She's right.
We all know there are terrible things happening in Burma. Especially in Karen State. Karen Human Rights Group and Free Burma Rangers both have terrifying, infuriating pictures of death and disability happening weekly.
For example, a guy killed and burned in an attack last week. And here's a picture of a 13 year old boy after he tried to return to his land mine ridden village to check to the family's animals.
He had been forced to leave his village after an attack in June and had been living in a temporary site in Thailand, about 2 hours north of Mae Sot. That site is now being closed and the residents are being forced to either go back to their villages, which are now covered with land mines or move to Mae La, the already ridiculously overcrowded refugee camp, 45 minutes north of Mae Sot. Thai authorities are "heavily suggesting" the former. Eek.
However, for this post, I'm choosing to focus on the death that I've actually witnessed. Don't worry, it's mostly ants.
We'll start off easy. These ants are actually still alive in this photo, but we killed them shortly after. They're on the top of our bottle of oil. Who knew ants liked oil? If you look closely, they're also all over the spatula behind, and what I think you can't see if that they're on the wall too. Surprisingly, even though they're all over the top and the bottle, none went inside, so we were able to save the bottle and the oil. I don't get it. We have really sweet bananas on the table that get no attention, and yet a bottle of oil, they can't seem to stay away from.
This is a gecko we found frozen to death in our freezer. This picture is sad, but, not nearly as sad as what he looked like as he began to defrost. Yuck.
This is a mini Reese's Peanut Butter Cup with a hole eaten out by ants which were now frozen to death. Here's the story: My wonderful, loving mother sent me some Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and Reese's Pieces. We opened the Pieces and kept them in the freezer. First, they taste much better. Second, we have an ant problem so we put pretty much all open food in the freezer or fridge. The Cups stayed, unopened, in my room. When the Pieces were gone, we opened the Cups and then put them in the freezer. About 3/4 of the way into the bag, I unwrapped one and saw this. Gross. After careful inspection of the bag, we found a tiny hole the ants had made to get in, apparently when the bag was in my room. We opened some more cups and saw more ants. We also looked inside the bag and realized that there were dead ants all over the bag. Ugh.
Don't judge us, but no, this didn't mean that we stopped eating them. We just had to check a little bit closer to see if the ants had gotten to them first. Some were still ok! But we did take them out of the bag so that our hands didn't get covered with dead ant parts every time we went to take one out.
This is a picture of a baby mouse being eaten by ants. This was at about 7pm at night, and my roommates and I actually witnessed the whole progression from the furry dead baby mouse in the morning to this. We don't know where the mice came from or how they ended up dead in the walkway outside our house. We've never had any mice in the house. And, even though there were three dead baby mice in the morning, there was only this one at night. These are hard working ants!
Sidenote - Our friends' house has a major mouse problem. They set up traps and used peanut butter, but haven't had any results. Our (Burmese) office manager said that to catch mice here, you need to put chicken or fish in the trap. Hmm... regional mice taste preferences? Can you like peanut butter if you've never had it? Is it only American mice that like peanut butter? Do mice in France like Nutella?
Ok, no ants in this one. My roommate Kirsten and I decided to go on a nice, evening, sunset bike ride in our neighborhood. I had just started a new photo project after unnecessarily buying four disposable no-flash cameras. The idea was that I would take only the disposable camera and only take one picture of whatever it was I wanted to take a picture of and then be happy with whatever came out. But we were not expecting this.
While biking around the neighborhood behind ours we saw a building with an interesting looking top. Kirsten thought it was a temple, I thought it was a church, we both agreed it was worth checking out. When we got there, it turned out to be a pretty big parking lot, with a big fire, a really small Buddhist temple looking thing and nothing else. We biked around, didn't think much, and were about to leave. Then Kirsten mentions that it was was kind of strange that they were burning a mannequin. I hadn't even noticed the person shaped thing burning in the fire. Then I saw lots of fresh flowers on the steps, and noticed there was a frame of a box around the "mannequin".
I found the only person around, who was an old Thai guy. I pointed and asked in Thai, "Is that a plastic person or a real person?"
"Real person! He died last night." Kirsten and I had a hard time believing this. We were sure dead people had to smell much worse. We didn't smell anything. And his fists were in the air too. We thought dead people would be pretty flat, not with arms at perpendicular angles.
"Wait, wait, so, you mean, really a real person who was yesterday he was alive?" The man didn't get why I didn't understand him and called his wife over so she could show me the death certificate. She pulled it out of her pocket and he pointed to 7:20pm, the time of death.
He explained that his guy was Po Karen (there are two main Karen groups, Sgaw and Po Karen) and that this afternoon all of the Po Karen in Mae Sot had been there, but they had all gone home now.
It was about 6pm. The ceremony had taken place at about 4pm and by 8pm it would all be gone. It was just our luck that we happen to catch it in this post-coffin-burning but body-still-recognizable state. The woman then took Kirsten and me up to the Buddhist temple looking thing. It was another, hotter, more enclosed fire which cremates the person much faster - only about 2 hours I think and I think it costs more money.
Right before we left, I asked if it was okay if I took a picture. He laughed, reminded me that the guy was dead and said he was pretty sure he wouldn't mind. What a weird job, burning people for a living.
So that was it - a Buddhist cremation site with a cremation going on. It's up to you how hard you want to look at the picture, but you can kind of see the last of the coffin, the head and the arms at the 90 degree angles. It's a crappy picture because it was taken at night, with a no-flash disposable camera, and developed at a CVS in Florida.
This guy's not dead. He's fine. He hangs out on my window screen pretty much every night. Sometimes he has moths to catch or other geckos to chase. Other times he just chills.
And here are some more pictures from a two-night concert my friend Katherine and I went to in Mae Sot. Also no death. The headliner on the first night was our favorite Burmese hip hop artist, Sai Sai. We were both really excited, and I had even learned how to say "Will you go on a date with me?" in Burmese. Katherine also wanted to, but she has a boyfriend, so that wouldn't have been right. Anyway, Sai Sai never showed. After waiting for at least an hour for him to show, the announcer said he wasn't coming, but he would come for the second night. That was a lie too. Oh well. We met a ton of nice people with varying levels of English and we danced a lot, watched some breakdancers, Katherine got to practice some Burmese and I think everyone still had a pretty good time.
Again, none of these people are dead or died, at least as far as I know.
OH! AND BURMA VJ WAS NOMINATED FOR AN OSCAR!
(I knew it had been shortlisted, but it actually made the real nomination for Documentary Feature!)
It's a film about the 2007 uprising led by the monks in Burma, featuring the monks that now live in Utica and come to NYC all the time. If you are my friend and were in NY in May or June 2009, I'm sure I bugged you about it seeing it at Film Forum.
See it.
