I finished reading Karen Connelly’s book Burmese Lessons, about her time in Burma in the mid-90s.  She’s a writer from here in Canada, a country that offers us the luxury of national politics as bland as tapioca pudding.  She goes from here to a country run by generals that is being abandoned by millions of people fleeing as refugees.  Her observations are sometimes really hard to read, a sad reminder of the kind of things people can do to one another.  She also has a keen eye for the basics of what it is to be human in the experiences she’s had.  Here are a couple excerpts:

I used to find the word homemaking vaguely embarassing.  As an occupation, it was an uninspiring potential fate.  But being among Burmese refugees and exiles in Thailand has taught me that it’s no small act to make a home.  Making a home safe enough for a child is the ordinary miracle.  How many refugees on this earth can only dream of it?  The tendency- perhaps from television images, the news clips - is to envision the displaced as herds, flocks, haunted masses carrying children and possessions on their backs, walking away, arriving at makeshift camps only to leave again.  And they are that.  But they are also individual men and women and children with the old human longing: to be held safely in their world.  Each one of them as a name.

 

People usually try to feed me, so that I now show up to the offices or safe houses with bags of curry or grilled chicken or mangoes, adding to the communcal meal or extended snacks that i know will be offered.  This food giving and food taking is so familiar that I sometimes forget its meaning.  We are taking care.  To take care is the great human act.  It is part of the answer to the brutality that may not touch people here directly but affects them deeply.  On the physical and metaphorical border these people inhabit, it is a daily challenge to take care of themselves, let alone others, but that is what they all do…..each one has done more than survive.  They have remained or they have become tender, alive to their own suffereing and the suffering of their people.  While I try to control my personal longings and berate myself for being too soft, they remind me that my yearnings are as basic as cooked rice.