Top photo Cathy takes a ride on the river Moei which makes the border between Thailand and Burma in the area that PUB works
October 2006
Cathy Downham
October 2006
David Downham
April 2006
Cathy Downham
April 2006
David Downham
April, 2006 Paw Bwe "I guess this happens everyday!"
By Cathy Downham
About three weeks ago, we were at home in Mae Sot having an ordinary catch-up kind of Saturday afternoon. We had an
opportunity because of a break in his schedule, to meet with a friend from Canada. In the short time he has been in
the area he has made a major contribution to the care and education of hundreds of migrant children who have come here
from Burma. We had asked him to come by and share his experience. Kshakalu, the founder of the hostel PUB supports,
wanted to learn as well so he had just arrived. We had just begun talking when Kshakalu's phone rang. He walked away
while he spoke and we continued with our conversation. I looked up and saw he was asking to interrupt. “ I have to go, there is a girl I have to get. It's okay if I bring her here?”
We said that was okay. I asked him if there was a problem. He told us he had just heard from a monk in the Burmese Monastery that is here, near the border, on the Thai side. The monk had phoned at the request of a young woman who had come to the temple for sanctuary. She was trying to find her mother and Kshakalu's number was the only information she had. As the story unfolded we learned that three years before this girl's mother had come to Kshakalu's camp asking his help to find her daughter. Kshakalu and the mother were from the same village in Karen State. Their families had known each other when there had been slightly better times in their village. The mother stayed with him a year going back and forth to the big refugee camp near us, searching, then sadly walking back through the jungle to her home and her other now grown children. She has come back this way many times since, still searching.
Paw Bwe* (Flower Cloud) was 12 when her mother sold her to a human trafficker. The Karen have large families. Maybe this is something that happens to civilizations that are under the pressure of extinction. To feed her other children Paw Bwe's mother felt forced to make the decision to sell her eldest. These people brokers routinely tell the parents that their child will work in a nice family home and be treated well. Mostly, these children are sold to the sex trade in Bangkok, as was this girl. Kshakalu went to rescue her and we discussed the situation of human trafficking, which is prevalent here. Our friend donates enormous amounts of time as well as funding which helps, and will help to prevent this exact kind of inhumanity but he was shaken and will be again, as we are, every time – by the proximity of these abominations. Paw Bwe was very beautiful as a child and when I met her that day I saw a lovely young woman with porcelain skin and a broad clear face that revealed little. She is now 27. She had forgotten most of her Karen and spoke only Thai. Kshakalu teased her a little about this and she smiled. She had recognized him when he arrived at the monastery. Despite the 15-year gap they remembered from a time when he was a 25 year old, home from university and she a schoolgirl in the village. Here families are very important and apparently Kshakalu looks exactly like his father who for many years was the chief elder in the village.
We were anxious to know how she was now and curious to know how she was able to find her way back here. A journalist, we know, would have thought the story worth at least the second page. The line between informing the world and getting people to listen, and the risk of walking blindly into these young people's memories causing further trauma and exposing unhealed wounds is a very fine one. In the long run, unless these stories are told, the perpetrators can and will continue their sorry business. But we saw that tears were close and now, that the minutes counted, so Kshakalu's plans were changed and he took her immediately an hour north to the refugee camp where her mother waited for her. We were upset that we couldn't do anything immediate to help. Our Canadian friend wondered, I think, if we were numb to this and said “I guess this happens every day”. He was right unfortunately. Here this sort of thing does happen every day. It doesn't walk into our house everyday but constantly it is at the clinic and in our young student's stories. A few days later, I asked Kshakalu if he had learned more. He said when the mother and daughter came together “so many tears came down there was no time for talking”. We live very close to one of the most evil regimes of all time. If not for the poverty caused by this wrong and aging war, Paw Bwe would have her own culture, family and language and her person and body would not have been violated. If not for the outrageous acts of the SPDC**, a gang of power hungry old men, her mother's heart would never have been so broken and we all might have more ordinary days.
