Read For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question for Free Online Page B

Karen script, a train of circular characters, loops that extended lines or swirls above and below the baseline. The other side was in English: 1.) Killings 2.) Disappearances 3.) Torture/inhumane treatments 4.) Forced labor 5.) Use of child soldiers 6.) Forced relocation 7.) Confiscation/destruction of property 8.) Rape 9.) Other sexual violence 10.) Forced prostitution 11.) Forced marriage 12.) Arbitrary/illegal arrest/detention 13.) Human trafficking 14.) Obstruction of freedom of movement 15.) Obstruction of freedom/expression/assembly.
    “Then what?”
    “Then they enter information into Martus.”
    “Into . . . what?”
    “Human rights violation database.”
    “Then what happens to the information?”
    “We can share, with other HRD.”
    “With other ...”
    “Human rights documenter.”

    “So you guys collect it all ...”
    Htan Dah stared at me.
    “And then what? Then it just sits there?”
    Htan Dah shrugged.
    “How do the guys get to the villages?”
    “They walk.”
    That explained Htoo Moo’s ass. “How long are they gone?”
    “Depends. Maybe three months.”
    “Do they just hide around the jungle that whole time?”
    “Yes(!),” Htan Dah said. “If they are caught, they could die.”
    This, though probably obvious, caught me off guard. Htan Dah and I watched each other for a moment.
    “Do you ever do that?”
    “No. I am office manager.”
    “Do you?” I asked Ta Mla.
    “ Yes ,” he said, nodding gravely. “I am . . . human rights . . . documenter.”
    Well, somebody had to document it—stealthily. One activist who gave an interview to a PBS Frontline reporter served seven years in prison. Another was sentenced to twenty-five years for giving an interview that was critical of the regime to the BBC in 1997. Of the 173 nations in the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index 2008, Burma ranked 170 th , behind Iran and China and Cuba and every other country except the “unchanging hells” of Turkmenistan, North Korea, and Eritrea. Burma is third in having the most journalists in jail. If one exile newspaper’s tagline, which quotes Napoleon, 6 is right that one newspaper is worth a thousand bayonets, 7 and the employees of BA were fighting one of the largest armies on the planet by keeping villagers abreast of relevant world news and trying to collect
the villagers’ struggles to disseminate to the rest of the world, they did indeed need a solid grasp of English.
     
    WHEN I’D told The Blay that I had no qualifications to teach English as a second language, I’d meant, really, that I had one, sort of: five years of high school and college French.
    “Okay, you guys, today we’re going to conjugate some verbs,” I told my afternoon class, the beginners. BA apparently had another office in Mae Sot, and most of my students apparently lived there. So, after one more full day of frantic Internet searching for a month and a half of lesson plans, Htoo Moo had, with neither a word nor a helmet and with a maniac’s speed, driven me to Office Two on the back of his motorbike. The beginner’s class contained Ta Mla, Ta Eh Thaw, and five people I’d never met. One of them was a middle-aged woman smooth of face and voice whose first question was how long I was staying and whose second was how they were supposed to have enough time to improve their English in six weeks. I’d only been in Mae Sot for four days, but even I was savvy enough not to use the “Six weeks is a really long time!” defense again with someone who’d probably lived in a refugee camp for twenty years. Instead, I just shook my head, my mouth open, apology creasing my forehead.
    My morning class, the advanced students, had been easier, since their comprehension was higher and I hadn’t had to painstakingly guide them through the very basic conversational interviews with each other and verb forms I hadn’t thought about since second grade. Like the beginners, they all had brand-new notebooks with creatures and