The Weight of Death is not Enormous...

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Weight.

When you talk about the severity of things happening, weight is a lousy measure. The emphasis placed on an event in the hyped up world of the west where families are afraid of their neighbors and a steel cage isn’t enough to keep a child safe in a car, isn’t the same culture to culture.

When a child is sick with malaria, the world does not stop to hope he gets better or nurse him through the fever, there are trees to tap and the grounds to cut clean…if the job isn’t done through the night, there isn’t food the day after tomorrow. Mq Nyi Nyi Htue is barely five years old. This afternoon he was told there is no medicine for him, today he lost his home and yesterday his mother died from the same illness that is destroying his blood. If Nyi Nyi wasn’t Burmese and living on a 30,000 acre rubber plantation in Thailand, none of this would have happened.

Truly, if his life had followed another reality, he would have not lived to see his last birthday, his mother would not have given him the love she did for five years because they would both be dead if she hadn’t fled Burma and found employment on the rubber tree farm where she had a place to leave her son alone at night; living in Kit 3.

Nyi Nyi is only the second child whose story I am able to share. There are many, many other children.

Death is not enormous: In Kit 17, a small marker on the doorpost of a hut indicates a recent death. Two months ago, three children were orphaned here because of an athsma attack. The chemicals that the rubber plant processing workers deal with are deadly. If the athsma hadn’t killed her, the blood poisoning would have in a few years anyway. Her baby is 1 ½. The oldest two are “gremlin” and his brother. The realities are dire. For these people, life and death are what happens…like Min Min’s mother sometimes they need a reason to grasp on to, for others like Minoo, Bantchi explains it enough. I see a world here that lives according to different rules. On ethat needs help but is hesitant and wary enough to make sure the help is sustainable.

cont...

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Photos

"Gremlin"
He and his siblings lost thier mother two months ago. They share the dwellings of various families. The Kit has taken joint responsibility for them.