A Medic's Story

"The greatest journey that one can make in their life is the journey from the head to the heart"

Burma has been under military rule since 1962, when a military coup overthrew the civilian government.  The current military government has been in power since 1988, disregarding the results of a democratic election that would have put the National League for Democracy in power.  The party's leader, Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest for nearly two decades, and remains an important icon for the pro-democracy movement in Burma.  For the rural people of Burma, this military rule has meant decades of abject poverty, violence and displacement.  Sacking of villages by the military and other guerilla groups is widespread, as well as forced labour and sexual violence towards women.  Many rural Burmese, as well as members of other ethnic minority groups (such as the Karen) have joined armed resistance groups, and thousands have fled across the border into Thailand.
Sitting around a table in the inpatient ward last week, nearing the end of the day, Jonny Soe, a young Karen medic in his early twenties began to tell me pieces of his story...  Jonny fled Burma nearly a decade ago, and lived in a refugee camp on the border for four years before coming to live at the Mae Tao Clinic and training as a medic.  He, like the dozens of other medics and health workers at the clinic, lives far away from his home and family, a refugee from his own country.  The medics are given a place to live at the clinic, but as non-citizens, they are unable to travel or to work for income.  They are given 1000 Bhat a month for food and other necessities (about $30), and spend their time working, learning english and computer skills and, for many, applying for refugee status to countries like the United States or Canada.  Many hope to eventually return to their home communities in Burma.
Jonny tells me how many of the medics struggle with depression, facing daily encounters with their people's suffering.  He tells me how hard it is for him to see young people die, hard to face a very ill man who is afraid of leaving his wife and young baby without support, hard to see people arrive with nothing but their clothes, and be unable to give them even a blanket, let alone definitive medical care.
I cannot believe the lives that these medics live, cannot fathom what they have lived through already, what they face every day, and what keeps them going.  I ask Jonny what he does when he feels sad and he says that he "just forgets".  
At the same time, it is remarkable the generosity and comraderie that exists within this ragtag community of medics.  The other day a young woman was admitted in a coma.  She had soiled herself, but had no other clothes to be changed into, so one of the female medics bought her an extra pair out of her own pocket.


I often find myself totally unprepared for the barrage of emotions that accompany this work.  As the intellectual statistics of war, displacement, illness, poverty begin to take shape in the form of faces, individual lives and stories, I feel a strange mix of layered emotions - numb, then sick, then angry.  Odd, the places my emotions occupy when I am afraid to feel them.  For a few moments, I glimpsed myself through  Jonny's eyes, my unfathomable freedom and privilege - material, geographic and political.  This is a confusing and uncomfortable space to be in, but it would not be honest not to feel these things, not to ask these questions.  What is my relationship to this suffering, these lives?  And, a line from a book I am reading (the Lizard Cage) that embedded itself in my mind, "how can a well-fed man relpy honestly to another man's hunger?"