The Playground of Human Identity
We are sharing a series of journal entries that were sent to us as an essay submission for our website. The author, JH, includes the following message: The following entries from my journal along the Burma-Thai border were first shared more than 18 years ago. On the advice of a respected teacher, they were distributed only on paper, so as to protect involved parties while raising awareness. Later, when the Internet became available, many of us still hoped in our hearts that these descriptions would soon become obsolete. Finally, I offer these words here in realizing that certain details remain far too accurate. May they bring benefit. Please forgive my youthful ignorance and arrogance. Errors are my own.
“Whichever country they live in, the violence has already occurred; it lives in the dreams and visions of the people, in the cells that constantly re-create the physiological body.”
Burma Border Journals #3
My young friend is gone teaching English; he is one of the folks with whom I rode South along the Moie River this past weekend. By gone I mean that he has finally met the group that he’ll be teaching to over the next three months, and it’s all a big secret. No one can know the organization with which he is affiliated. No one can know the group to whom he has been assigned. Thus, he must live with his students from now on. The local headquarters for such covert behavior as second language training is unmarked and moves periodically, but those who pay attention know even the most clandestine detail of its operations.
Another new foreign and non-medical colleague will be going soon too. No one that I know understands what exactly he does, but he’s around the guesthouse for weeks to months at a time and is quite well-acquainted with various mysteries of the town and surrounding countryside. I like to imagine sometimes that he works for the Central Intelligence Agency. In these parts such things are not as far out they might seem.
Last evening the most recent wave of interviewers for the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) arrived. Three of them are staying at the guesthouse. The others will lodge at the East end of town. How it works is this: The United Nations (UN) sees that people are suffering and goes around trying to get countries like Canada and the United States to offer a new start to the refugees. These countries in turn say, ‘Okay, we’ll take ten persons or we’ll take twenty but with these specific qualifications...’ Criteria might include an age within the child- bearing range say between 20 and 42 years, a negative chest x-ray for tuberculosis, negative serologies for other infectious diseases, and specify that the refuge-seeker be a skilled laborer or educated to some standard. Ultimately, the best and healthiest young men of the tribe, those most productive and often with budding leadership potential, are offered the chance at freedom. What they don’t realize is that the golden land of their dreams does not exist, and although with hard work and many hours at low-end service jobs they shall rise above abject poverty, isolation ensues. Geographically distanced from their community, culturally different from their colleagues, hour after hour working farther and farther away from themselves and from their family if they have one, they sleep between matching clean sheets, eat food free from maggots.
Whichever country they live in, the violence has already occurred; it lives in the dreams and visions of the people, in the cells that constantly re-create the physiological body. Only love is big enough to contain it, only kindness and inclusivity can vibrate at a frequency that jostles and sloshes the contents of each cell back into balance. The UN interviewers look like kids, small children with big academic degrees and the power to determine the courses of lives. One of the three interviewers makes it clear that her role in doing pure good is not up for discussion. In wielding such authority, there is a human tendency to persuade ourselves that we’re doing the right thing. When viewed in terms of either-or polarities, evaluating outcomes on a larger scale threatens the validity of that self which we have created to funnel our precious time and energy, our life force. It is too scary for some to voluntarily place the identity at stake. If it were a sandbox here, I’d say what they do is okay, enabling fragmentation, preventing the teaching of sustainable resource use practices, robbing an entire tribe of its future existence. At the end of the day, we’d pack up our toys to go home.
If this were all a playground, we’d share a meal and sleep safely, then come to play again tomorrow at thinning and depleting the herd, together until we get it. In this case, we self- proclaimed ‘helpers’ stay in a beautiful guesthouse in town, while even the trained medics cannot leave the clinic compound. We eat from a variety of fresh foods in large portions; they speak English but the only edible word they know is “rations.” We go home to the Western world where a few of us gone missing did not grossly alter the day-to-day course of the nation. Our sense of personhood is enhanced by an "international experience” on the curriculum vitae. Out of a warped sense of empowerment, we tell people what is wrong “over there” and how to change it, to fix it now. We obviously need to play a bit more first, to practice until we see that these humans do not constitute an object for manipulation based on our own embedded issues. We would play so that we can learn to co-exist, grow into the wisdom that we are co-existence itself. Fighting is already a failure in understanding and communication. Ultimately there is no exclusive identity subject to annihilation; only fear drives such convincing constructs.
The camps are where these people live because they cannot go home; the trip has no scheduled endpoint. Their last elders were our game pieces. Still when they want to shift the direction of dialogue they hug us around the shoulders gently, from behind, grinning, steering our gaze in line with their own. Then they look into our eyes as if asking, “Do you really get it?” This way is their resource for healing. The wounded being can rest tenderly when cradled by the collective heart, nursed patiently until spontaneously on its own time there is an opening to self-love, self- forgiveness, and ultimately global compassion. Is it any coincidence that from our culture of self-hatred we suggest separation? Who teaches whom?
Sometimes reluctance to engage arises in the form of preaching non-violence. There are those who place blame saying these people are aggressors too, that their army has been known to torture those it holds captive. Of course they do. War is a culture of violence, a breeding ground for hatred, greed, and contempt. When war happens there have already been multiple defeats, humanity gone awry, both sides included.
May this writing heighten awareness about the plight and great beauty of the people from all parts once called Burma. May it bring benefit to all who are described herein and to all who read it. May you be truly happy.