Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

SAVING FISH FROM DROWNING
room for that. My husband was the headman and he told them that
the SLORC army would not only burn our homes but also force us to
work on the pipeline. We knew what happened to people who did
that. They starved. They were beaten. They got sick and died. So we
made a plan. We wouldn’t go, that was the plan. We would take our
best things high in the mountain and deep in the jungle—our cook­
ing utensils, our farming tools. We would leave a few junky things
just to fool them into thinking we would come back.
We flatland farmers went to live in the jungle like the hill tribes.
We lived by a big stream, and we learned how to swim the slow green
waters. We bathed there every day, and it was never deep. We had
made another plan. If the soldiers came, we would jump in the river
to escape. But the day the soldiers came, the stream was running like
a crazy spitting demon. It was the monsoon season. Still, we ran for
the water as the soldiers ran for us. I grabbed Loot and Bootie—and
the river grabbed us, and there was no time to think what was up
and what was down as we tumbled along.
Some of the villagers were thrashing, some were paddling, and I
was holding the edge of a bamboo pallet, that’s what Loot and
Bootie were sitting on. How we got this pallet, I didn’t ask myself at
the time, never did until just now, and now I am telling you that the
Great God gave it to Loot and Bootie, since there was no reason He’d
give it to me.
So on this pallet, Loot and Bootie were riding, and I was hanging
on to just a small edge, a pinch, careful not to tip them over. I saw
our whole village moving down the river as one, and I had a vision—
or maybe it was a memory—it was everyone in the threshing field on
the first day of harvest, which wasn’t so long ago and was also com­
ing up soon. In that field, we thrashed as well, moving through waves
of ripened grass. We moved as one, for we were the field, we were the
grass, that’s how I remembered it. And here we were again—our en­
tire village, our headman, my family people, and the dear old faces
279