At night all you hear is the stillness of the crickets and lizards calling out beneath the darkness. The moon is wide and bright tonight. It is the calmest thing I have seen yet and I have seen many things.

I saw so many little girls and boys; the kid girls’ faces powdered yellow in cute, rough circles. I saw them shuffling around to somewhere, dust kicked up and tiny, bright bags swinging in the wake of this child exodus headed into or out of church, homes or schools. I heard the acoustic ring of guitars in the distance, the dookay lizards making an own chorus.

Singing is around all corners here and laughter follows in smaller, widening ripples. Lives are carved out here. In the side of this mountain bamboo homes rest next to so many, many houses. Unofficial number is around 50,000 but who can call it with all these new babies crying in laps and on shoulders, women hauling bamboo poles with a swollen, pregnant stomach.
I saw the houses closely today. Dried, massive leaves sewn together make roofs, some sadly slipping off, others cracked through in this hot, arid season. The bamboo is getting old here, worn through and splitting down the middle. In other places new shelter is going up, houses raised by four men working. Tiny patches of farm gardens make tight lines between silty walks. I saw boxed in self-sufficiency. The good earthy smell of fresh, watered mud is around, a giant green snake slithering through the field. Cobras run here as well.

Across the way, the thin, ash-colored trunks grow bare up to the top of the hazy green mountain. The water flows in swells up stream, chugging and pausing as it slaps and slips over the rocks, falling down the way, cut through the green-brown of dirt and grass until it is slowed to a chocked trickle in front of my feet. On one side of the stream is the impossibly large mountain range standing high on guard. Here, now, there is only one mountain, not many to be concerned with or know. There is only one and he is so big you can hardly stand to look at him, hazy and burning in emerald green, the straight white lines of trunks breaking the burn. Below the tree line, dried-out brown rooftops dot the hillside, up and down in stacks that stick out under the green of the palms. The big, wide leaves of the palms blow in a warm wind. I stood in the heat to watch one of my student water a tiny, deep green plot. He waved across before carrying two large empty pitchers back down to the stream. On the other side of that mountain are thousands and thousands of people running through the jungles, starving and staving off malaria, bullet wounds, rape, torture and death as much as they can while they stave down crying babies, hungry stomachs, and heart through souls.

The houses on this side of the mountain, in the land around the seminary look abandoned. Piles of ash sit kicked into ditches in front of the high porches. Some young men sit underneath the raised houses, asleep in the shade. I watch their hammocks rock slowly as I pass, climbing like a Billy goat up the steep cuts. The Karen move up with ease, a natural walk. I am stumbling. Inside glassless windows, women sit on the floor, men sit chewing and spitting beetle nut down between the floor beams. Many houses are empty. I circle back, sliding downhill and catching stares from dark eyes hidden behind walls and smaller eyes hidden behind trees, children smiling then disappearing.

As the sun went down, I crossed back down to the stream. Evening of this hot day made a little warm wind to blow through the dried treetops. A rustling broke the silence as bodies broke through the brush. Men and women walked in groups through to the water, sitting down in heaps to bathe and wash clothes. The shadow rose higher up the mountainside. While the women soaked their clothes, dirty-faced kids ran across the stream, kicking a flat volleyball, splashing and shouting into this fine hour, all dressed in matching navy blue shirts with logos in a Scandinavian tongue.

Besides the European-sponsored shirts, I wondered how much would change or be different at this hour of the day if these people were home, in a free state on the other side of this mountain. It is hard to imagine. What do they feel at this hour? It is harder to know the shock of looking across the East River in New York, standing on a Kip’s Bay pier if Queens was a country I once knew but could not call home any longer. So close and well….yes, very far.

I am sure there would be large, concrete schools if these Karen could live in peace. A man could plant his own rice and not wait for one of the Burma Border Consortium groups to give it to him. There would be more water, more food and a man could call a patch of mountain land his, and not theirs or someone's. And a man’s hands could do his own work. I imagine a Karen man could then come home at this good hour and bring his family up close to his body and look into the sky and his chest would go silent and cool like a filled-up river in ways no American has known since the Natives but that we all still search for in the security of suburbia and non-thinking, at least about neighbors and the others.