Welcome to the Wild West in the East

We crossed into Burma for a day trip to renew our Thai visas and spent the day wandering through the dusty little border town of Myawadi. It kinda reminds us of set from M*A*S*H* when they would show 1950's small village Korea. It was a bit timeless with the bicycle rickshaws, no cars, no pavement, sweltering heat, traditional Karen clothing, women carrying all manner of sale objects on their heads.

One pic that escaped us was a striking young girl with a dark complexion and the white Burmese make-up on her cheeks wearing a brightly patterned skirt and carrying a platter of sliced ripe red watermelon on her head. The most refreshing watermelon I never had.

March announcements:
Happy Birthdays to Lubricantes Jimmy, John Bon Jovi and Alan Greenspan!
Best Wishes to New Orleans on Mardi Gras and Happy Lent to all you sinners!

Novice Monks in Mae Sot

Novice Monks in Mae Sot
Originally uploaded by maujb.

There were some moments of respite from the intensity of the clinic and Burmese/Thai refugee politics. This afternoon, I wandered into a Wat on the edge of town and had a nice chat with these novice monks.

Crocodile Rock in Mae Sot

Yes, we work hard and we play hard too! We had a few sweaty rockin' karaoke nights at the Crocodile Tear in downtown Mae Sot. We sang for our Singha's many an evening and even did a decent medley of Crocodile Rock, Benny and the Jets, and Saturday Night's alright (for fighting) to an adoring crowd. Our good friend Min (above) sang harmonies and kept us well lubricated with Singha's on ice and the odd Black Russian.

Happy Valentines Day/ Happy 2nd Anniversary!!!

Everyday's the 14th . . .
Happy Anniversary to Mau and Don!!!

If I could find a mountain top around here I'd climb it and shout, "I LOVE MY DONNIE!!!!!"
I know everyone is sticking their fingers down their throats right now trying to puke on their computer screens, but I don't even give a care! I LOVE DON!

Okay now Don is blushing and puking!

For our special day we went out to the nicest bestest restaurant in 100 km. Khao Mao Khao Fung was designed by a Thai botanist and features babbling brooks flowing through manicured lawns from ponds full of colorful coi and catfish in a lake surrounded by palms, plumeria, hibiscus, and billions of orchids everwhere. The food is pretty good although they have a tendency to bring dishes other than the ones you ordered. And they have several baby elephants roaming the gardens playing mood music on drums and keyboards.

Mau's experience at Mae Tao Clinic

Arriving at Mae Tao Clinic is like rolling into hot 'n dusty ramshackle village of semi-permanent mismatched structures. It is literally a community of staff and patients living together on a medical campus. In the mornings there are lots of people milling around, mostly refugees, staff, patients and their families with a few volunteers here and there. There are a few stores too that sell cold beverages, fine Burmese foods, and essentials. You can see laundry hanging in the surrounding non-medical buildings, small makeshift kitchens scattered throughout cooking up breakfast or lunch, children playing in the dusty main road and lots of people healthy and sick sitting in the shade waiting.

We toured the facility and all its many buildings. I don't know what I was expecting it to be like but I was really impressed with the amount of servies available here. It is a regular hospital albeit lacking in the modern equipment, materials and the occasional sink. Services are available for primary care, in-patient departments for both adults and pediatrics, reproductive health, labor and delivery, HIV counseling & testing, a surgical department, prosthetics rehab manufacture and fitting, and a school to train nurses and medics. The entire clinic/hospital is staffed by refugees from Burma.

As volunteers on our first day we were asked to attend to the Adult and Pediatric Out-Patient Departments. I took the Pediatric department by default since Don's expertise is Adults and I currently don't have an expertise. A lot of the patients travel over the border from Myanmar to get health care so it was usually more than just "We're here for a 1-month check-up!" Most of the children had something serious going on. Sometimes I could feel a lump growing in my throat just seeing all these tiny children with malnutrition, strange infections or fevers sitting listless in their parent's arms. When it was slow I would wander over to the pediatric inpatient department and follow up on patients we had admitted earlier that day.

The inpatient department is a huge room divided into individual spaces with wires strung across the ceiling and numbers taped to the wire above each space. Each patient/family got a space with a plastic mat on the floor and a plastic folder for their chart. Some of the patients have been there for weeks. My first day there there were multiple children with TB meningitis, some with Malaria and Malarial encephalitis, a couple being treated for severe malnutrition and young boy with Cerebral Palsy who was abandoned by his father when his mother died from Malaria two months ago. Just heartbreaking cases.

Around clinic you can hear plenty of language variations. Although, I couldn't tell the difference between Thai, Karen or Burmese if you threatened me with a handful of hot chilie peppers. All the charting is done in English and the nurses and medics are expected to learn English. But in a environment where there are hardly any native english speakers most of the staff speak their native languages amongst themselves. So for most of the staff their english skills aren't enough to make up for the average volunteer's meager Thai, Karen or Burmese. My role quickly evolved into that of a medical english instructor. I developed lectures around subjects the nursing medic staff wanted to hear and provided hand-outs full of related medical terminolgy that they could use to improve their charting. Occasionally, the medics would consult me on patients but for the most part they were more proficient than I am with a majority of what they saw.

All in all I recieved more out of this experience than I brought. I thoroughly enjoyed working with the nurses, medics and other fellow volunteers. It was is an incredible opportunity to view the lives of these amazing survivors in this small volatile part of the world. And I'm sure I only scratched the surface.

Don's experience at Mae Tao Clinic

The medics and nurses at Mae Tao Clinic do incredible work with very few resources. They are young folks from the refugee camps on the Thai side of the Burmese border who are trained by other Burmese medics and the occasional western doctor, nurse or NP. They eat, live, work and study medicine and English on the clinic campus and may visit their families in the nearby refugee camps perhaps twice a year because of restrictions on movement within Thailand. There are about 1000 people living on the clinic campus at any one time and there are 3 meals a day provided for every worker, inpatient and their families.

My role at the clinic was of a consultant and a resource as the medics definitely run the show and do a very good job of it considering their level of education, training, and lack of treatment resources. I saw patients in the outpatient clinics alongside the medics and gave some tips on history taking and reviewed physical exam techniques. I learned a lot about tropical medicine and Karen/Burmese concepts of health and illness from the medics and patients.

I have been enjoying hanging out with the expats in Mae Sot. Everyone is working, teaching, volunteering in good NGO programs. But the special part of being here is the interactions with the patients, medics and nurses at Mae Tao Clinic. It has been an enlightening experience to hear the stories of survival, strength, perserverance and hope from these people.

N.D.W is a young woman of 18 who I had the pleasure of working with at Mae Tao. At 10 years, the Burmese military burned several houses in her villiage and she left with her family through the mountains and jungle to cross into Thailand. The Burmese military demand payment of money or food from villagers, often taking male children from their families for use as porters or as human landmine detectors. The female children may be forced into prostitution in an attempt to keep houses or crops. NDW's family safely crossed the border in 1997 to live in the Maela refugee camp near Mae Sot along with more than 30,000 other refugees. She has lived in Maela for 6 years, then came to Mae Tao for the last 2 year to train, work and live in the clinic campus. She is not allowed to leave the campus for any reason and risks arrest or detention, or repatriation to Burma if she is found out of camp borders by police. She has 3 sisters living in Maela camp and making Burmese-style clothing for sale in Thai communities. Her brother left to Bangkok to seek work illegally but he has not been heard from for 3 years and is believed in detention or dead.

Despite these dire living and working circumstances, the medics I spoke with have hope that one day they will be able to return to a democratic and peaceful Burma.

Mae Tao Clinic

Dr. Cynthia Maung had been out of medical school for a just a few years in 1988, when the military junta began arresting and murdering democratic activists, teachers, doctors, and many others. Chaos spread across the country, even reaching the small Karen village where Dr. Cynthia worked in a private clinic. She fled across the border into Thailand, walking through the jungle at night and sleeping in fields by day. She wound up in Mae Sot and lived in Huay Kaloke refugee camp. With help from foreign relief workers and Karen leaders, Dr. Cynthia started a makeshift medical clinic to care for refugees recovering from war wounds and malaria.
She expected to return to Burma in three months.

Nine years later, Dr. Cynthia is still on the border running Mae Tao Clinic. In that time, she has gone from sterilizing medical instruments in an aluminum rice cooker to running a clinic that treats more than 100,000 patients a year, delivers 5 to 10 babies a day, trains medics and nurses, provides prenatal checkups, childhood immunizations, HIV testing and counseling, and education about nutrition, sanitation and family planning. The is also a prosthetics department that provides prosthetics and rehab for landmine survivors and other amputees that is staffed by survivors of landmines. The clinic accepts money donations of any amount and definitely puts it to good use. Check out their website for more info on donations.
Time Magazine article on the clinic.

Because of restrictions by the Thai government the staff of the clinic as well the families of all the in-patients, all of whom are refugees of Burma, must live on-site of the clinic and are allowed to travel only back to Burma or the refugee camps. There are currently 1000 people living at the clinic.

While volunteering we have met many nice farangs who also spend their vacations doing good work. We worked with Dr Eva from Quebec and Dr. Jim from Taiwan. We've met Dr. Damien and Nurse Prue from Australia (pictured above) and enjoyed their company over many a meal. While choking on chilies and discussing whatever incredible things we experienced in clinic that day, we have repeatedly solved all the world's problems. If only the world would heed our advice.

For all you medical types who enjoy tropical medicine horror stories, check out Dr. Damien's blog. He's got the low-down on Meningeal TB, Malarial Encephalitis, eyeball abscesses and
the odd bird-flu sighting.

Mid-life Crisis Career Change

Thai Cookery Class
Originally uploaded by maujb.

The food in Thailand is absolutely beautiful! With the hot and tangy crunchy mango and papaya salads, the creamy spicey coconut curries and soups, and the flavorful fried rice dishes one might think we were approaching our Argentina level of girth. But the flavors of fresh basil, lemon grass, kir lime leaf, galangal, ginger and chilies of all colors, and varieties seem to have fat melting properties. Also the Singha beer is amazingly enough, FAT-FREE!

Inspired by the fabulous flavors and the complete dearth of Thai restaraunts in the U.S., Don has decided to open a Thai-Argentine restaraunt in Portland.

F*ck Tibet . . . Free Burma Now!

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is a nonviolent pro-democracy activist in Myanmar (Burma). In 1991 she won the Nobel Peace Prize for her peaceful and non-violent struggle under a repressive military regime.

One of her most famous speeches is the Freedom From Fear speech which begins:"It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it."

Aung San Suu Kyi is the daughter of Khin Kyi, a prominent Burmese diplomat, and General Aung San, who negotiated Burma's independence from the United Kingdom in 1947 and was assassinated by rivals in the same year. After leaving Burma to study and live in England, Aung San Suu Kyi returned to Myanmar in 1988 to care for her ailing mother. Heavily influenced by Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence, Aung San Suu Kyi entered politics to work for democratisation, helped found the National League for Democracy on September 27, 1988, and was put under house arrest in 1989. She was offered freedom if she would leave the country, but she refused.

In 1990, the military junta called general elections, which the National League for Democracy won decisively. Under normal circumstances, she would have assumed the office of Prime Minister. Instead the results were nullified, and the military refused to hand over power. This resulted in an international outcry and partly led to Aung San Suu Kyi winning the Sakharov Prize that year and the Nobel Peace Prize in the following one. She used the Nobel Peace Prize's US$1.3 million prize money to establish a health and education trust for the Burmese people.

She was released from house arrest in July 1995, although it was made clear that if she left the country to visit her family in the United Kingdom, she would be denied re-entry. When her husband Michael Aris, a British citizen, was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1997, the Burmese government denied him an entry visa. Aung San Suu Kyi remained in Burma, and never again saw her husband, who died in March 1999. She remains separated from their children, who remain in the United Kingdom. Suu Kyi remains under house arrest presently.

In 2001, Irish rock band U2 released the single "Walk On", which was written about and dedicated to Aung San Suu Kyi. "Walk On" was banned by the junta.

Aiya Cafe, Mae Sot, Thailand

Aiya Cafe, Mae Sot, Thailand
Originally uploaded by maujb.

We arrived in Mae Sot on Feb 6 for a month of volunteer work and Thai country living. Mae Sot is a Burmese-Chinese-Karen-Thai trading outpost consisting of legal and black-market transactions, especially gems, and is home to an extra-ordinary number of NGOs.

Riding bikes around town, we saw Thai soldiers, Karen women in traditional dress and makeup, Burmese men in longyis (sarong, lava lava), families of four riding past on a single moped, and many a paleface NGO worker swilling a fruitshake or a Singha.

Mau at Wat Pho

Mau at Wat Pho
Originally uploaded by maujb.

Wat Pho includes the largest reclining Buddha and the largest collection of Buddha images in Thailand, as well as the country's earliest center for public education.

The reclining Buddha barely fits in the shelter and doesn't EVEN fit in a camera view-finder. It measures 146 meters long and 115 meters high, and illustrates the passing of Buddha into nirvana.

Lil' Donnie n' Kublah Kahn

Lil' Donnie n' Kublah Kahn
Originally uploaded by maujb.

Politics are heated in Thailand this week as 100,000+ protesters filled a park calling for the resignation of the Prime Minister Thaksin (pronounced toxin) and investigation into a series of major swindles over the last several years by this PM.

The latest of these swindles involves the selling off of a family telecom business three days after new Thai Telecommunication Act (2006) passed on Friday January 20th. Thaksin's family sold Shin Corporation to Temasek Holdings with tax liability exemption. The family netted about 73 billion baht (about $1.88 billion) tax-free from the buyout, exploiting a regulation that individuals (as opposed to corporations) who sell shares on the stock exchange pay no capital gains tax.

Another swindle involves conversion of the pegged-Baht to floating status and insider currency trading, as well as multiple government mega-project bid-rigging Halliburton-isms.

There is a hastily called election planned for April 2 but it is being boycotted by all opposition groups.
Should be an interesting month here in the capital.

Thai "Fear Factor" Buffet

Thai "Fear Factor" Buffet
Originally uploaded by maujb.

Bugs, bugs, and more bugs! Everyone loves the bugs, huh.

Well, here you have it. Crickets, locusts, worms, maggots, roaches, beetles. Whatever you want to crunch on or chew with your Lib-Eye steak, flied lice with clispy celilly, or clispy pok, you can find in the markets in Thailand.

Mmmmmmmmm . . . crunch!

Floating Market, Thailand

Floating Market, Thailand
Originally uploaded by maujb.

Land is at a premium at Bangkok markets and a few of these markets spill over into the waterways. We walked the plank on to this floating market to inspect the seafood. You point and they cook it in a flash with a wok. Snakehead fish soup anyone?

In another part of the market was a Karaoke stage where the local law enforcment moonlighted as crooners. Don't quit your day jobs gentlemen!

There shined a shiny demon . . .

There shined a shiny demon . . .
Originally uploaded by maujb.

This post is a tribute to Tenacious D. This is just a tribute. We listened to Tenacious D in every country we've visited. And we're looking forward to their upcoming film, "The Pick of Destiny" upon our triumphant return to the U.S. Booyah!

Wat Phra Kaew & Grand Palace also known as the Temple of the Emerald Buddha is like a buddist disneyland with gleaming stupas, polished red and green roof tiles, golden flaming gables accenting the various temples, and mosaic encrusted pillars are all a shrine to the Emerald Buddha who is guarded by fantastically decorated mythical giants. We didn't get any pictures of the Emerald Buddha for fear of having our heads chopped off.

Super Duper Golden Grand Palace, Bangkok

Super Duper Golden Grand Palace, Bangkok
Originally uploaded by maujb.

We arrived in Bangkok in early February after a grand night of luxury in one of Mumbai's 5-star hotels. India was lovely and we probably left too soon . . . it was nothing like we expected.

Bangkok, on the otherhand, was exactly as we expected right down to neon lights, loads of crap and trinkets for sale, and the drunk and puking 20-somethings (both farangs and Thais) on Khao San Rd.

"Hey did you hear the King had a baby? So, today only there is a special sale at all the gem shops, no sales tax! But you have to buy today!"

Welcome to Bangkok!