Her release date is set but no one sets much store by it. The world is wise to the lying ways of one of the most brutal regimes on earth. Then, the day before, news filters through that she may actually be released, that the order has been signed. The world waits with baited breath, the second’s pause  heavy with awareness that history may be changing.

The Lady

And then she is out. She is walking, waving, speaking to her people. Her cut glass, educated tones ring out across the world. In Burma people risk their impoverished lives to stand and wait outside her house, holding a vigil for their rightful leader. They hold banners, they weep, they put aside their disparate tribal differences and are a nation for a second.

For a moment they herald a new dawn for their blighted country. As always, the lady steps forward with grace, from fifteen years of imprisonment.  Not the jubilance of freedom on her face, but the gentle knowledge of a soul whose life is in the hands of a brutal dictatorship, and whose time left to effect change is short. It might be a second, according to the whims of the generals, but it will be nonetheless monumental.

(Link to Video of her release on the BBC)

It astounds me after all she has been through that she does not leave. That after the decades of imprisonment she doesn’t ensure her own safety by abandoning Burma. That her commitment to her people goes further than I can dream. At any second she is under fear of arrest, of assassination, yet she persists.

Persists with her vision of democracy, persists in her political voice, persists in fighting for the rights of her people. How does one woman become the political conscience of a nation? How does she sacrifice her children, her husband, her freedom and her life to fight this cause with refined gentle grace and measured, careful intelligent speech?

She speaks to the world and tells them her freedom is no freedom, there can be no rejoicing while her people are still repressed, while more than 2,000 political prisoners remain in jail. She tells the BBC, “I cannot complain, the average person in Burma has been subjected to far greater hardship than I”.

I wonder at the Junta, who having had her locked up for fifteen years presumably thought it was safe to release her a week after their ‘supposedly’ democratic elections. I wonder what they must think when they see scenes of people risking their lives to pay homage to her across the country? How they could be so blind to think they were safe, that her power would have dissipated, to underestimate the soul of a nation?

The unfortunate conclusion is that her freedom will be short lived. But the wonder is that despite sixty years since her father was instrumental in securing Burma’s independence, and twenty years since her rightful election as its leader, despite gross and horrific violations of humanity all over Burma, despite the destruction of a nation and a people and the ethnic cleansing of many more peoples: the pulse of democracy beats strong in Burma and the responsibility of the people courses through her veins.

However long they leave her languishing in jail, hoping the fire dies down they can never extinguish it. As she steps out onto her balcony and lifts her hand to wave to those below, as she gracefully thanks the people for the risks they have taken. As she speaks calmly of the future, and her beautiful face is watched on television sets around the globe, she just proves them wrong again and again.

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1. Joe and Egger get a photo from Burma

There’s been a new face hanging around the restaurant for a few days. She is a tiny young girl of about twelve, who looks like a puff of wind would sweep her away. She has a beautiful face and smiles huge crinkly-eyed smiles whenever I pass her.

Being used to the ebb and flow of people around here I don’t think to question who she is for several days. Until it becomes clear she’s sleeping here, at which point Crab explains she is Ooh and Bo’s daughter and she swam here from Burma.

“She what?” I ask, complete incredulity written across my face. Crab re-iterates, “yes she swam here”. Ooh and Bo couldn’t afford to pay the people traffickers who smuggle people over the border from Burma, so she went illegally in a boat with 14 other people.

Crossing the foul straits between Ranong and Thailand, they were chased by the Burmese police, the boat overturned and she had to swim for it. Five people died. This little slip of a girl swam to Thailand, and then presumably with no money, certainly with no Thai language, managed to make her way across the country to the island.

A few weeks later, I am actually in Ranong, Burma, doing the annoying three-monthly visa crossing required on most long term visas. I arrive at the port having mini-bussed across the country, spent hours on the ferry and finally arrived at the hell hole of a port.

The place stinks. The smells of rotten fish, rancid sewage and gasoline hang in the air and choke everyone, along with the sweltering heat. On the dock, hundreds of boats are crammed along the edges of the water, packed in like starving kittens, bobbing at their mother’s teat.

When we clamber into the boat, the clean highway from Thailand cushions us on one side of the river, and on the other side the smoggy jungle hills of Burma, with all their secrets and their deathly struggles, rise into the distance. I look down at the water, which is black, putrid, oily foulness. The stench is almost unbearable, and I have literally never seen water that looks like straight oil. It’s disgusting.

In our wooden longtail boat we chug our way out into the wide water stream that divides the two countries. Belching gasoline, as we pick up speed the air clears a little bit. I cannot believe that this little girl was in this water. Cannot imagine her cheerful eyes and sweet smile racing under cover of darkness across this waterway with the Burmese police on her tail. I cannot begin to contemplate the fear as she lands in the filthy water, or the strength she must have had to swim across the miles of water, and haul herself oil coverd and exhausted from the obnoxious river.

I dread to imagine the life she has come from. Something in her demeanour, something in her eyes speaks to me that she is a victim. Unfortunately in a place like Burma, with no protection, no women’s rights, a war torn, bloody land, just a beautiful little slip of a girl making her way is unlikely not to have encountered hardships. I wonder what she has seen, what those intelligent gentle eyes have borne witness to. What she thinks behind that luminous smile. Of course she just gets on with it: is happy, smiles, enjoys being with her family, is glad to be alive, is glad of the moment she is living and the opportunity to enjoy it.

A few weeks later the girl gathers her things in a plastic bag and swinging it against her leg waves goodbye. She is off to another beach to work in a resort. I hope she is well treated, I hope they are good to her, that someone there will be protecting her, that she wont be abused, violated, exploited or hurt in anyway. She is perfectly happy as she gets on the bike to go, this is her chance, a shot at Thailand, a shot at a good life, work, food, some comfort. She is glad to take it and I pray with all my heart it works out for her as the bike speeds out of the village and up the dusty dirt road.

Related posts:

1. Joe and Egger get a photo from Burma
2. Aung San Suu Kyi

Today is a day of wonderful people beginning their journeys.

My cousin is flying from London to take over as head chef, and help me open our new cafe venture. In what couldn’t be a starker contrast, Joe and Egger’s oldest son sets off today to join us from Burma.

Joe just got the call to say everything is confirmed, the people traffickers are paid, and he should be crossing the border, crammed in the back of an illegal van, to make his way across Thailand to us.

Wishing them both God’s speed.

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1. Joe and Egger get a photo from Burma
2. Swimming From Burma

Joe and Egger work in the kitchen. They’ve got six children in Burma. They left them all behind, the youngest one only three, to escape to Thailand to try and make enough money to support the whole family. Their entire family put in their savings to pay the people traffickers to get them across the border, from where they landed up working in a shrimp processing plant.

Joe and Egger are the lucky ones. Many Burmese illegals pay their life savings to get over the border only to be imprisoned in brothels, conscripted into chain gangs or to work slave labour for Thai employers. Burmese have no more value than a dog in Thailand, they are the non-existent slaves that power the machinery of Thai industries, and often times wind up dead as a result. In Mae Sot on the Thailand Burma border they say it takes two tyres to burn a Burmese person’s body. Truly disposable then, not just a figure of speech.

Joe is a gentle, mild-mannered man, who works like a trooper and possesses a quick intelligence and an incredible desire to learn. He is picking up Thai and English at the same time, learning the cocktails in the bar with a little reference book he painstakingly put together himself after taking notes on how each drink was made.

He loves technology, is fascinated by ipods, laptops, and DJ decks, in another life I’ve no doubt he would probably have been a graphic designer. He is a true artisan, artist and craftsman, producing beautiful functional items we never knew we needed from scraps of wood and with a lathe he made himself out of an old power drill.

He has one dress shirt, it’s blue and old, worn at the seams but always perfectly laundered, and donned for his role in evening service with pride. Here are people with self-respect. With nothing at all in the world but a tatty plastic bag containing a few clothes, but who still get up in the morning, do the best they can possibly do and keep working against the endless tide of poverty and futility that defines their existence.

This week they made the dangerous journey to the main town to send $20 to Burma to their family. They went before sunrise to avoid the police on the road, their every movement threatened with fear of arrest and deportation. When they came back they had with them a photo that had been sent to them through the Burmese underground.

In it their teenage son postures in a smart pair of jeans and a shirt. Egger’s face is lit up with pride, this is her child, this she has, this she can possess despite her status as one of the dispossessed. The little scrap of paper that has made it over borders and through many hands to reach them and give them a glimpse of one of the children they have not seen for a year, lights up their world and makes the long haul worth it.

We western children with healthcare, education, money, options, choices, the world laid at our feet, yet who loll in the doldrums of misery, self-created pain and drama have many many lessons to learn from noble souls like Joe and Egger. It humbles me to know them.

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1. Joe and Egger’s Little Boy….
2. Swimming From Burma
3. Aung San Suu Kyi