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Rubber!!! Or as the Brits say, “roobah”… or the French, “roobair”… or (my fave) the Burmese, “ROBE-ah”.

Last night Myat Thu and Aung Kyi took Matt, Miléna, and I to a rubber tree plantation “near Pakarang”. While I’ve seen many rubber tree plantations in my time here I hadn’t yet seen how the rubber was collected save guessing about the diagonal gashes I saw down the sides of every tree. The reason none of us had seen how the “3 D" (Dirty, Dangerous, and Difficult) job was done was because it had to take place in the dark (4 D?). If it rains workers won’t go out and thus lose a day’s wage, but last night was nice and clear (perhaps because it monsooned on us Wednesday night) and around 10:30 we took off from Pakarang by motorbike. First thing to learn-- this rubber tree plantation was not near Pakarang. Turning off of Petkasem road, charging down the dark curvy road I’d only been on once before, I found myself wondering in my usual nonplussed fashion… “where on the F***ING earth are we F****ING headed!?” We blew by Htoo Chit’s house only to turn off again some distance later onto a narrower and even less well-paved road, only to turn (some distance later) onto a dirt road full of pebbly obstacles, only to take some more twists and turns, only to climb some steep hills, only to rumble back down, only to finally abruptly turn off onto a walking path that led to a few faintly lit shacks. At last I pulled up to a stop between two of the structures where all of my thoughts of, “they’re taking us out here to beat us up… Holy Jesus Christ Almighty… thank God Matt decided to come along … we could take them, hell I’m taller than both of them…” melted as soon as I saw Miléna’s face. You could see she was a bit startled but she was smiling as she stated her new exclamatory phrase (that she says she picked up from me), “oh maaan”. And with that I couldn’t contain my relief-filled laughter anymore. I’d been letting out the occasional giggle since we left the paved road, shrieking every time I had to dodge frogs or dogs, little rocks and big potholes, but now seeing her face and hearing Matt’s equally startled, “I thought we were in for it back there, I kept thinking about what the folks back home would think if they could see me now!” I just kept laughing. “They would shit their pants” I responded, still laughing. It’s true, my thoughts while driving in were— omgomg I’m going to shit my pants… what on earth will my parents think… and: this really is just too damn funny not to laugh at. Laugh at the ridiculousness. Laugh at how there were some close calls on that gravel but my attention was always focused and with the way I drive there’s little harm to be done anyway. Normally I’d be, well, shitting my pants, but here anything goes. Here you follow two (albeit sweet and innocent looking) Burmese guys you hardly know deep into the forest at eleven at night. Here you park your dinky motorbike between two growling dogs just to roll your eyes at them. Here you stumble across twigs and branches, accompanying the two said Burmese guys as they wake up two ROBE-ah workers so you can traipse around and watch them work.

We could hear the phone ringing outside of the hut and while I could see Aung Kyi respond on the other line when the man picked up the phone, dressing on his way out the door, Myat Thu tried to convince us that the noise was the man’s alarm, not Aung Kyi (and us, guilty by association) waking him up. Like I don’t feel guilty enough already that we’re following some dude around while he starts his 11 PM night job, knowing that he will have another 12+ hours of work to do after we leave. Like I don’t feel guilty enough that two FED employees took time out of their evenings, from 10 PM until way past midnight, to show me the work some of the migrants they work with do. I get it, it’s just another day on the job: show us Westerners how truly insane this work actually is because it is very obviously a different world to us. It is their job to share this experience with us because as I mentioned above… it’s not exactly something I’d be doing on a Thursday night in Lake Placid (or anywhere in the US of A, for that matter). And they know that once home, I have the power (mainly—of voice and money) to help them from afar.

Each worker works alone, walking from tree to tree in the dark, cutting a strip of bark off the tree to give the rubber a channel to drip down. It reminds me of sap collection, but the manner of tapping is obviously quite different; the rubber runs closer to the surface of the tree here, making an easy tap and sugaring line rigging impossible, thus requiring many more workers to do the job. Like I said, they work 12-14 hour days, cutting the trees in the dark because the rubber runs faster in cooler temperatures. Then they will return in daylight to each tree they cut to empty the rubbery-watery contents of the coconut shells situated at the bottom of the groove into a bucket which is then brought back to be mixed with water and a certain acid to make the right consistency for what we traditionally know as rubber. (see below pictures for a better explanation of that run-on sentence!)

As we trekked through the trees Myat Thu shared stories about women working alone at night, vulnerable to Thai gangs that are known to come and rape them on the job. As if the jungle with its snakes and spiders isn’t scary enough. As if working in the dark, arms stretched above your head, cutting coils of bark off of a tree for twelve hours at a time isn’t enough. As if living in a shack in the middle of the woods, hardly knowing anything but this existence of midnight tree cutting isn’t enough. But rather than the somber, begrudging individuals I expected, the father-daughter team that we followed into the forest were laughing and joking with Aung Kyi and Myat Thu, leaving me itching to know what they were saying. How are they so smiley and jovial? How?? In this existence?? I admire them, and am yet again perplexed by how different our own perspectives and backgrounds render us all.

This experience reminded me that if I do not understand why someone says what they do or acts the way the do, sometimes the best thing to do is just ask. “Why?” (it’s okay Dad, keep asking it, I don’t think it’s too aggressive a question!). Leaving the rubber tree plantation I wondered, why do they smile and laugh? Do they believe they will escape this situation and thus find happiness in knowing it is only temporary, or have they accepted the conditions that blanket their life like the darkness above their headlamps, making peace with their current situation and finding happiness in life, even when most of their living occurs in the dark? This question unfortunately has no easy answer, and even without the language barrier I doubt the workers would have been able to pinpoint a “why” reason, but for both me and them it really is rarely about the answer, rather it’s about the fact that the question was asked in the first place.