Mellie has been a part of Terra Nova since our earliest days. She is currently doing humanitarian work in Burma. We have asked her to keep in touch. Below is her last update. Please note that we cannot post pictures or her last name for security reasons on her end.

Obviously, much has happened since I last wrote to you. It is an overused phrase, but some of the streets I walked on a month ago have been stained with the blood of monks, reporters and peaceful demonstrators. Shortly after I left Burma for Thailand the demonstrations swelled from tens to hundreds of thousands of demonstators. The main force behind this was tens of thousands of monks who decided to defy the government. They have now been silenced. Monastaries have been raided in the middle of the night, and monks locked in classrooms, beaten and tortured. It is hard to exaggerate the brutality. The government has admitted to about 10 deaths (an incredible admission in a country where even articles on accidental deaths are censored) and there is reason to believe the number is actually in the hundreds.

This is a video from CNN that shows a glimpse of the streets of Yangon in the past month.

I came directly from Yangon to a small town on the border of Thailand and Burma. It is a center for the ex-patriot resistance movement, mainly led by people who were university students invovled in the 1988 demonstrations. The atmosphere here has been wild – from mounting excitement to horror and dissappointment. For about two weeks everyone looked both wired and sleep deprived from hours of time either contacting people inside Burma or reading the news on the internet. I went to one demonstration outside town – just across the river from Burma. The “demonstration” mainly consisted of us – a couple hundred people – holding candles and praying for peace and relief of suffering. About a dozen heavilly armed Thai soldiers came to encourage us to disperse. (But, unlike in Burma, there were no arrests or violence of any kind.)

I am working for these two months at a clinic that is run mainly by refugees and serves the refugee and illegal migrant worker community here. It has been amazing and heartbreaking. A look around one area of the clinic: In the first bed is a man coughing up cups of blood. His TB test just came back positive but he lives in Burma (he just crossed the border to come to the clinic). MSF (Doctors Without Borders) provides the TB medicine for the clinic, but they only provide it for Burmese people living in Thailand because the WHO provides free TB medicine to clinics in Burma. But of course the Burmese clinics charge the patients and this man cannot afford to even walk into the Burmese clinic, let alone stay for the 6-9 months of treatment. So we are in the process of negotiating with MSF for his treatment. Bed number two is a quiet woman who seems to just observe everything. She has been there for a while. She has AIDS (which the medics call “virus #4″ to preserve the patients’ confidentiality a bit). There are no anti-retrovirals available for her so we just keep treating the other infections she gets and trying to keep her fed and comfortable. Bed number 3 is hard to look at. He is about 35 years old and has TB meningitis, we think. Half of his body is paralyzed. His good arm and leg are tied to the bed because otherwise he would throw himself off the bed with his involuntary movements. His wife sits with him day after day, holding his hand, even though it is hard to say if he even knows she is there. Periodically she painstakingly pours a white fluid down a tube in his nose to feed him. MSF has tried all the TB drugs available, and nothing has worked. Finally, bed number 4 is a breath of fresh air. Compared to the skeletal figures in the previous two beds, he looks pretty good, though thin by american standards. He has hit the jackpot – he is a Burmese man living in Thailand who has both TB and HIV. This particular combination places him in a small group of people who actually qualify for an antiretroviral program through one of the NGOs here. Sometimes it seems so frustrating and absurd. To think that in America you only need one disease to “deserve” treatment. Here, the resources are so scarce and who gets them depends on some decision made thousands of miles away.

But that is not really representative of the clinic. There are more heartbreaking stories – dozens more in the one month I’ve been here – but most of the patients are here with abdominal pain or pneumonia or malaria or anemia. All of the treatment as well as food for themselves and any family members staying with them is free. I love working with the medics who are smart and resourceful and compassionate and have a lot of clinical experience. But, speaking of work, I need to get to sleep so I can get to the clinic by 7 tomorrow morning.

Please pray for this place.

mellie