JSMK - Getting Here

Once upon a time, when we were living in Longview in our cute, white, clean, carpeted, vintage 1920s apartment with such wonderful things as a bathtub, and a memory-foam mattress topper, and a solid headboard you could lean against, and a crockpot and kitchen aid mixer and a blender, Gabe and I used to dream about going to other parts of the world. We would say things while we were sitting on our bouch (the bed-couch that served both purposes in our living room) eating chocolate watching episodes of 19 Kids and Counting, like, "This is great, but wouldn't it be fun if we could be traveling together right now?"

I was reminded of that while I was 3 hours in to a journey that required me to cling to a "bench" jury-rigged onto the front of a tractor as I descended the third or fourth mountain at what seemed a 45 degree angle. My back was bruised in a strip across my shoulder blades from the bar of the passenger bench, and the flesh at the back of my knees felt like they'd been beaten from jostling over the board that was nailed to the front of the bench to help insure riders didn't slide off the front and plummet over a cliff or get crushed by the tractor wheels.

That was also the moment I realized something that should have been way more apparent to a farm girl such as myself: tractors don't make comfortable carriages. And when I said I wanted to be traveling somewhere with Gabe, the very last thing in my mind was that such travels would include traversing the 3000 foot tall hills of Burma on farm equipment.

How did we get to that scene? What on earth are we doing? Good question.

No, this was not an "India gone bad" retreat back to Thailand via whatever mode available. We actually planned this trip separate from India. India, by the way, ended well and we came back from that jaunt with some good discussion happening between us as we look toward the future.

But I'm talking about Burma now. Backtracking about a month and a half, I was at a girls' night making Valentine's with some of the gals I've met in Chiang Mai, and I was talking to this interesting young lady named Benita. Benita and her husband work for the Free Burma Rangers - an organization that seeks to bring hope to the oppressed tribal people of Burma (it's official name is now Myanmar, but the tribal groups apparently reject that name because although it was changed to that in an attempt to symbolically unify the country, it contains sounds or letters that aren't in the tribal dialect of some of the people groups, if I understand correctly). FBR, as the organization calls itself, desires to see justice established by equipping volunteers from the tribes in ranger tactics - such a jungle survival and navigation and surveillance and medical skills - so they can, in turn, aid and assist their people when they are attacked by the Burmese military and document abuse for the purpose of publicizing to the global community.

As part of FBR's work, they have a training camp where they run an annual new-ranger's training boot-camp-type-event for 3 months, and they also have a one-year medical school for the Rangers that desire to become medics.

Benita explained that FBR likes to have native-English speakers at JSMK (there's a lot of acronyms in this social pocket - this one stands for Jungle School of Medicine Kawtoolie. This is understandable as many of the US volunteers are former military folks). Usually there are doctors or nurses that go out to the jungle school for short stints to teach the classes, but the months of March and April they didn't have any foreigners there. She asked if Gabe and I would be willing to go to teach English, math, and maybe some basic anatomy (right now the students are at the beginning of their one-year medical training, so they are completing a 2-month "foundations" study). We couldn't go in March because we were still teaching English at Bawrirak Suksa and we had our India trip planned, but we offered to go as soon as we got back from India.

So the tractor was one of the many phases of transportation we did this week getting from India to Chiang Mai to the very rural jungle camp.

In fact, we thought we'd have to hike the final 25km (yes, over those 3,000 foot elevation hills... Carrying our 20lb backpacks....), so the tractor was an unexpected blessing. And by unexpected blessing, I really mean a total act of sweet mercy from God because, let me tell you, daily PiYo workouts are wonderful for toning and strengthening, but let me make this abundantly clear: PiYo for 2 months is not sufficient preparation for hiking in the Burmese hot season over hills that are more than half a mile high with 20 lbs of weight strapped to your back. I don't know what we were thinking, but that is the voice of experience telling you there.

We did hike the final 5km or so, and that took us almost 2 hours. On the final hill (really, it was about the only hill we had to use our own muscle power) I wasn't sure I was going to make it. I kept telling myself, "Don't look up, just take one more step. Good job. Now take one more. Keep your eyes on the trail. Don't look up. Nice, even breaths. Don't look up." Going down that hill on the other side was almost worse, of course, since my legs were shaking so bad it was like balancing on jello. But the one time I had a foot slide out from under me, I was able to catch myself with my opposite hand by leaning backwards in a PiYo flip (so I guess that PiYo did come in handy for something!).

The sight of the thatched-roof, 2-story wood hut that is to be our home for this month looked like a luxurious palace when we reached our destination, though!

Now we're on Day 2 of being at JSMK - Gabe rigged up hammocks for us to sleep in (a gesture for which I'm very thankful for, having seen 3 rats in the past 24 hours that also seem to inhabit our living space). To be fair and give due credit here, Gabe has actually hung the hammocks twice - last night's after-dark hanging resulted in a long night of feeling akin to bananas with our feet and head about a meter higher than our sagging mid sections, so today he attempted to fix that inconvenient detail. We are diligently applying bug repellant and trying to get a lay of the land. So far today has not included any tractors or hiking beyond climbing the stairs to our living quarters, and for that, I'm particularly thankful!


- Dani