Strong emotions and tea on the Myanmar border

As Myanmar heads for a full-blown civil war, a cafe on the border with Thailand has become a haven for exiles. The tea shop is named “Freedom” and the tea is brewed strong.

Food is cooked over a gas stove by a woman forced to flee Myanmar for her support of the opposition, reported The Independent. The cashier is a young woman with long hair and a sweet smile – a former pre-school teacher who refused to work under the generals.

Six days a week, new arrivals from the motherland come to talk about what they’ve heard about the fighting and who’s in hiding, in jail or dead.

Almost 200,000 Myanmar nationals have crossed into Thailand since the military takeover. Thousands more arrive through the jungle every month. The lucky ones get picked up by nongovernment organisations (NGOs) that help them file applications seeking refuge or asylum.

This is a place where life goes on and people find new ways to resist the military. The refugee problem is nothing new. In the 1980s tens of thousands of ethnic Karen refugees fled Myanmar.

“We’re trying to stand together,” says Thet Swe Win, boss of Freedom. “It’s the only thing we can do.”

Thet, 36, arrived in Thailand six months after the coup, with just a laptop and a sarong. He had run a nonprofit in Yangon and was well-connected to the dissident community.

Thet, pulled together US$6,700 and rented the two-story building on a dusty street six miles from the border and recruited a group of new exiles.

The first floor is a humble restaurant serving tea and simple food like kyay oh – noodles with pork and egg – and mohinga, a fish soup. The second floor is a free venue for people to hold activities. Half of the profits go to the people who work there, the other half is sent back into Myanmar to help displaced people.

“It’s a traditional tea shop,” Thet said. “You can eat, smoke, talk. All the things that matter to Burmese.”

Thet learns of new arrivals nearly every day, often through calls from a local jail. A mural of the Argentine-born revolutionary Che Guevara stretches across a wide wall, visible to passersby. Receipts are printed with the Burmese word for “freedom,” and the tables are labelled with the names of the cities in Myanmar that have seen the deadliest fighting.

Most of the café employees have spent time in detention or had their homes raided by the military. They can’t share their names, but they share their stories.

Take the cook, e.g., a middle-aged woman in an apron and a hair net, sweating over a wok. She used to run a bus company in Bago, a city northeast of Yangon, but when her son joined the resistance, she sheltered him.

Or the manager, a petite woman with a round face at a table near the cash register. In Yangon, she was a private banker, married with two kids to a man who worked for the central bank. When her husband joined the civil disobedience movement and refused to work, a warrant was issued for his arrest.

Or the teamaker, a civil engineer who led pro-democracy demonstrations, who spent so many years pouring over structural problems only to spend his days stirring tea.

Throughout the border region, there are whispers that the fighting in Myanmar is about to get much worse, with an offensive planned for the end of the monsoon season in October. For the exiles at the tea shop, it is difficult not to worry.

They play the guitar playing, they brew tea. Then they let themselves talk, smoke and sing as the sky turns deep orange.