A quick dump follow-up

On January 26th, we returned to the dump again to visit and see how people were doing, as well as to speak with a number of people who had medical problems. If you read the last few posts on this blog, you saw a photo that showed most of a row of homes still standing after the majority of the homes on the dump were destroyed. This is a photo of the same row of houses.

Except, they're kind of missing now, because they were destroyed when the police returned later on:




And this is the machine that does double duty as trash organiser and destroyer of homes:




The trucks keep coming, though, so many of the dump residents return and try to eke out a living despite the risks they face with the Thai police. After all, there's a reason they chose to live on a dump rather than remain in Burma.




One young boy had a wound that was infected, so we convinced his mom to let us take him (and her, of course) to a clinic to get it cleaned out properly and check that he was generally healthy (at least, as healthy as one might expect for a child who lives on a garbage dump). Note the flies in mid-air, going in for more:




After being treated at the clinic, his leg looked much better and he said it was much less painful as well.




Later that afternoon, my favourite restaurant employee told us that there was to be a partial annular solar eclipse that day so I googled it and found out what time it would occur. At the midpoint of the time range, when the moon was covering the biggest area of the sun, I took this photo. If I had been in the precisely correct part of Indonesia or the ocean, this would have shown a thin white ring around a black circle.

Golfing in Thailand

In the afternoon (same day as the last post), it was time to de-stress a little with a relaxing activity - golf at the driving range! Yes, Mae Sot has a driving range, and the locals are too smart to use it in the midday heat so Pieter, Gareth, and I had no problem finding spots. None of us are golfers, but at the driving range, our main goal was just to hit the ball as far as we possibly could, using as much brute power as possible, rather than focusing on perfecting our technique.




My downswing looks more like a hockey slapshot than a golf swing, but I was hitting 150-200 metres regularly, and we weren't even using drivers! Not bad for our standards!




Gareth gets mixed up on occasion and launches the golf club rather than the ball. Luckily no one was hurt and the club was undamaged. He nearly made the 50 metre mark!




Back at the guesthouse, another guest kindly shared some of this crazy, crazy fruit with me. It's really tasty! You just take the outer casing off, and it's very similar to lychee inside (in fact, it's closely related). It's called Rambutan and you should eat it if you see it. It'll make you happy.




Here's a random photo from a different night. It's a toad that used to come by once every evening for a while, then stopped visiting, which means he's probably on display in the window at someone's local taxidermist in Australia.

More on the Mae Sot rubbish dump

The last post, 2 days ago, was a very short look at the Mae Sot garbage dump in Thailand. The problem with the people living on the dump (when I say "on the dump" I really mean it literally - most of the homes are actually on the piles of trash) is that they have no documents permitting them to be in Thailand. They live on the dump for a reason: it's better than the life they left behind in Burma.

For a number of reasons, which are far too complex for me to explain in a concise blog post, the Thai police regularly arrest 'illegal' Burmese migrants in Thai cities and deport them back to Burma. The dump has not been the regular focus of police efforts, until recently.

On January 23rd, my friend and I found out that the police had raided the dump site early in the morning and arrested any inhabitants who weren't quick enough to run away. They took the arrested people to the police station, where they sat them down in rows outside, and eventually drove them in a caged truck to the border crossing nearby where the migrants were handed over to the Burmese authorities. They were given no food during their detention in Thailand, and we found out later that they were also given no food during their detention in Burma, despite many toddlers and young children being among the hundred or so people arrested.

Here's a scan of the photo that was put in a national Thai newspaper the next day. The caption reads "Aliens: On the 23rd of January, 200 members from the Mae Sot police force, volunteer forces, municipality of Mae Sot, and Tak immigration department arrested illegal immigrants in the Mae Sot area. They arrested 116 people in total, made up of Burman, Bangladeshi, and Karen people."



Of course, there was no news story to go with it, just the caption. The official story was that they were illegal migrants who had crossed into Thailand and were working in the city, whereas we had met a number of the people recognisable in the newspaper, so we knew better.


The following are a few photos of what the dump looked like on the afternoon of the 23rd, after the police had left and a few of the migrants had returned from their hiding spots. As I mentioned in the last post, the Hyundai excavator normally used to keep the trash organised, was used for something else this time around: to destroy their homes.

Here's the "theatre" that was demolished. The dump residents had saved up to get a generator to show videos on occasion, mainly for the children, a huge expense to try and add some normalcy to their lives, and something of which they were immensely proud. The police stole the generator, fuel, television, etc.




Homes partly demolished. The excavator simply punched them in from the top, causing them to collapse. Of course, that was after the police kindly stole any food items, electronics, cooking equipment like pots and pans, from the homes.




Some of the homes in this row were left standing, supposedly because of confusion over a property line nearby, not wanting to upset the owner of the land.




The home in the foreground and some of the homes in the background were demolished, and the residents' few belongings lay strewn about, left in the frenzy of trying to run away.




This man was able to avoid arrest and is disassembling his home, to take the useful parts with him back to Burma. He will try and start over again in the jungle there, and hope for the best.




More destruction:




This man has loaded up everything he can salvage and is walking back to Burma. He's tired of the treatment in Thailand, but doesn't know whether life will be any better in Burma, which he left because of the impossibility to earn a living and the danger ordinary people face at the hands of the Burmese authorities.




--


We talked a lot with the few people who were around in the afternoon, and they asked us to return and spend the night, in case the police came back (they threatened to burn all the houses, and had even brought a fire truck with them on the first raid), to witness and perhaps moderate the potential for excessive use of force by the police. So we left, bought some food for ourselves and the small number of people who would be staying on site at night (most of them went into hiding at night), and returned. We slept for a few hours in someone's home that hadn't been destroyed, though the family wasn't there. At 4am we got up and went to the 'central' area of the dump to sit around and wait, and hoped that we were waiting for nothing to happen.

This young man woke up and started a fire around 5am to warm up (it gets very cold at night in Mae Sot in the winter). There's no shortage of old tires, which burn very well once you get them started, though the black rubber tire fumes are probably terribly unhealthy. He kept the fire from getting too big by throwing water on it occasionally.








One of the few homes left standing:




Another fire close-up. The wires are from the tire. The dump is littered with these fine metal wires which tried unsuccessfully to trip me constantly.




Two 30-second exposures. The second one is me with my headlamp, and my friend pushing the shutter release on my camera which was resting on the Hyundai excavator track (the linked plates on which it rolls).






Our friend warming his hands (it was really, really cold)




As daylight slowly arrived, people began to straggle back to the dump site to start searching for recyclables to earn money for food. Before starting, they generally sat around various tire fires to warm up a bit after a long and cold night. These are by far my two favourite photos from my visits to the dump:






Tire fire smoke and morning fog ensured the air was not clear in the morning...




The dump residents' pigs managed to evade the police quite easily the previous day. The people at the dump don't eat the pigs, as it's better for the community to sell them to local restaurants and use the money for cheaper food, which can feed more people. So, if you've been eating pork in Mae Sot recently, it might be one of these guys. What's the best thing about them, according to the dump inhabitants? There's almost no work involved in rearing them, as they don't stray too far and they don't need to be fed - they get very large by finding their own garbage to eat! Everybody wins :-)




Normally, when a garbage truck arrives, there are quite a few more people to sort through the new delivery, but many were still in hiding. The good news is that the women and children held in Burma were released later the same day. Most of them then walked back to the dump, which took quite a while. The men, however, remained detained, and I don't know even now whether or not they were all released eventually.




Working hard to help themselves, rather than joining the beggars in the streets of Mae Sot:




Everybody works. This is the same boy from the background of my two favourite photos above, a very nice kid:




The sun rising in the east, while dogs scavenge for scraps of edible trash:




There's a long and complicated story that follows this event, but you'll have to ask me in person to find out the details, as it's not really suitable at this point in time to be telling the whole story online.

The Mae Sot Garbage Dump

In a previous post in January, I posted a downloadable large-size photo of the dump in Mae Sot, Thailand. It is/was (the 'was' is the subject of a post to come in two days' time) home to many migrants from Burma, who pick through the trash to find recyclable plastic and certain types of metal, which they take to a depot to earn a minuscule (and I really mean minuscule) amount of money. My friend is making a documentary film about the situation, and he asked me to join him to help out a bit and take some photos as well. We met many of the dump inhabitants who shared their stories and the problems they encounter with the Thai authorities, as they are undocumented migrants. They want their story shared, even though there is a risk that more attention will increase Thai authorities' efforts to 'solve' the 'problem' of Burmese migrants, as they see it.

A man and his child at the dump:




There were a LOT of people living at the dump, around 300 according to many estimates.








After trash has been delivered by garbage trucks, the Hyundai excavator moves it onto the massive piles of garbage that rise skyward.






In the next post on this site in a couple days you can see another, far less innocent, activity the excavator was used for...

Umphang again! With the biggest waterfalls in Thailand

A week after my first trip to Umphang, I went down there again. My Spanish friend Carmen wanted to go, and we hoped we could find a way to get to the waterfalls this time, the ones for which Hans and I had refused to pay $15.

Just over halfway to Umphang, on the side of the highway, is Umpiem Mai refugee camp, with a population of around 15,000 refugees from Burma. On the other side of the border near here is where a lot of the recent fighting between SPDC, DKBA, and KNLA forces has been.

Carmen and I tried to visit the camp but smiles weren't enough to get us in. Still, we could take photos from the road!








The refugees are not allowed out of the camp by the Thai government, but they can walk out onto the highway without a problem. There's a checkpoint to stop them from going up to Mae Sot, though they could walk a very long walk to Umphang if they had a good reason.

We met a couple of young boys walking past as we took photos of the camp, so we let them use our cameras for a bit to teach them how, and they were really happy at the chance. They'd never held a camera before, and you could see in their facial expressions how proud they were to be trusted with something like a camera. Here's a shot of one boy, taken by another boy:




We made it safely to Umphang and I called my friend Praew, who works there (but was out of town the previous week), and she invited us to a late office Christmas party that evening, which was really fun as we got to meet a number of aid workers from different organisations and countries, mostly locals of course, and there were games (such as the balloon stomping game from a previous post) and LOTS of amazing food.

The next morning, we got up early, barely managed to start up our bikes in the freezing cold (yes, it gets cold in Thailand - it was below 5 degrees Celsius and humid), and off we went to the Thi Lo Su waterfalls. The ride was painfully cold for my hands, and there was a tremendous fog on the road so we couldn't go full speed, but the road was familiar so it was no problem to get there.

We arrived at about 830am and the gate man wouldn't let us take our motorbikes in, same as last week. So we went to the ticket lady and she said a truck would come by eventually and we could figure out a price. Only a few minutes later, a guy with a pickup truck full of Thai tourists showed up, and after a lot of haggling we managed to convince him to let us ride in the back of his truck (the Thai tourists were comfortably seated inside) for 50 Baht each (CAD $1.50). Nice!

Riding along the bumpy 25km road in the forest (which we eeeeasily could have done on motorbike, but it was nice to let someone else drive for once)




The falls were really nice; we had to walk a while to get to them, and they were quite picturesque. Mostly we just sat in the sunshine in front of the falls warming up, relaxing after the 25km bumpy ride sitting on the hard bed of the pickup truck.






We both had to be back in Mae Sot the next day, so after the waterfalls we had a quick bite to eat and we were off on the highway back to Mae Sot. Here's Carmen on her shiny red bike on one of the high mountain sections of highway:




All-in-all, a successful trip #2 to Umphang!

Umphang and a Round of Migrant Schools

On January 10, I was going to go from Mae Sot down to Umphang for a look around. I found out the night before that one of my motorbike buddies (Hans) from the roadtrip to Mae Sariang was heading down to Umphang the same morning, also alone, so I called him up and in the morning we met up and set off on our ride. It was a good drive, 1219 curves in the amazing Highway 1090 up and down mountains and through jungle, really beautiful. We chilled out in the tiny town of Umphang that evening, had the best fried rice I've ever had, and the next day we set off to see Thailand's biggest waterfalls at Thi Lo Su. However, when we arrived, they wanted to charge us each $15 to drive us down the 25km forest road, as they wouldn't allow us to take our motorbikes on the road, saying it was too dangerous.

We turned around, and on the way back to Umphang we visited a free, and big, cave. I'm no good at cave photos, but here's proof we were there:

Stalactites:




Hardened (very hardened) mud, where water fills large areas of the cave during rainy season. I wouldn't venture into this place at that time of year, you'd be taking a big risk...




I had to be back in Mae Sot for other engagements the following morning, so I took off on my motorbike alone for the 1219 curves and 164km back up to Mae Sot while Hans stayed another night in Umphang to look around and relax. On my way 'home' I stopped for the first time to get a closer look at a pagoda and waterfall I'd seen several times before, but I never did figure out how to get up there.




The next day was a visit to a Burmese migrant school often called the Monk School because there's a monastery associated with it, and the monks help the children with some teaching and some support in terms of food. The children monks attend the school with the other children. We took a big delivery of vegetables and spices for the school, as the children were not getting a balanced diet and needed veggies badly. We also arranged for several weeks' worth of deliveries, and a trusted friend agreed to try and round up funds to continue this in the future.

Here are the kids:


















While we were there, a World Education truck drove up and out jumped a friend of mine, Hongsar! This is the guy who taught me to drive a motorcycle back in November, and he works for another organisation that oversees many migrant schools. He was helping World Education deliver big boxes of items for a number of migrant schools in need, stuff like stationary and soccer balls. He asked me to join him for several more school visits, so I left my motorbike keys with James, who had hitched a ride with the truck of veggies, and he drove my motorbike home later while I jumped into the World Ed truck. We visited 4 more schools, quite distant from Mae Sot (the farthest was 48km away!), and it was really nice to see some new areas.

This is what we had to cross to get to one of the schools:






And these are some of the younger children of that school, excited and confused at the sight of a foreigner:




At another school, we arrived as a number of local women were returning home after a long day working on the farms:




The last school we visited was run by a rather ancient, but apparently devoted, couple. This is the main school building (more than one class, they don't have walls to separate them).




A few days later, I was back on the road to Umphang! More on that in the next post...