Applications, Acronyms, and Appearances

Tomorrow morning I leave Mae Sot to head up to Chiang Mai, where I'll be meeting with some professor-types. Hopefully I'll also see this sweet monastery on a mountain outside the town - Doi Suthep. I'll be sorry to leave Mae Sot, of course, but so it is.

This past week here in Mae Sot has been, well, something (probably) - but I'm finding it hard to characterize. I've kind of been racing to meet the deadline for my first grant application, so much of my time has been spent here in this internet cafe downloading forms and writing short little snippets about "Career Objectives" and "Personal and Academic Interests." (Carol Gluck is writing me a recommendation for the Weatherhead grant, which made me ridiculously happy.) Outside of grant applications, I've also been meeting up with a lot of the people I knew from last summer. I had dinner at a Japanese style barbecue place the other night, where I finally got to say hi to all of my students I taught. Getting to hang with them for a little, even if it was super brief, was incredibly meaningful for me. The whole "Please don't forget us" issue has weighed really heavily on my mind, so I hope I was able to communicate to them that indeed I had not forgotten them.

One of the other main things I've been up to is meeting with the different youth-focused CBO's in town: the KYO, AASYC, SYCB, PYNG, KSNG, etc. In Chiang Mai I'll meet more: the NYF, the PYO. (I'm too lazy to write out the acronyms, sorry.) I'm gathering their input for a project I'm working on through Young People For - that is, I'm trying (perhaps unrealistically) to build an international network of students doing Burma activism. I've been stumbling over its name. Perhaps the International Burma Solidarity Network? The International Burma Student Network? Also I was overhauling my resume yesterday, and I couldn't figure out what my title should be. Currently I'm Secretary General. (I kid.)

Anyway, I'm always sort of amazed by the tenor of Mae Sot, all of the latent currents of meaning flowing through this town. What am I talking about, you ask. And rightly so. I'm not entirely sure, but this town really does seem like a hall of mirrors sometimes, a place of appearances, a place of masks. On the one hand, small Pad Thai stalls serve *unbelievable* food for next to nothing. The fruit stands are overflowing with abundance, and the sunsets make wonderfully spiky silhouettes of the palm trees. In the early morning mists, novice monks in saffron robes weave through town with begging bowls in their hands. And in the night, the stars shine down on Chang-fueled conversations about Nietzsche and morality. And then there's that other hand, the one with human rights violations - nay, crises - scribbled all over it. And then just outside the Pad Thai stall you see the Burmese migrant worker begging, and you realize that the monks in Burma are monks because monasteries are the only places of learning the regime hasn't crushed. And then maybe one of those huge NGO trucks rolls by, maybe IRC, ZOA, MSF, or even UNHCR. Maybe the noise of it breaks the illusions.


The balance is a tenuous one, between the masks and the maimed, if you will. There are all these trucks in town, delivery trucks I guess. The trucks aren't all that big, but they're stacked super high, like so high I'm always wondering if they get clotheslined by either of the two traffic lights in town. And then on top of the boxes stacked so high, way higher than the cab of the truck even, there are always a few people perched, swaying wildly - to my perspective, at least - as the truck rounds a corner or swerves away from a motorbike. That's the balance I'm talking about. That's my Mae Sot: a place where chaos is avoided only by the laws of an invisible physics. The latent meaning remains latent.


Anyway, it's been a good little stay here. I'm actually kind of looking forward to putting on my headphones tomorrow - I've been listening to The Good, the Bad, and the Queen quite a bit - and watching some Thai countryside fly by. I'm staying with friends of friends in Chiang Mai. Hopefully they'll be good people.

Enjoy the pictures.