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| By Jürgen Kremb in Mae Sot, Thailand |
When a garbage truck rolls into the waste dump at Mae Sot, a city
of 120,000 residents on Thailand’s border with Burma, 12-year-old Ma Nge knows
it’s time to get moving. The dump truck barely has enough time to unload its
stinky freight before an army of at least 20 children and their parents descend
upon the trash in the hope of fishing out anything that could be of use. It
goes without saying that whoever arrives first gets the best stuff.
It’s a terrible and degrading job. And it’s enough to turn the
stomach of any visitor not used to such a malodorous locale. Scores of rats
scamper over the trash, sometimes even snakes. “But I’m mostly afraid of the
glass shards that cut your hands and feet,” the little girl says.
Degraded and Exploited
Ma Nge hates her work, but she has no alternative. Nine years ago her family
fled Burma, but they never managed to fulfil their dream of a better life in
the border city Mae Sot in western Thailand, the first stop for many of the
more than 2 million Burmese refugees believed to be living in Thailand.
“This has made most Burmese easy prey for unscrupulous Thai
businessmen, and the police don’t do anything to protect them,” says Moe Swe,
43, a former student leader from Yangon, who now serves as general secretary of
the Burmese exile group Yaung Chi Oo Workers Association in Mae Sot.
More than 80,000 Burmese work in the border town — most in the
city’s more than 200 textile factories. The majority of the Burmese lack
working and residency papers, enabling companies to exploit them at far less
than Thailand’s legal daily minimum wage of 135 baht (€3).
Moe Swe’s efforts to raise public awareness of the dreadful
situation and also to educate his Burmese compatriots about their legal rights
have often put him in deadly peril. Three years ago, mafia gangsters stormed
the workers association’s office and destroyed its furniture. The perpetrators
stabbed a Danish labor activist who was there on a visit.
‘Two Car Tires and Five Liters of Gasoline’
Despite the fact that Yaung Chi Oo workers continued to be attacked and badly
injured by masked motorcycle gangsters after the incident, police were never
able to solve the crime. And those are far from being the worst attacks against
illegal Burmese workers in Thailand.
The charred and half-decomposed bodies of Burmese are often found
along the border, victims who have been killed and hastily buried by ruthless
factory owners or human traffickers. According to people in Mae Sot, all you
need to make a Burmese person disappear is “two car tires and five liters of
gasoline.”
That’s why Aung Thar, Ma Nge’s 60-year-old father, takes the
police raids at the dump to be a more or less unavoidable act of God. “Once a
month they come and purport to be searching for illegal immigrants,” he says.
But often the police just come to take away the last belongings from the close
to 30 families who have erected their small bamboo huts on stilts next to the
Mae Sot waste dump. A year ago, the police even snatched the chickens away from
Aung Thar’s family.
But he accepts it all with almost stoical composure. After all, he
knows that if he hadn’t made it to Thailand, he would likely be dead today, his
body lying somewhere in the Burmese jungle. His family’s hometown is located in
the state of Mon in southeast Burma, where a war has been raging for decades
between the governing military junta and insurgents. Together with other men,
Aung Thar was often forcibly recruited to serve as a sherpa to government
soldiers. The living conditions were truly horrendous — three of his own
children died of malnourishment.
A Better Future?
“There is no war in Thailand, and at least we have a little bit to eat,” the
old man says. And he even holds out hope that his youngest child, Ma Nge — who
is far too slight for her 12 years — will have a better future in store for
herself than following in his grim footsteps.
These days, the young girl only has to help her family with the
trash collection during afternoons and weekends. Monday through Friday, she
spends her mornings at the Sky Blue School, which has been built at the edge of
the dump by Helfen ohne Grenzen (Help without Frontiers), a charity
organization based in Bozen in Italy’s South Tyrol region. About 80 children
between the ages of three and 13 are provided with instruction there in their
native Burmese.
But Ma Nge’s favorite subject is English. Her dream is to become
an English teacher one day “at home in my parent’s village,” she says,
referring to a place she only knows from stories. “But only after there is peace
in Burma.”
