how to lose your mind in 7 days

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this week was totally fucked.

Gertie's arrest was the worst news to break, obviously - I can still barely think about it without wanting to break something or curl up in the fetal position on the bathroom floor - but it was hardly the only stunner. Observe:

Monday: Rosalind and the ugly baby

Rosalind went into the hospital last weekend with acute appendicitis. I skipped my usual Sunday visit to the Vietnamese house, so I didn't find out until Monday. Very few people knew what was going on, and my frantic questioning of all the Vietnamese turned up exactly zero details.

I had a hard time finding Rosalind at the hospital, since she was pretending to be Cambodian and had given the hospital staff a fake name, but I hunted her down eventually: a pale, stick-thin figure drowning in blue hospital pajamas. Her hand was cold and clammy, bony fingers slippery with sweat, clinging weakly to mine as I held them both against my heart like some kind of goddamn Victorian damsel.

The incision was surprisingly large, not unlike an off-center cesarean section. "It's like you had a baby," I told her. "A really ugly baby." She laughed, then cringed with pain, and I regretted the joke.

I asked her if she wanted me to stay, and she said yes. So I did, perched on the bench between Winnie, who rested her head on my shoulder and massaged my hand, and Saul, who told me the whole story - that is, as much of the story as he could get out between Rosalind's frequent interruptions. "He's lying," she'd say, rolling her eyes a little. "That didn't happen."

Objectively, of course, she looked like deep-fried crap: greasy hair sticking up in all directions, dark puffy bags under her eyes, nails yellowed and bare of polish for the first time in our acquaintance. But she was awake, and smiling, and okay. Beautiful.

Wednesday: Sally and the bug-eyed baby

Pippi left on Sunday for a surprise visit to Sally. She wasn't due to arrive in Sally's remote village until Tuesday, so I was surprised to answer my phone Tuesday morning and hear Sally herself shrieking at me in broken Thai - hello, I miss you, do you miss me, the baby is big, I'm coming back.

"Say what?" I gurgled, wondering if someone had slipped something into my water bottle, but she had already hung up in a fit of excitement.

For once, she wasn't bullshitting. She arrived at the shelter with Pippi on Wednesday, bringing her goggle-eyed baby girl with her. Unfortunately, the reasons they're both back with us are rather grim. You may recall that Sally gave Pippi Two to her aunt. Soon after, the aunt apparently decided she didn't actually want the baby, so she shunted her back to Sally. Meanwhile, Sally's parents decided to move to the city - without their youngest daughter and infant granddaughter - leaving Sally alone with the baby she didn't want in a village that really didn't want them there. Cue Pippi's arrival, a few calls to Harriet and Robin, and Sally's (sort of) triumphant return.

Her standard line is that she doesn't want the baby. Under pressure, though, she's admitted to Pippi that she does like the kid, but her mother won't let her keep her. Pippi is trying to convince her to stay here with Pippi Two for a couple years and finish school, get her shit together, but Sally is determined to give the baby away again and leave the shelter sooner than later.

Friday: Fran and the hairiest baby of all

Fran had been planning for a while to take Blue back to Burma. I wasn't the only one who strongly opposed this idea, for reasons that should be glaringly obvious, but she was insistent. The problem, she said, was that Blue needed papers. Without the assistance of his douchebag father, who had unsurprisingly vanished without a trace, he couldn't get papers here in Thailand. If she didn't get him Burmese papers within a certain time frame, he would be doomed to statelessness, belonging nowhere.

On Thursday, Fran went with Agatha the social worker and somehow secured the necessary Thai papers. I doubted very much that the process was particularly legal, but I didn't give one single flying fuck. What mattered was that Blue had the papers he needed, and Fran wouldn't have to take him back to Burma. They could stay here, safe and supported, and start building a real life.

On Friday, though, Fran went out again and found an apartment. She told me she's leaving on April 1. No doubt she'll go straight back to the bars, where it's easy to make money and even easier to find yourself knocked up and abandoned.

Dammit, dammit, dammit.

Sunday: silver linings

Rosalind is home now. I've gone over to the Vietnamese house almost every day this week to spend a few hours with her, gossiping and shooting the shit. I keep forgetting that I'm not supposed to make her laugh; yesterday she got the giggles so bad that she had to haul herself to her feet and hobble out of the room. She walks like an old woman, hunched over and clutching her incision. She spends most of our time together lying in bed, one skinny hand wrapped around mine or resting on my knee or fiddling with the seam on my jeans. Her medication makes her sleepy, and I usually sneak out after she's dozed off. It doesn't matter: she knows I'll be back.

Pippi Two is absolutely gorgeous. She's so much bigger than the little fairy girl that left in January: the first time Sally shifted her into my arms, the weight of her took my breath away. She's still thin, but her arms and legs are terrifically strong, and she holds up her own head like a champ. Her eyes are enormous and pitch-black, and she stares at me while I hold her, her squishy pink mouth forever pursed in an expression of mingled concern and curiosity. I can still get her to stop crying by jamming my finger in her mouth. And sometimes, when it's just the two of us, I'll still sing to her, just to watch her tiny, sparse eyelashes drift down over those massive cartoon eyes.

Blue is not the world's cutest baby. He looks like an old man, jowly and grumpy-faced, and his shorn hair is growing back in the most hideous Friar Tuck pattern. He's hard to please, unhappy on his back or when it's hot for him to lie on his stomach, and he tends to fall asleep with his sweaty, bristly head shoved right up under my chin. To make matters worse, he's had wicked diarrhea recently; I don't mean to be dramatic, but I think it’s safe to say that I’ve wiped that kid’s ass more in the last couple weeks than I’ve wiped mine in my entire life. I sit at my computer, unable to type with my hands full of this Benjamin Button baby - sweaty and scratchy and heavy, leaking poop like a punctured water balloon - and when Fran asks if I want her to take him now, I shake my head. "Mai bpen rai," I say. It's okay.

It's okay.

negative proof

Gertie never made it across the border.

&

I’ve heard two different versions of her “origin story." It's hard to say which one is more accurate; both were told to me by people who ought to know the facts, who had no reason to bend the truth. Both are horrific, but then, people rarely end up at this shelter because of anything less.

In the first version, Gertie was trafficked over from Burma and put to work in a sweatshop, where a supervisor raped and impregnated her. She escaped and came to the shelter.

In the second version, she was raped by a Burmese general. She became pregnant, and her rapist ordered her to have an abortion. She refused on religious grounds. When the military threatened to kill her for her disobedience, she paid smugglers to get her into Thailand.

I don't know which story is true. Maybe they both are, to some degree. I hope not.

&

We know that she didn't make it out. We know that she got picked up by the Thai police. We know that it's been almost a month since the arrest, and no one has heard from her.

We don't know - possibly never will know - exactly where she is or what happened to her. But we can make an educated guess.

The Thai police are not exactly known for their stalwart defense of the people, especially refugees, who are not recognized under Thai law. Barring a miracle of God or nature, they would almost certainly have sent Gertie back to Burma.

In the best case scenario - the far-fetched daydream that allows me to get up in the morning - they kicked her across the border with relatively little fuss and she was allowed to return to her family. We’ll never see or hear from her again, but she's safe. As safe as you can be in Burma, anyway.

A far more likely possibility is that the Thai police turned her over to the Burmese authorities – the military – who are not known to spare the rod when dealing with "repatriated" refugees. Burmese prisons are nothing to joke about, even in the (frankly doubtful) event that she has not been raped or tortured.

Worse still, if the second version of her story is true, she would have been turned over to the same military she was running from when she came to Thailand. If they realized who she was, she would have been raped brutally and repeatedly, most likely tortured, and possibly killed.

&

I have tried to present this straightforwardly, sticking to the facts as I know them and building a likely chain of events, using what I've picked up from first-hand sources as well as reports from human rights groups, activists, journalists, and survivors. I have tried to think with my head, not my heart. I have tried not to jump to any conclusions.

Above all, I have tried not to associate the Gertie I'm writing about here with the Gertie I know. The friend who teases me and gossips with me, who takes my arm and falls asleep on my shoulder in the songthaew, who always alerts me when there is papaya salad to be had. The student who scolds me if I'm late, who taught me to write my name in Burmese, who reads aloud with slow determination and invariably says "a-n-d...and!" and "ans-wur" no matter how many times I correct her. The seamstress who has the aesthetic sense of a five-year-old, who loves bright colors and flower headbands and teddy bears patches, who's always presenting me with retina-scarring color combinations and asking if they're beautiful, as if I could say anything but "yes" to that hopeful face.

The mother who was traveling with her two-year-old daughter, a thoroughly spoiled mama's girl with a boy's haircut and a split thumb like her mother's.

&

What do I know, anyway? Maybe they let her off easy. Maybe she and Opal are back with her family. Maybe they're still sitting in a Thai prison. Maybe I've totally misjudged the situation. I'm no expert, you know. I could be wrong.


I could be wrong.

the number 23

I am not in the habit of doing anything particularly special for my birthday. Last year, if I recall correctly, MD and I went out for a nice but low-key dinner. The year before, it was my first day staying in someone else's house on a cooperative farm in Costa Rica. Two years before that, the big day was spent mostly in a minivan with four people I didn't know very well, trying valiantly to get from Denver to Phoenix - a 16-hour doozy, during which I never mentioned that it was my nineteenth birthday.

The thing is, I don't like to make a big fuss, or make people feel like they're obligated to be nice to me or give me special treatment. If you hate me the other 364 days of the year, the anniversary of my birth shouldn't be any different.

That's not to say I don't appreciate some small acknowledgment. Like most people, I'd be a little upset if everyone forgot entirely, but a simple, "Oh, by the way, happy birthday," from a few loved ones is more than enough to keep me from going all Molly Ringwald.

This year, I planned to keep things pretty quiet: dinner in the city, Skype chats with a couple friends, maybe treat myself to a massage and a new book. I hoped that most people wouldn't realize it was my birthday at all.

No such luck. I have no idea how the news got out, but everyone knew by the end of the day. I think I remember mentioning it offhand to Elsa a few weeks ago - probably when she expressed surprise at my tender age of 22 - but I assumed she'd forgotten until Harriet searched me out to deliver a pair of huge, fabulously garish earrings, which were so perfectly me that I immediately switched them out with the pair I was wearing. Harriet made a point of telling me they were from Elsa, probably because she didn't want me to think she'd chosen such ugly things. (Elsa told me later that her mom had in fact thought they were too big and loud, but Elsa had insisted that they were my style.)

I must have told Rosalind, too, because Alma informed me she's the one who spilled the beans to the Vietnamese. Alma and Winnie ambushed me in the morning with a joyfully off-key rendition of Happy Birthday, as well as three different cards: Winnie's short and sweet, Rosalind's in textbook-perfect English, and Alma's almost invisible under a thick layer of stickers. I blushed and cringed and thanked them - and then, like the coward I am, I ran away. I intended to hide in the office, but it proved no sanctuary, as our social worker Agatha pulled out an incredibly sweet card that George and Ruthie had left behind for me. (They've been in Vietnam for the last two weeks, so how the hell they knew, I have no idea.)

Later in the morning, Betty came in and stood next to my chair, a terrible scowl darkening her normally cheerful visage. Slightly alarmed, I asked what was wrong. She continued to glare at me for several seconds, then abruptly burst into a huge grin and flung herself at me, bellowing Happy Birthday at the top of her lungs. "Shut up, shut up," I wailed, totally in vain, as she just cackled wildly and squeezed me tighter.

Later still, Winnie came to the door of the office and asked me to come with her. It's not an unusual request, and the reward for cooperation is often papaya salad, so I happily joined her for a stroll behind the women's residence, arms slung around each other's waists. We meandered along, idly discussing the plague of tiny frogs that had suddenly descended on the farm that morning, and it wasn't until we approached the gazebo and I saw all the women gathered together that my brain started howling, "IT'S A TRAP!"

The women burst into that hateful song, led by a beaming Betty, and I smacked Winnie's shoulder and hid my crimson face in my hands like the socially inept ingrate I am. Then I noticed Pippi walking over from the office bearing a serving dish piled high with ice cream, the melting tower obscured by a mass of flaming yellow candles. Everyone sang again, presumably because they enjoyed watching me squirm, and I managed to blow out the candles and thank everyone without passing out or embarrassing myself any further.

I'm still pretty embarrassed about all the ballyhoo - so very unexpected because it's practically unheard-of around these parts - and I'm sure there were many people that were strong-armed into participating who really didn't give a damn one way or another. But I'm not so ungrateful as to demean the actions and effort of the handful of people who were behind it all, who just wanted to do something special and make me happy.

So even though they'll (God willing) never read this, let me just say for the record: thanks, you guys. I love you too.

retro: into that good night

Over the course of my travels, I have slept in many, many beds. It's frequently been the nature of my work to sleep wherever there's a bit of free space: innumerable thin foam mattresses, a dozen creaky canvas cots, couches and floors and beds so hard they may as well have been floors. I have spent countless nights lying awake on these beds, tormented in turn by the heat and the cold, illness and nerves, itchy fleabites and upset stomachs and, on one memorable occasion, a particularly loud colony of frogs. Just the other night I discovered flying ant larvae nestled in my blankets, and have been suffering phantom creepy-crawlies ever since.

But never, and I mean never, have I had so much trouble sleeping as I did as a volunteer in Nicaragua.

Ironically, my allotted sleeping space was pretty nice. The bed was a real mattress, a luxury I have since rarely seen even in more affluent towns. No doubt it was my host parents' bed, quietly surrendered to me with the sort of selflessness usually seen only in anonymous kidney donors. There were no sheets to worry about; I just sprawled across the bare mattress, travel pillow smushed securely between my head and the wall. For the first couple weeks, my little sisters took turns sleeping with me. 11-year-old Julieta tended to tuck in close behind me, huddled against my back, while 9-year-old Marta was an aggressive cuddler, wrapping her arms and legs around me every night like a spider monkey. I was forever carefully unwrapping her and rolling her over onto her other side, only to watch as, like a perpetual motion machine, she instantly rolled back over and clung onto me again.

At some point, they both stopped sleeping with me. To this day, I sometimes worry that my host mother found out they were disrupting my sleep and ordered them to let me have the bed to myself. It's a stupid thing to let ruffle my conscience, but if I've learned one thing from my mother, it's that you can never have too much guilt or garlic. I feel guilty for stealing a piece of a stranger's pretzel when I was five years old, I feel guilty for things I've done in dreams, and I feel guilty for unintentionally forcing my host sisters to sleep three to a bed.

Our town had no electricity, so everyone went to bed shortly after nightfall. I got in the habit of reading to Marta and Julieta in the evenings - after we watched our novela on our cousins' car battery-powered television, of course. I had brought a stash of Spanish-language children's books, and every night we would sit on the edge of my bed, the girls pressed up close against my sides, and read Dr. Seuss. One of the girls would hold up a little white candle for light, dripping wax on the pages and occasionally "accidentally" singeing a piece of my hair.

One night, during a particularly spirited recitation of Cómo el Grinch Robó la Navidad, I noticed movement out of the corner of my eye. Snagging the candle from Marta, I turned around to investigate, only to discover that the wall was swarming with ants. Not tiny, harmless ants, like the kind that would later plague my cereal in Granada. No, these were big, black, ass-kicking ants, the panzer division of the ant army. I knew from experience that a bite from one of those bad boys felt a lot like getting hit in the hand with a baseball bat. A baseball bat covered in spikes.

"ANTS," I said, calmly, to my sisters.

"Ants," they agreed. Julieta reached over and flicked one off the wall.

"ANTS. WHERE MY HEAD GOES."

I believed then as I do now that compromise is key to cross-cultural understanding, but I straight-up could not sleep with my head tucked up against the Demon Ant Super-Highway. I began to sleep curled up at the foot of my bed, like a dog. My legs stuck off the edge of the mattress, but who cared? At least I had put a safe distance between my body and the ant battalion, although frequently a handful of them would trek all the way down the mattress just to see how I was getting on.

Then I noticed the scorpions.

Well, okay, I had noticed them before. What I hadn't noticed was that they tended to mosey across the outside wall. The wall I was now snuggling up to every night.

In other words: "SCORPIONS. WHERE MY HEAD GOES."

Reasonably, I thought, I began pushing the mattress away from the wall a few inches. My 15-year-old sister Milagros thought I was insane. "They'll just walk across the floor and up the side of the mattress and get you that way," she said.

"LA LA LA I'M NOT LISTENING," I replied.

So that took care of the ants and the scorpions. Unfortunately, the worst was yet to come.

One night, I woke up around 1:00 A.M. feeling sick and over-hot. Venturing out to the latrine was not an option; at night, it swarmed with cockroaches the size of small dogs. I resigned myself to hours of misery, hoping vaguely that I would drift back into sleep but knowing enough not to count on it.

Half an hour into my ordeal, I was distracted from my suffering by a strange, clicking, sibilant sound. The house was built into the side of a hill, so that the top of my bed was level with the ground outside. And something was out there, on the other side of the wall. Something...hissing.

"Milagros," I whispered urgently. "Mili! Is that a snake?"

She sat bolt upright. "What? Where?"

I shushed her, indicating that she should listen. A moment later, we both heard it - a whistling hiss that trailed off into a series of clicks.

She swallowed audibly and said, "It's just crickets." She seemed uncertain, and I wasn't buying it. Crickets my ass. Since when did crickets hiss? Or have teeth?

Satisfied with her assessment of the situation, Milagros kicked Marta's legs away and went back to sleep. Whatever my fate was to be that night, I was going to face it alone.

I want to take a moment to clarify that I'm not particularly afraid of snakes. I'm not particularly afraid of earthquakes or axe murderers or deadly nightshade, either, but when brought face-to-face with these things, I think it's only natural to realize with sudden clarity that they can in fact kill us. Some of the biggest assholes in the animal kingdom can be found in Nicaragua - this is, after all, the country that gave us freshwater sharks - and various parts of the country are home to coral snakes, bushmasters, and the good old fer-de-lance, each of which are bound to ruin your day.

Quiz time!

Q: Was the snake outside my house really a horrible, astoundingly deadly pit viper?
A: Unlikely.

Q: Was I, armed with a single drippy candle and my pocketknife, really about to go check?
A: Fuck off.

Throughout that long night, as my stomach twisted and cramped, I listened to the snake slide back and forth on the other side of the wall. The roof was only casually connected to the walls, leaving plenty of room for a determined death-bringer to squeeze through and kill us all in our beds. Could snakes climb walls? I was pretty sure they could. On the other hand, most of my snake knowledge came from Jumanji and The Jungle Book. On the other other hand, it was a really short wall.

Either Disney lied to me about wildlife abilities and behaviors (ha ha, like they'd ever do that), or snakes aren't actually too interested in sweaty, unshowered gringa as a main course. Whatever the reason, the snake didn't slither over the wall that night, or the next night, or the next. In fact, it stayed outside for the next two weeks, jealously guarding its territory every night, until the day I left. I know this because I was awake for every one of those nights. I never intended to stay awake. I would doze off after storytime, then jolt awake a few hours later, my heart in my throat. The bastard was always there, gliding leisurely along the length of wall that separated us, occasionally slowing down as it passed my head as if to suggest that this was the night it would come over the wall and eat my face. I could never fall back asleep, so I would lie there listening to it until dawn, scratching my mosquito bites and amending my mental hierarchy of nocturnal enemies.

In this way, we passed our nights together: the snake moving back and forth along its familiar path, hissing and clicking, and me curled up at one end of my mattress, mud-flaked toes twitching nervously in midair, wondering what else might be hiding out there in the dark.

snow white

I am really, really white.

Okay, that's not really "news" as such. I'm English, Russian and German, which means (1) I'm a tremendous asshole, and (2) I cannot display my legs in public without blinding all onlookers. I am only slightly exaggerating. The supernatural paleness of my skin has been the subject of much discussion since I started traveling. My host mother in Nicaragua observed that my feet were the color of milk. The chatty nurses at the Ministry of Health used to say that I made all their photos look overexposed. In Mexico, I was regularly stopped by old women as I walked through their little towns and informed, quite gravely, that mine were the whitest legs they'd ever seen.

Some people can pull off the pale look. Anne Hathaway, for example. Gorgeous! Or Christina Hendricks - phwoar. Their skin is like fine bone china, and those bitches are working it for all it's worth.

They also clearly sleep underground, carry parasols and have not seen the beach even once in the last twenty years. The rest of us must balance our desire to protect our delicate complexions with the fact that most of Planet Earth is, in fact, outside. As for me, the instant I expose my pasty white skin to direct sunlight, my look becomes less "porcelain" and more "cracked terracotta."

It's easy to avoid the sun in Cleveland, as it's cloudy, raining, snowing or sleeting approximately 361 days out of the year. But the minute I venture out of the overcast haven of the Midwest and actually encounter that big shiny thing in the sky, my defenseless skin loses its ever-loving mind.

"FUCK OH MY CHRIST WHAT THE HELL IS THAT," it says, cringing away from the sun's rays like a small animal cornered by a slavering beast.

"That's the sun," I say patiently, slopping on another liter of sunblock. "It keeps us alive. Seriously, we've been over this like a million times."

"OH GOD OH GOD WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE," my skin wails, and abruptly bursts into flames.

So I spend most of my time abroad wearing a skin-suit the approximate hue and texture of a quality salmon fillet. I've built up a tolerance for the pain, but the sight of my sun-broiled flesh generally causes a great deal of alarm among my non-white associates. "What happened to you?" they demand. Invariably they reach out to touch, then hesitate when I flinch. "Does it hurt?" they ask, curious hands still hovering above my skin, as if warming by a fire.

"A little," I lie. "It's not as bad as it looks. Say, do you know where I can procure a large quantity of dry ice?"

Even when my skin's not falling off in sheets the size of playing cards, it's kind of a pain in the ass. I am evidently a rare mosquito delicacy, and my whiteness causes the flaming red bites to stand out like scarlet letters, drawing a lot of unwanted attention from every well-meaning grandma and taxi driver in a twelve-mile radius, each bursting with useful insights such as: "You know, you should really use repellent." And: "Have you considered pants?"

In some places, even my plain old unblemished skin is enough to draw a crowd. I used to dread walking through one of my "base cities" in Nicaragua, one of the only places I've ever felt distinctly uncomfortable about the nature of the cat-calls directed my way. This would be the town where, not thirty seconds after emerging from the Ministry of Health building, I was hailed by a group of young men. "Hello!" they chorused gaily, and then, when I didn't respond to their satisfaction, "You are a dirty fifty-cent whore." (Well, actually, they said it in Spanish, and they said "10-córdoba." Still, my going rate at the time was upwards of five dollars, so what the hell did they know.)

I've been called by a lot of nicknames. Chela was popular in Nicaragua, güera in Mexico. Both mean "white girl." More general terms like gringo/a and farang tend to mean this, too - while they technically mean American or foreigner, it's understood in many places that Americans are white. Just ask any Company volunteer or staff member of color; I guarantee they've had the following conversation more times than they can count.

LOCAL: So where are you from?
VOLUNTEER: California.
LOCAL: No, where are you from?
VOLUNTEER: Uh...I was born in New Jersey?
LOCAL: Look, where are your parents from?
VOLUNTEER: Annapolis.
LOCAL: And their parents?
VOLUNTEER: Same.
LOCAL: And their parents?
[15 minutes later.]
VOLUNTEER: Okay, fine, I think my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother was born in China.
LOCAL: A-ha! Just what I thought, chinita.

So, obviously, I could have it a lot worse. I know that. I understand that complaining about my pale skin is kind of like bitching about the heaviness of my golden mantle and the discomfort of my diamond-encrusted shoes. At home and abroad, my pinkish epidermis allows me an insane level of privilege of which I'm usually not even aware. In a lot of places, due in large part to some tricky cultural and socioeconomic issues -

[Dear M,
Don't you dare detour into a discussion of cultural hegemony. Don't do it! No one cares!
Kisses,
M]

- uhh, where was I. Oh, right: due in large part to all that, light skin is valued and sought after in many places in a way that'll give you the heebie-jeebies. You can't walk into a drugstore here in Thailand without seeing shelves upon shelves of supposedly skin-lightening products with names like "White Radiance" and "White Perfect." In fact, I have yet to find a moisturizer here that doesn't claim to bleach the user's complexion. Lots of the women at the shelter use these or similar products, and more than one person has poked at the pale skin above my tan lines and told me that my skin is beautiful. Even the men on the construction team hide their faces behind hot, heavy canvas veils, because dark skin marks a person as a laborer.

So I'm lucky, undeservedly privileged, because, for better or worse, I'm as white as it gets.

But seriously, you guys: who do I have to bribe, kill or screw to get a decent base tan?