mae sot

mae sot is a thai-burmese border town, dark and brooding, torn by the sorrow of suffering people. at night, the dogs bark viciously, and hunt in packs. they only recede nervously from a stick thrown from the hands of a fiercely angry Australian journalist. the hotel we stayed at, the dk hotel, is run by an older man and a dozen young boys. at night, two of them drape themselves, sleeping, over furniture. one flicks his ear while watching a noisy boxing match on tv, the other sits contorted in a low chair outside, ipod headphones jammed in his ears, green tshirt twisted around his lithe body.
the hotel seems to have once been grand, perhaps the most grand in the city, but it has fallen under the morbid spell of age and strife and dirt. fluorescent bulbs and the faded, unvarnished teak carvings of massive angry fish, fangs the size of golf tees, hang from the ceilings; the marble floors polished so violently the baseboards are faded, as though pale is annexing the building from the floor up.
this whole damn city feels like a rude afterthought, as though some careless server has thrown it onto the table after you have had the coffee. there is very little sense of depth here, and even less beauty. here is all dirty concrete and corrugated rusted metal storefronts, slapped grossly onto once-beautiful, now-dilapidated teak homes. brand new colorful plaster buildings, yellows and pinks and blues, drown in the dinginess of the street. it’s as though the town is ashamed of their fabulousness and is doing all it can to kill it. people walk around vacantly, as though manipulated by some unseen forces, moved by invisible joysticks. it’s all very bewildering. accumulated years of dirt and apathy and fighting and loneliness and suffering settle into the cracks and expand, fade and consume anything in its way.
mae sot is the wrong city to look for hope, but it’s here, deeply encoded in children’s pencil and watercolor sketches that hang in the café were we took our after dinner coffees and teas and cakes. it’s there in the warm conversation with a woman who wandered into our fish café, selling string key chains for 10 baht apiece to help her ill mother—this is a woman i would barely look at, let alone give money in exchange for a waste of my time, but hope here is so precious a commodity that it must be dispensed whenever possible.
there are people who look deeper into those around them—people who see the ordinary and leave it unaccepted; the status quo is something to be analyzed, prodded, questioned, changed if found unsatisfactory. to these people, a boy begging in the street is not just a boy begging in the street. this boy has a name and a schedule, and if he is not on his beat, his absence is noted. a girl selling bags of mangoes every morning at 8 am is evidence of life swimming along as only life can, not an inconvenience in the way.


the Myanmar-thai “friendship bridge.”


a man standing on the thai-burma border, a line painted on a concrete bridge.