Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

SAVING FISH FROM DROWNING
batteries, a generator frame, the jackets of their guests, and assorted
food supplies. One by one, these men deftly went across, and then
lowered their loads to the ground. With practiced expertise, one of
them began to unwind the knots that tethered the bridge to its tree
anchors, while the other two unwound a rope that was off to the
side, curled around the trunk of another tree to create a winch. This
was the long tail of the bridge. Carefully now, the men lowered the
bridge while relaxing the long rope. Down it went, until the bridge
hung like a useless ladder on the opposite side. They swung and jos­
tled the tail end of the rope still attached to the bridge until it
blended with the lianas of the winding gorge and disappeared. The
free end was lashed to the root of a tree that had fallen over, decades
before. Ferns hid it completely.
From this vantage point, the people of No Name Place could see
the bridge. But no one approaching their secret home from the other
side would know a bridge had ever been there. And that was how
they kept themselves cut off, hidden in a secret world no one knew
existed, they hoped. For the past year, the bridge had been brought
up every other week, when they needed supplies and felt there was
no risk that soldiers were in the area. If the soldiers discovered the
bridge, the Karen people would run toward the deep jaws of the
mountain and jump in. Better that than to be caught, tortured, and
killed. And if they weren’t able to kill themselves first, if they were
caught by the soldiers, they would gouge out their own eyes so they
could not watch the soldiers rape their sisters and daughters, or cut
the throats of their mothers and fathers. The soldiers, they remem­
bered, liked to smile when they held the knife to make someone rise
or lower, as if they were puppet masters pulling the strings of a mar­
ionette to retell one of the old Jataka tales of the Burmans.
They feared the soldiers most during the monsoons. The rain beat
down the thatches over the tribe’s small verandahs, and they lived in
mud and picked off leeches every few minutes. During that season
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