40 People in 40 Days

I was happy to make a new friend who doesn’t work for Compasio, so I have some contact with the outside world in Mae Sot :) Her name is Katie, she’s from Australia, and she works at Mae Tao Clinic.

Mae Tao Clinic is a non-profit clinic providing medical care to people who can’t afford it. They see many people who walk across the border from Burma, and we’ve taken people from the garbage dump there to receive treatment. Katie gave me a tour of the clinic recently, and I was amazed what a large campus it was. The buildings sprawled across a huge piece of land, and there was a separate building for each department of medicine or patient type. What I saw was astounding.

There was a room for abandoned babies, because it wasn’t uncommon for a mother to give birth and take off without her baby. There was an area for people who were terminally ill or highly contagious, and they lay on mats across the bare cement floor. We saw people recovering from surgery in the 100+ degree heat, and rooms filled with rows of beds, just like you’d see in war movies. Katie pointed out a man who now lives at the clinic, because he has nowhere else to go. People in his town threw acid on him, and he now had trouble with his vision and with using his arms.

We also visited the prosthetic workshop for all the amputee patients. As we watched a couple men molding and altering legs and feet, a man waited with one leg on a bench and another man walked by on crutches to try out his new leg. I noticed the white board behind us, and saw that it tracked the patient activity and gave a description of each recent case. The two boards covering the wall were full, so I was shocked to see the dates next to the names. The chart only went back 40 days, and there were already 40 names on it. Each name had a designation of “leg” or “foot” next to it, along with a diagnosis. A couple said, “disease”, but the overwhelming verdict was “landmine”. These men had come across landmines in Burma, planted by the military, and had lost a limb. Sometimes it’s an accident, because there are landmines are all over, and other times it’s because they’ve been coerced into the position of “human minesweeper”. Because the military doesn’t know for certain what areas are treated with landmines, they’ll take men, women and children from their villages – from their families – and will make them walk ahead to trigger any landmines in their path.

The injustice is sickening.

But, I couldn’t help but notice how there was an order to the chaos, people were being treated, and people were healing. It made me thankful that Compasio has a place like this to take the people we care for from the street or from the garbage dump, and that we have relationships with workers and nurses there.

I grow more and more firm in this every day: “I am still confident of this: I will see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living.” -Psalm 27:13