Holland, Amsterdam, 26 June 2010.
I knew she was Karen the moment she came over and asked me for a drink, her roundish face a dead give-away reminding me of Nong in Krung Thep who herself is half Karen...
Now a drink in the land of the holy Thais is quite affortable to a reasonably well-off Farang like me so pas de problem there, and since I am always on the look-out for suitable models for my extensive collection of sketchbooks, it seemed only natural at the time I asked her for her life story while making a portrait of her...
This was in a small and obscure bar in Mae Sot, a small trading village on the Thai/Burmese border, surrounded by Karen refugee camps, fugetives from the frequent border skirmishes between an insane regime based in Ragoon at the time and weakening Karen resistence forces...my model was both a refugee and a female soldier fighting the hated Tatmadaw governement army...
Her name was Shere and she grew up in a typical dusty Karen village sharing her young life with semi-naked Karen toddlers running amok in the village's sandy streets while her parents were busy tending to the rice paddies under a scorcing hot sun up to twelve hours a day...
Getting her basic schooling under swaying Banyan trees from a woman so old she needed aid to walk to the village's dirty latrine but had the gift of languages and was the only one in a 500 hundert-plus community who could understand the marks on paper...
How one bad day when she was 13 years old, the feared Tatmadaw send an emissary telling the village elders they had to leave the land, not allowed to carry more then the necesary food and clothes on their bodies...about the long March to Thailand, the land mines on the way that ripped limps of fellow villagers, snakes and starvation and sneaking across the Thai border in the dark of night...
She told me about her illegal crossings back into Myanmar - or was it called Burma - fighting those she came to hate and despise while her fellow combatees were being ripped to pieces by the opponents bullets, the systematic burning of Karen villages, the rape at the hands of the enemy after having been captured and about her ordeal once she escaped, fleeing through a devilish jungle back to the safe haven of Thailand, taking a job as a simple bar girl to survive...
The story went on and on....it all came back to me last weekend when I found some pics of the Longneck Karen, a sub-tribe of the original Karen, which I drew in my sketchbook to distract myself after a heavy weekend full with booze and female attention...her name was Shere and she was only twenty-five years old...
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