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THE BAMBOO SCHOOL, the subject of last week’s post, has indeed transformed its local area. Ironically this is partly because the population of the local area is mostly not Thai but refugees from Myanmar (Burma), whom Catherine has been helping to settle.
The Bamboo School is only 4 km from the Myanmar border, and is affected by the influx of refugees from the continual fighting and disturbances in Myanmar.
Because of the influx, a lot of people from the hill tribes on the Thai side can’t easily get passports even though they may have been born in Thailand.
A lot of the kids can get Thai IDs but this doesn’t necessarily allow them to get a passport as of right. I think this problem also has to do with a lack of birth certificates, which do not yet seem to be universal in remote border districts, thus adding to the uncertainty as to where people were born.
Here are some more photos of the Bamboo School and its lovely grounds.
While I was at the Bamboo School, Catherine told me a bit more about herself. She’d been brought up on a homestead called Hinau at Rangiwahia, a large farm. Her father crossed wild Wapiti from the New Zealand forests with Canadian stock, and made the Hinau walking track. Their place was the model for the homestead in the film Footrot Flats. Her first husband was Derek Riley, who died after 22 years of marriage. She is currently 75 and still working hard (and I can vouch for that, having volunteered for just a week! The first few days were like being taken by storm, basically.) I don’t know how she does it.
Although Catherine is a Seventh-Day Adventist, she steers clear of any formal association with religious charities, in part because she thinks they are too bureaucratic and get in the way of just doing what needs to be done.
She came to Thailand in 1993, to teach English in Chiang Mai, in a manner that was associated with a church. She arrived with a motorbike and a pup tent. Unfortunately, according to Catherine, her next husband, Mr Bryan, drained their bank account and ran away with a Thai girlfriend who in turn drained his account. It seemed that the only way he could get a job with a church group was with a stable family life, “so I was a convenient tick on the box,” she said.
Her husband was nevertheless not the marrying type, in more ways than one, and so she ended up on the site of the future Bamboo School, in the year 2000, by herself. She has married again, to a Thai man named Wirot who is, fortunately, respectable.
Catherine started the Bamboo School with just 169 Baht after her husband drained the funds. But she soon raised $39,000 after telling a religious gathering the story of Yok, a boy who died of AIDS after being molested by monks. His last request was for some noodle soup, and after he died a little girl stuffed his coffin with packets of noodles.
Catherine has won many awards, including a recent United Nations award for refugee work, and is quite famous.
Here is an Australian interview with Catherine, and a documentary that I couldn’t embed.
Molestation, trafficking for staffing brothels, and paedophilia are unfortunately endemic in this region, especially among vulnerable refugee populations.
Catherine told me about one incident in which a van full of 14 Myanmar refugee girls being trucked to Bangkok crashed because the driver was drunk. Catherine said that “fourteen Muslim girls were lying on the road and we had to translate. Drunken bum walked off into the jungle. The police arrived and cleaned up the area and took the car away.”
It turned out that the girls were being trafficked for 7,000 Baht per girl to be brought to a brothel in Bangkok. Catherine said that there was a book I should read about that sort of thing called My Name Lon You Like Me?, written by a woman who ended up in Germany. (I have linked the book’s title to a review by an expat blogger in Thailand.)
Catherine said that for foreigners to renew their Thai visa, they have to have a syphilis test.
On occasion, Catherine had to fend off a would-be rapist herself. She showed me a heavy metal award plaque and said that this was what she had used to fend him off; waiting until he was tangled up in his trousers before chopping at him with it.
Catherine gets visitors regularly, though not on Saturday, which is her Sabbath as an Adventist. The visitors go to a part of the complex called Lakeside and they give a lot of money and food: you should see what they donate! The kids perform for them as well. Surplus donations are given to the refugees.
But she needs more good volunteers.
Another reason why there are so many orphans and semi-orphans in the area is that there is little family planning in these parts, and people still have huge families. Catherine told me that people have some very strange misconceptions about these issues, which she strives to put right.
Some of the medicines devised by the Bamboo School have been patented for it by a Chinese volunteer, with the result that their revenues flow toward the school and help to sustain it.
Unfortunately, because the school is so close to the border, the conflict in Myanmar is putting its security at risk. The main insurgency on the Burmese side in this region involves the Karen, who have been fighting the Burmese/Myanmar government, which became independent from Britain in 1948, since 1949. The conflict concerns guarantees of autonomy and land rights, made at the time of independence, that were never kept.
Though numerous in this area, the Karen are only one of many minority groups that are either fighting or being persecuted by the Myanmar regime, which seems to be closely and chauvinistically identified with the majority ethnic group in Mynamar, the Bamar, who are Sino-Tibetan (i.e., related to the Han Chinese and to Tibetans). The Bamar, whose name accounts for the older name for Myanmar, Burma, make up about two thirds of Myanmar’s population.
Other Myanmar minorities include the mostly Muslim Rohingya, whose home region of Myanmar is close to the border with Bangladesh, into which many Rohingya have fled, and the Mon, some of whom also live close to the Bamboo School on the Myanmar side. Many Mon have fled Myanmar as well, though I believe the Mon are not actively fighting the regime at present.
The Mon are an ancient group, in some ways culturally ancestral to the whole region. The Mon alphabet came from the Indian subcontinent along with Buddhism, which also originated on the subcontinent even though Buddhism is more often associated with East and Southeast Asia these days. Thereafter, the Mon alphabet evolved into both the official Burmese and Thai alphabets, among others. The current Thai Royal Family is also partly of Mon descent.
The Myanmar regime is supported by Russia and China, while the Karen and the other minorities estranged from the regime tend to have Western supporters, such as the US-based charity called the Free Burma Rangers.
While I was at the Bamboo School, another woman named Kesia was volunteering as a nurse and Nathaphob Sungkate (‘Pod’), a freelance journalist, was writing about former graduates of the school. The New Zealand ambassador to Thailand was due to visit shortly (the school is quite well known), but, unfortunately, I was scheduled to leave before he arrived.
I really enjoyed my time at the Bamboo School and regretted leaving, though it was hard work. They dropped me off in Kanchanaburi, where I caught a bus to Bangkok.
Next Stop: Bangkok!
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