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Tuesday, February 26, 2008

At the refugee camp




Clara and I have arrived at whispering seeds. We are about 2 miles from the Myanmar border. We were greeted by Mao Mao, a real jungle boy about 6 years old who said "big motorcycle" and started climbing on the bike. A teenage girl whose Burmese mother was a sex worker and died of TB and Aids a year ago was also there to show us the right dirt path to go down. She is incredibly smart, speaking 3 languages despite no schooling ever.

We bathed in the river, ate vegetarian dinner, and slept in a mud brick tree house, on some mats laid over the plank second story floor. A mosquito net is all that protected us from the jungle in these open air buildings, without power or water.



There are other volunteers here, from Ireland, New Zealand, Canada. All very nice, with everyone pitching in to help.


The roads on the way here were fun, nothing like downhill, decreasing radius, off camber turns to fire up the juices! Unfortunately, they are slashing and burning all the land up here, you can smell the corruption through the smoke on the horizon.