shoe off so we could assess the damage. I couldn’t see the biggest gash (it was on the bottom of my foot) but Jeremy told me it was big. He wrapped my foot tightly in his bandana, but then I couldn’t fit it back into my shoe. I asked him if I could just wear his shoe, I figured his size 15 could accommodate my foot, bandage and all. He gave me his shoe and we started trying to figure out how to get to the next town that might have a clinic.
We were relying on sign language to ask for help and directions and we weren’t getting anywhere fast. Finally (this was a huge answer to prayer) we happened upon a kid who spoke English. He didn’t speak well, in fact he probably knew about 14 words, but it was enough to tell him I would pay him to lead us to the next town that had a hospital. We followed him about 15km to Thai Hoa. I rode with my injured foot slung up over the handle bars to keep it elevated.
The hospital was exceedingly primitive. A man lay grimacing on a table with a splint on his leg that consisted of two sticks bound together with a bunch of tape. As his friends hoisted him up from the table and carried him hurriedly through the door they came within a centimeter of slamming his injured leg into the door jam. I wondered what kind of care I could expect.
I presume the man who worked on me was a doctor. He said (through our 14 word interpreter) that we would have to come to his house so he could stitch me up. It seemed curious that he couldn’t do it at the clinic, but there was no way to ask why. We struck out again on our bikes, following the doctor across the small town and down a dimly lit alley to his home. I knew I was about to get some serious stitches, and I was pretty nervous, wondering whether or not this guy had any anesthetic.
Turns out he did have anesthetic, and other than the fact that his flea ridden dog sat right next to him as he stitched me up, it was a fairly sterile procedure. He produced several syringes and vials of mysterious serums which I hoped were antibiotics. All the labels were in Vietnamese so I just had him hit me with everything he had.
So now it hurts to walk, but luckily it doesn’t hurt to ride a motorbike. So we’ve continued our trip down Vietnam. The interesting thing now is that we’ve realized we would have been better off buying jet-skis than motorbikes. The flooding they mentioned in the news. They weren’t joking. We’ve driven through torrential downpours for the last few days. I’m trying to keep my foot from getting infected, but it’s a bit tricky since it has to spend it’s days in my soggy right shoe.
Now we’re in Hue, the old capital of Vietnam. I’ve made an invalid out of myself, mostly laying in bed keeping my foot dry. Jeremy runs errands and comes back wide-eyed with stories of people in canoes going down main roads. I really wanted to do a motorcycle trip because I was feeling like the train/bus method lacked a certain element of adventure. It hasn’t been hard to find adventure on the motorbikes. Not hard at all.

-bjorn2bwild