 Burmese children mine heaps of garbage in order to survive at a dump in Mae Sot, Thailand. (QMI Agency Photo)
|
MAE SOT, Thailand - Trucks packed with goods as high as they are long line up to cross the "Friendship Bridge" between Thailand and Burma.
This is the most conventional way across the Moei River, that separates the two countries.
But black market goods - everything from teak to amphetamines - make their way into Thailand via more unorthodox routes.
Burmese migrant workers, the mainstay of this border town's underground economy, fall into that category.
They are ferried across the river on inner tubes, while Thai border guards look the other way for 20 baht (about 64 cents Canadian).
There are an estimated 100,000-plus Burmese migrant workers in the border town of Mae Sot and more than 2.5 million in all of Thailand.
Hoping for a life free of oppression and grinding poverty, the migrants look for a better life on the other side.
More often than not, however, life on the construction sites, garment factories and farms that hire them fall well short of ideal conditions.
"All the factories use migrant workers," says Moe Swe, who heads up the Yaung Chi Oo Workers Association. "They treat them like animals. When they need them, they hire them. When they don't need them, they kick them out."
San Dar was one of countless Burmese women who toiled for long hours on a sewing machine in Thailand until she lost her job.
The 24-year-old woman from Rangoon came here with her mother about a year ago because of Burma's dismal economic conditions.
In Burma, San Dar - a false name the migrant woman made up due to fear of reprisals from Burmese authorities - owned a sewing machine, which she used to run a small business.
A day's wages in Burma, an impoverished nation of about 50 million, could not buy meat, a relative luxury she can afford in Thailand, she noted.
But in Thailand, San Dar and her mother have watched dreams of a better life get shredded at a garment factory.
At the garment factory, she worked from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., a shift broken up by a two-hour break, seven days a week.
That earned her 61 baht ($1.96 Canadian) a day.
The legal minimum wage in this part of Thailand is 152 baht ($4.87 Canadian) for a day's labour, but is easily skirted for the sweatshops who have learned how to hide their conditions from government inspectors.
Things turned sour for San Dar and her mother when the factory's manager asked them to move to other sleeping quarters, which she said were beside smelly toilets.
Because her mother was already very sick, San Dar refused, a response that prompted the manager to kick their dinner across the floor, she said.
"That's why they came to us," said Moe Swe, whose association offers a safe house for dismissed migrant workers.
Apart from emergency shelter, his workers' association offers migrants retraining, coaches them on workers' rights and advocates for their compensation from ruthless employers.
Between May 2002 and July 2008, the association, working with lawyers paid for by international aid organizations, successfully represented 1,835 workers before the Thai courts.
In 132 cases, the total compensation was 10.7 million baht ($342,935.53).
That's made Moe Swe an unpopular man among Thailand' business community.
A neatly dressed man with glasses and a laid-back manner, he is used to upsetting the status quo.
Before he fled Burma, he led a student uprising in 1988 and spent 12 years hiding in the jungle.
Now, it's not the Burmese regime that's gunning for his head. It's sweatshop owners in Mae Sot.
"I've cost them a lot of money," Moe Swe says with a laugh.
While migrant workers are able to register to work legally in Thailand, many employers prefer to remain underground.
About 997,000 migrant workers registered with the government in 2009, but Moe Swe said an equal number or more did not.
Others choose to bypass the factories for a life of mining through mountains of trash at a local garbage dump at the edge of the border town.
Trash pickers can earn between 30-40 baht (96 cents-$1.28 Canadian) digging through trash and reselling their finds - about the same wages they would make taking care of cows at an area farm.
About 200 Burmese migrants have traded their troubled homeland for rudimentary bamboo dwellings perched amid the peaks and valleys of foul-smelling rubbish.
"It's worse in Burma," says a 25-year-old mother of two children from Rangoon who has lived in the dump for about a year.
Last month, her husband died here after a bout with malaria. He was 28 years old.
Elsewhere, others languish in refugee camps.
While the line between migrant and refugee tends to blur in Thailand, there are an estimated 50,000 refugees living in a camp just north of Mae Sot, waiting for a chance to return home or move on.
Officially, there are roughly 150,000 Burmese living in Thai camps.
Some camp residents have spent their whole lives there.
Though some at Mae La earn money as migrant workers in illegal sweatshops, many get by on food rations.
Ley Nge would like to leave the camp and earn some money, but is too afraid to cross paths with Thai authorities.
"Here's it's peaceful, but it's not like a village," says the 30-year-old.
Thai policies that restrict camp dwellers' freedom of movement are troublesome, says Sally Thompson, deputy director of the Thailand Burma Border Consortium (TBBC), a group of aid agencies that provide camp dwellers with food and other basic necessities.
"The opportunities for livelihood are extremely limited," Thompson said.
"It's really unrealistic to think that refugees can be self-reliant within a camp context."
Lucky children lodging at Kaw Tha Blay Hostel, a residence supported by Canadian-based charity Project Umbrella Burma, are able to go to school.
The Orillia, Ont., charity provides about $600 to feed, educate and house each orphan or unaccompanied youth who stays at the hostel.
Lucky ones may study two more years at Project Umbrella Burma's college.
One Burmese man working at a small eatery in downtown Mae Sot likened the life of a migrant to one of perpetual limbo.
"I've got no future now. I cannot live in my country. I cannot live in Thailand," said 25-year-old Johnny Adhikari.
Adhikari said he and his uncle found themselves at the wrong end of Burmese authorities when they made the mistake of confronting a soldier for stealing a goat.
Realizing they would never win their case, his uncle told him to leave the country.
"He said, 'Johnny, you have to go.'"
Now a river separates his new home and his old, with little hard times no further behind him.
