freedom

upstairs in our house, there is a phrse pasted onto the siding that reads:

"the purpose of freedom, is to free someone else"

this phrase has been ringing in my head a lot recently. i've hit a certain kind of a "block" where i feel like i'm on the verge of jumping off the cliff to join the revolutionaries, go off the radar into the thickness of the jungle that does not exist on the map. because only there, can people make a diffrence.

i was out to a bar called thaime's with all the foreigner friends in town in a hope to have andy perform a song at an open mic. i had gone to the thaime's few times and enjoyed it. it has a log-cabin-like decor with lots of lights and has east-meets-west atmohphere. but my being there this time made me hate this place and resent my own presence in the bar among westerners with western thoughts and premature understanding of freedom that allows them to forget the fact that some burmese poeple who crossed the border illegally just few blocks up the road are hiding away in the darkenss of the night, hoping to be spared of being caught by the patrol police while looking for something to eat. with an australian man belting out mrs. robinson, and a drunk french dude with a burmese tattoo proclaiming that tonight is a solistice and that french people party all night for it, i could not help but to think about what eh moo paw and eh na moo and other burmese friends and their genuine longing to be able to go shopping and just hang out in town without fearing that the cops will catch them or having to pay off the cops once they are caught. they are just like us in their mid-twenties just wanting to do a mid-twenties thing. and they can't. but we - highly educated, blinded by the humanitarian ideals, dressed in expensive clothes probably made by burmese factory workers, laughing about nothing and pounding down beer - were completely detached from these truths that we are supposedly helping. at that momment, all i wanted to do was to go home, grab andy's guitar, bike over to the clinic and play music among people who are and will be confined in this little space, just content for the fact that they are not constantly being raided, or that their children's fevers are going down. people of our age who had an opportunity to receive education up to 10th grade are acting as teachers/guardians/parents to orphans, feeding them, bathing them, comfort them if they are sad, never knowing what it's like to be among friends sitting around playing music and drinking away the night in a simple bliss of freedom. how can i not feel guilty? how can i not wish myself to be able to share this with them? may be i felt it more because i have their faces and their skin. i know that many wonder "who is she among white faces?" and i know it comes with a certain bitterness. the bar was just so stuffed up with good-hearted western values that blatantly ignored the needs of the people that we are meant to serve. i've heard many of these people say "i can't believe they do this," "i can't believe they don't do this" "we need to get them technology" "they would love to be resettled in the US" and i keep my distance from them.

i am not a hard-a**. i love having fun, hanging out at the bar or otherwise, and i am all for doing things i enjoy to keep myself sane so that i can continue the work. i just realized, that my work is not to bring my values to them, or to encourage refugee resettlement abroad. i want to lend my hands to get them what they want - to live comfortably with freedom, in a place where they belong - viallges in the hills of beautiful burma. and the fact is, we usually forget that in our naturally western drive for "humanitarian" deeds. we all do it to satisfy ourselves to a certain degree, but i desire to let myself be dissolved in the people's values and truly hear their voices as if the words are spoken in my own tongue. the cacophony of comfort from the fellow westerners at the bar somehow made their calls apparent in my ears. i hope you realize i'm not trying to be judgemental of others. it is mostly a criticism of myself, and my weakness to not be able to leap over to the other side. and i am completely over generalizing everyone that's here. i am sure there are some who have made the similar revalations and doing the right thing.

i think annie and i are going to try to plan a hang-out time with our burmese friends at one of our schools. hope it will be realized.