"They are my brothers"
I caught myself thinking these thoughts, as I met four students from Mae La's bible college. They were between ages nineteen and twenty-five, tanned from the sun, and muscular from playing volleyball. Each had a typical Karen smile, genuine and inviting, and I instantly felt like they were my brothers. Had I been born in this camp or they ended up at my college, we probably would have known each other well--maybe I would have played volleyball with them, maybe we would have gone to the same youth group, maybe even have some classes together. I felt like I was meeting people I already knew well.
Their names felt funny on my foreign tongue: Gonyouwah, Ploday, Po-wah, and Freedom. I let the last name sit in my mouth for a while before I scribbled down the sounds I heard. Freedom. Ironically, he was the only one who didn't speak English and needed a translator.
Their stories were strikingly similar: they came to Mae La primarily to study. Education in Burma was really expensive and it was no option for internally displaced people who lived in the jungle. They wanted to study theology and bible and philosophy. They walked for two weeks to one full month to come to Mae La and be "free" to study.
I looked around me. We were sitting in a classroom underneath a lone light bulb dangling from the ceiling that was partially made out of tarp in a refugee camp that had thousands of huts built practically on top of each other and was held together by a rusty barbed wire fence. "Free?" I heard myself thinking, judging.
They told me stories, then. Their houses and churches and schools and entire villages were burned down by the Burmese military. They watched their family members and best friends tortured, mutilated, and murdered. Gonyouwah described with great detail one technique he remembered the military using: pouring boiling water over the heads of innocent civilians before scalping them.
I swallowed hard and realized my mistake. This refugee camp--what looks like a combination of animal pens and a prison in my busy mind that is trying desperately to make sense of what I'm seeing and hearing--is their freedom.
This is not freedom.
"If we go outside, they will catch us and put us in jail," Po-Wah said.
"We have to stay and help our Karen people," added Gonyouwah.
"We want peace-land and democracy. Pray for us. We don't want a third country [to be resettled]; we want our homeland [the Karen State in Burma]," said Ploday.
"Tell your people we want freedom," one of them said as I was busily trying to copy down their powerful words.
I looked up. They are students. They are around my age. They are my brothers. But their faces are not like mine; they look older and wiser from their experiences, perhaps more jaded, perhaps more hopeful, perhaps just different.
Suddenly I'm crushed and overwhelmed and paralyzed by my own mobility? lack of restraints? independence? I will be driving out of this camp in two days and flying out of this country a day after that and will meet people on the other side of the world who will never see the faces and know the names or stories of my brothers in Mae La refugee camp who are studying bible and playing volleyball really well behind fences. I'm crushed, overwhelmed, and paralyzed by my freedom.
My moment of panic dissipates when I snap out of my thoughts. Gonyouwah playfully flings his arm around Freedom and they share a joke in Karen. I'm with family. These are my brothers, we have the same Father, and I'm invited to play ping-pong with them. I feel encouraged and hopeful. I feel free, liberated by what links us and makes us human.
Use your freedom, little sister, to promote theirs, I hear someone say.
