Camp

We planned to train to “camp,” or, more precisely, to train to the city of Ubon Ratchathani, Thailand, known more simply as Ubon, site of a Lao refugee camp in the 1970s and 80s.  The train tracks end at Ubon anyway, we figured, and that would give us a night to check out “camp” before we moved on to Mukdahan, the first receiving community in Thailand on this side Mekong.  We would, in effect, trace the path of escape backward into Laos.  At the end of the tracks of Ubon, we would take a taxi to camp, driving once again into the landscape of memory.

For Sy, memory grows more strongly impressionistic at camp.  These are childhood memories, that no man’s land at the dawn of consciousness when things come back to you almost completely in images without interpretation.  Sy’s memories from camp are strong enough that they have become foundational in her story, have moved their way into our family story, become a baseline for our sense of what’s appropriate in the world, and, at times, a way to threaten our children with the darker implications of their actions.  As “eat-your-food-there-are-starving-people-in-Africa” is to other families, so camp memories are to our family.

They are not, I don’t think, your average memories.

One of the memories has to do with toileting.  Or rather toileting without a toilet.  It seems that when you had to do your business in the Ubon camp, you walked out to an unoccupied section of the camp, found a place near a tree or behind a bush and squatted down.  But the part that’s made it into Nonginthirath family legend is what you did next:  “You find a stick or some leaves to wipe your butt with.” 

Ah, yes, and how those sticks have made their way into the family narrative:  as comic relief—“Oh, well, it’s a step up from wiping your butt with sticks”; as inspiration in difficult times—“If I could wipe my but with sticks, I can sure as heck do this”; and, my personal favorite, as a measure of luxury over against need—“Do you think I cared about X when I was wiping my butt with sticks?”

Don’t get me wrong—it’s not that the sticks show up in conversation very often and never in public.  But if you’re around long enough, they do loom in the background—in somewhat the same way as the outhouse and Sears catalog loom in the stories of an older generation: as a reminder of blessing in the present.

A second memory is even more pertinent because more serious, less comic-sounding.  It has to do with sustenance itself, with the marginal existence of marginal people.  Camp was, of course, a place of rations.  Keo got a “job” dispensing powdered milk rations with relief workers Dave and Janet.  Sy remember standing in line daily “for those stupid powdered milk rations”; there were also, it seems, rations on rice and meat.  As is always the case in dire times, there was more of the staple than there was of the protein.  Meat was most in demand.  Because of its scarcity, it was the most valued, the most stretched, the most savored.

“You would get this little bit of meat,” Sy remembers, “and you would make that meat last, you’d eat just a little bit with your rice because that was all you got.  You’d stretch it and stretch it.”  

It’s this memory that stands at the back of the lesson about eating po—eating too large a ratio of meat to rice in a way that’s wasteful, over-indulgent, profligate.  With the rise of the food movement reminding us that meat is luxury, with the rise of health consciousness reminding us that portion control is key to our health, this camp lesson isn’t going away any time soon, nor should it.

There are other memories, darker and more ethereal, that also remain from camp.  Playing on some dirt mounds at the edge of camp, Sy thought she heard a cat meow; “When I looked I saw the shadow of person but there was nobody there,” she tells me.  “It was phi,” ghosts, entities prevalent in the Lao world.  Sprinting to get away, she fell and gouged her knee; the scar remains.

So camp for Sy is really a no-man’s land of memory, a stripped down landscape where physical and spiritual realities remain; where the questions, “How shall we survive?” and “Who is influencing our destiny for good or ill?” are featured as the foundational questions we all have to face as human beings on planet earth. 

The real Ubon camp is quite literally a no-man’s land.  As I said, we hoped to visit the site of the camp, and so in preparation for our trip, I Googled it, assuming it would be as easy as that—that Google would dial up pictures, directions, a tourist information center. 

However, little remains of the Ubon camp.  After digging around for a while, I did get directions to where the former camp would have been located, posted on a website about travel in Thailand.  Behind the high school and amongst new buildings such as a cancer hospital and trade schools, one can apparently still find the old concrete roads of the place that locals still refer to as soon Lao—Lao center.

Of course, it’s a blessing that the camp no longer exists.  I’ve heard another Lao refugee from Worthington express consternation that the same camp she had been in was being used a generation later for Indochina’s latest hemorrhaging people group: the Karen of Myanmar.  Still, it was a bit disappointing, I think, for Sy to hear that so little remained of a place that has so fundamentally shaped her orientation in the world.

We didn’t end up stopping at what’s left of the camp.  Other realities constrained us, like traveling with children.  That’s probably for the better.  The needs of the immediate present and imminent future shift our agendas from looking back to looking ahead, but the camp at Ubon served its purpose and continues to cast its shadow into our lives.  In the way it teaches us about the forces that conspire for and against life itself.  In the way in inhabits our story.