Can you see me?

---

Mengelebah,…Mengelebah! Can you see me?

Seeing the Invisibles of Khok Kloi

I keep replaying the comment of the Victim Disaster Identification Unit manager over and over in my head… “there was little awareness of migrants …until they washed up in such great numbers with the Tsunami.” I visited the centre a few days ago on the back of a Motocyc with Kwang and Meu. The cemetery, centre and surrounding forest are painted with the residue of the disaster: silence and debris…Empty gurneys, blackened funerary stacks and old posters lay quietly within the grounds. The boxcars holding a few remains yet to be buried, are lined in the back, behind a tarnished concrete wall…a sign nearby warns it is a “Dirty Area”.

In contrast to the holding grounds, the cemetery and memorial to the victims is a minimalist, but tidy place. Rows of concrete headstones bearing a number and letter ID. These are the remains of those not yet identified, the bones of the last of the wandering “spirits”, if you believe such things… There are still bodies unrecovered, many of them, but here is the place for those that have been found but not identified.
DNA recovery and matching work goes on daily here.

The memorial is fluid and has so much motion and energy in its lines, waving pillars of molten-looking black basalt and concrete. Each numbered headstone has a sunflower plant…recently planted, to shelter the stones, until the remains can be identified, exhumed and returned to their families.

The plight of the Burmese is reflected even here. Of the 423 bodies that rest here, only 42 have been so far identified as to race, 29 of them are Burmese. The manager says she expects that average will continue as the ID process goes on.

I spent eight hours with the field team from Child-Trac last week. Hours that changed my perspective on many things…including my status in the world.
I have broken my time into four vignettes. During the day I traveled with Minoo and Eve (who are both Burmese and escapees from Burma’s own internal mess), I was privy to a lot of things almost any westerner would be. For that, I am thankful.

Cont…

---