Tuesday, September 29, 2009

An interesting analysis of a Thai on Burmese


Maw is a Burmese housekeeper at my apartment. When I talked to her for the first time, I was very impressed by her ability in speaking Thai. She told me that she has been in Thailand for over a decade. After I talked to her, I realized that I knew very little about Burmese migrant workers.
Maw and her friends entered Thailand at Ranong Province . She paid 4,500 baht for one way transportation from Ranong Province to Phuket Island . The money was given to a Thai policeman, who gave them a drive. And later the money was divided among other policemen at each checkpoint all the way to Phuket. “It is all about money. They (policemen) work together,” she said.
When arriving in Phuket, she did not have enough money to afford the government registration fee for immigrants. So she worked illegally for a few years. Several Burmese who came with her were arrested and deported. These were years of great fear for her.
She started her first job at a fishery company. Her duty was to select and weigh fish. She worked 12 hours a day and received 80 baht without any holidays. She did not get sick leave either and sometimes did not get paid, all of which violates Thai Labor laws. And the worst incident involved her being threatened by her employer with a gun and being raped.
However, she could not sue for any justice. If she had raised her voice, she probably would have been sent back to Burma. So she had to bitterly struggle with the way people unfairly and cruelly treated her.
Two years later, she registered to get a work-permit document. She dreamt that this would improve her working condition. But this dream was just that and it never came true.
Migrant workers must pay 4,450 baht registration fee every year, according to the Human Rights Sub-Committee on Ethnic Minorities, Stateless, Migrant Workers and Displaced Persons and the Lawyers Council of Thailand
But in reality, she had to pay as much as 7,500 baht to a village headman. There was no explanation where the additional costs came from. And she had very little understanding of the payment procedure. Moreover, she had to pay 3,500 baht every time she changed jobs. What for? She told me that the money was for a signature from the new employer. Without a new employer's guarantee, she would immediately become an illegal alien after she left her former job and would be deported under the Thai Labor Laws.
I didn’t understand how some unscrupulous people could take advantage of an underprivileged person like her. Why were they so pitiless? This reminded me of a Thai saying: “These people are taking blood from crab.” I felt truly sorry for her that she had gotten involved with such self-interested and malicious people. The more I knew what she has been through for years, the more upset I became, and the more I learned how heartless people in my country could be.
Here was a woman who was forced by poverty to be away from home. She had no idea what her future life would be. The only desire she had was to support her family that was left behind. She worked hard to earn money. Why didn't we feel sympathy for her?
At the present time, I personally know only one immigrant person who is being treated unfairly in Thailand . There are millions of other migrant workers who have suffered from injustice and inequality. My country has treated them shoddily. In Thai culture, people are divided into "we" and "they."
When I was young, I used to distrust and dislike Burmese people. I thought they were poor people who often turned into criminals. They smuggled drugs into Thailand and many Burmese women were prostitutes. I always had negative attitudes towards them, mostly based on accounts in the media and from the education system.
When I was a young student, I was taught that Burmese people viciously burned down our stunning ancient capital city of Ayutthaya . This information was repeated over and over during my high school years until I believed it completely.
From my culture, I learned hatred and prejudice. But now I am confused whether this really is what my society wants me to feel. Shouldn't everyone be equal whatever nationality they are? Would it be possible to not be affected by the media and schools anymore? This would be extremely difficult since we mostly just believe in what we are taught.
Today I have already changed my negative attitudes towards Burmese and turned them into positive ones. As an adult, I am mature enough to know that all humans are equal.

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Saturday, September 12, 2009

အခ်စ္၏ လွ်ိဳ ့၀ွက္ခ်က္ ?

အကယ္၍ မင္းတေယာက္ေသာသူကိုမခ်စ္ေတာ့ဘူးဆို၇င္လမ္းခံဲြလိုက္ပါ။ သူမ်ားကသူ ့ကိုခ်စ္ဖို႔အခြင့္အေရးေပးလိုက္ပါ....

အကယ္၍ မင္းခ်စ္သူကမင္းကိုထားသြားရင္စိတ္ေလ်ာ့လိုက္ပါ။ တျခားတေယာက္ကိုခ်စ္ဖို႔အခြင့္အေရးရတာေပ့ါ။

တခ်ိဳ႕ပစၥည္းကိုမင္းဘယ္ေလာက္ၾကိဳက္ၾကိဳက္မင္းအတြက္ျဖစ္ခ်င္မွျဖစ္မွာ

တခ်ိဳ႔ပစၥည္းကိုမင္းၾကိဳက္ေနလညး္စြန္႔လႊတ္ခ်င္စြန္႔လႊတ္ရမယ္.....လူ႔ဘ၀မွာအမ်ိဳုးမ်ိဳး၇ွိတယ္

ဒါေပမဲ့သူမ်ားကကိုယ့္ကိုထိခိုက္ေစႏိုင္တယ္...တခိ်ဳ႔ေရစက္ဆိုတာဆံုးရႈံးရတာပဲ...
တခ်ိဳ႔က်ေတာ့ဘယ္ေတာ့မွရလာဒ္ေကာင္းမရႏိုင္ဘူး။ လူတေယာက္ကိုခ်စ္ျပီးရင္ပိုင္ဆိုင္ဖို႔ဆိုတာမေသခ်ာဘူးေလ...

ဒါေပမဲ့တေယာက္ေယာက္ကိုပိုင္ဆိုင္ျပီးရင္ေတာ့ေကာင္ေကာင္းေလးသူ ့ကိုျပန္ခ်စ္ပါ..

ေယာက္က်ားေလးေတြငုိတာတကယ္ခ်စ္လို႕ျဖစ္တယ္ ။ မိန္းကေလးေတြငိုတာတကယ္စြန္႔လႊတ္ရလို႔ျဖစ္တယ္တဲ့။

အကယ္၍ ရိုးသားျခင္းဟာထိခိုက္ေစႏိုင္တယ္ဆိုရင္မုသားကိုပဲကၽြန္ေတာ္ေ၇ြးခ်ယ္မယ္

အကယ္၍ မုသားစကားဟာထိခိုက္ေစမယ္ဆိုရင္ဆိတ္ဆိတ္ေနျခင္းကိုေ၇ြးခ်ယ္မယ္ေလ....

ဆိတ္ဆိတ္ေနျခင္းကထိခုိက္ေစမယ္ဆိုရင္ခြဲခြာျခင္းကိုေ၇ြးခ်ယ္မယ္ေပါ့...အကယ္ေ၇ြ႔ဆံုးရႈံးျခင္းကိုဒုကၡလို႔ဆိုရင္မင္းေပးဆပ္ရမွာကို ေၾကာက္ေနသလား?

အကယ္၍စြဲလမ္းျခင္းကဒုကၡဆိုရင္၊ မင္းျပီးဆံုးျခင္းကိုေ၇ြးခ်ယ္မလား?

အကယ္၍ ရ၇ွိေအာင္ၾကိဳးစားျခင္းကိုဒုကၡဆိုရင္မင္းတယူသန္ျဖစ္ျခင္းကိုေ၇ြးခ်ယ္မလား..

အကယ္၍ ခြဲခြာျခင္းဟာဒုကၡဆို႕င္မင္းဘယ္သူကိုရင္ဖြင့္မလဲ?

ကိစၥေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားဟာျပီးသြားမွ၇ွႈင္း၇ွင္းလင္းလင္းသိရတယ္.......ကိစၥေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားဟာျဖစ္ေနခ်ိန္မွာဒုကၡလို႔မခံစားမိဘူးေလ။

ခ်စ္ျခင္းႏွင့္ေရစက္ဆံုျခင္း ရွိခဲ့ရင္ေတာ့ ေအာက္ကအခ်က္ေလးေတြလုပ္ေပးလုိက္ပါေလ။

၁။ သူမပ်င္းေနခ်ိန္မွာအေဖာ္ျပဳေပးပါ
၂။ သူမ၀မ္းနည္းခ်ိန္မွာႏွစ္သိမ့္ေပးပါ
၃။ ေယာက္က်ားေလးကတက္ၾကြစြာဦးေဆာင္ပါ
၄။ မိန္းကေလးကိုခ်ိန္းဆိုျပီးအျပင္ထြက္လည္ပါ
၅။ မိန္းကေလးမွဦးေဆာင္ေဆာင္၇ြက္မႈမလုပ္ပါေစနဲ႔
၆။ သူမအားေန႔တိုင္းေပ်ာ္၇ႊင္ႏိုင္ပါေစ
၇။ ခ်စ္သူကိုေကာင္းေကာင္းမြန္မြန္ဆက္ဆံပါ
၈။ ခ်စ္သူဆႏၵကိုလိုက္ေလ်ာပါ
၉။ သူမကိုစိတ္ထိခိုက္၀မ္းမနည္းပါေစနဲ႔
၁၀။ သူမအႏုိင္က်င့္ခံ၇ခ်ိန္မွာခ်က္ခ်င္းသူမက္ိုကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ပါ
၁၁။ ခ်စ္သူအေၾကာင္းကိုကြယ္၀ွက္မထားပါနဲ႔
၁၂။ ခ်စ္သူကိုသစၥာမေဖာက္ပါနဲ႔


ခ်စ္သူမ်ား အားလုံးေပ်ာ္ရြင္ႏုိင္ၾကပါေစဗ်ာ။

(from an email)

Friday, September 11, 2009

Ways To Know That You Love Someone

12 Ways To Know That You Love Someone

TWELVE:
You talk with him/her late at night and when you go to bed you still think of him/her.

ELEVEN:
You walk really slowly when you are with him/her.

TEN:
You don't feel Ok when he/she is far away.

NINE:
You smile when you hear his/her voice.

EIGHT:
When you look at him/her,you do not see other people around you.You see only him/her.

SIX:
He/She is everything you want to think.

FIVE:
You realise that you smile every time you look at him/her.

FOUR:
You would do anything to see him/her.

THREE:
While you have been reading this, there was a person in your mind all the time.

TWO:
You've been so busy thinking of that person that you didn't notice that number 7 is missing.

ONE:
You are going to check above if that's true and now you are silently laughing to yourself.

NOW MAKE A WISH! YOU KNOW WHAT YOU WANT THE MOST.......

(from Hsuchai's email)

Nominated by UN as the best Poem of 2006 - Written by an A frican Kid


Nominated by UN as the best Poem of 2006 - Written by an
A frican Kid

When I born, I black:
When I grow up, I black :
When I go in Su n, I black
When I scared, I black :
When I sick, I black : A nd
when I die, I still black :
A nd you white fellow :
When you born, you pink :
When you grow up, you white
When you go in sun, you red :
When you cold, you blue : When you scared, you yellow :
When you sick, you green
A nd when you die, you grey : A nd you calling me colored??

(from Scarlet Tune's email )
"If you are interested, you'll do what's convenient; if you're committed, you'll do whatever it takes." - John Assaraf"
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