Che Guevara

I was very surprised to see, on my first night in Mae Sot, upon entering the Burmese restaurant to which I went with some coworkers to dine, a collection of photos and drawings of Che Guevara. It was not what I had expected to see upon arriving on the Thai/Burma border. When I asked, though, I was told that the owner of the restaurant had been a student activist that had been active (and arrested) with Aung San Suu Kyi during the protests in 1988 and 1990, and had later served with the dissident guerrilla forces, before fleeing Burma and settling in Mae Sot.

He associates Che with rebelling against oppressive regimes, and honors him as a genius of the guerrilla tactics used by some in doing so. It was a strange moment for me, to relate Che - who has become such an iconic figure, known more as a symbol of the fight for freedom than an actual man who lived a life of violence (and perhaps perpetuated it) - to the current struggles in Burma, and more, to the actual lived experience of this one man, in whose restaurant I was eating. Ideologies and epic struggles don't always seem pertinent to prosaic daily existence, yet here was a man who had lived and fought for a cause in a reality that I can only imagine. So far beyond the way we 'rebel' or protest in the U.S., and with so much more at stake. It was just a moment of startling reality, that, Che aside, there is a fight going on here that is serious and real, with lives at stake, and demanding sacrifice. In Mae Sot, one is surrounded by the people engaged in this struggle, and you no longer have the luxury of thinking of freedom as an idea on a T-shirt with Che's face, but as something precious, that should not be taken for granted. The difficulty then is to determine where I fit in this (if I do), what I have to offer, and how well I can ever really understand, given that I can walk away at any time, that my life is not under threat, that this is for me ultimately a job, and not a struggle for existence.