Only Jesus offers true freedom in Burma

WORLD’s current issue includes Sophia Lee’s cover story about the two weeks she spent with the Free Burma Rangers (FBR), a Christian-led humanitarian aid group that works in dense Burmese jungles. Here’s a story of what she learned one Saturday morning.

Free Burma Rangers (FBR) founder David Eubank, coordinator/chaplain Doh Say, and I hiked for 90 minutes one Saturday morning to a village high school. As we drew close, we crossed a rambunctious soccer match. Wiry boys trampled across a sheared field, their lean, copper-skinned legs kicking up a dust storm, while girls wearing colorful pants squatted nearby cheering, their round cheeks smeared with thanaka, a traditional buttercup-colored cosmetic paste. We said “Gwa-lah-gay!” or “Good morning!” in Karen. The girls giggled and waved back.

At the school, I met Paw Toe Ki: schoolteacher, wife of headmaster, mother of five. At 44, her broad-cheeked face remains smooth. She wore her thick, jet-black hair twisted in a matronly bun under a giant hair clip. All the injustice she’s endured taught her to be a steely woman of placid expressions—never smiling too wide, frowning too deep, or speaking too loud. In 2005, she and her husband established the school to raise future medics, soldiers, or educators who serve their oppressed peoples.

We sat in the cool shadows underneath her hut, which like most traditional houses stood several feet above ground on wooden posts. There, Paw Toe Ki quietly told her story: Soon after she was born, Burmese soldiers tortured her father, a village headsman, for feeding Karen rebels. He escaped. The army then arrested her mother, throwing both mother and baby into a dark pit, where Paw Toe Ki spent her first birthday. After the Burma Army released them a year later, the whole family joined Paw Toe Ki’s father in the jungle.

From then on, they played a ghoulish game of hide-and-seek with the military: Whenever the family heard the soldiers approaching, they hastily packed necessary belongings—rice, salt, blankets—and scrambled to another temporary shelter. Paw Toe Ki recalls her father telling his children, “We’ll eat only porridge from now on, because the people don’t have enough rice. We must be tough and strong for our people.”

The rare moments her father returned home from his pro-democracy duties, Paw Toe Ki and her siblings tiptoed about the stranger they called “father.” At night, the stoic man called his children onto his mat to sing for him. Today Paw Toe Ki sings the same songs to her children: “Come into my heart, Lord Jesus. Come in today, come in to stay, Lord Jesus.” As a little girl she believed every word. “Even now I believe,” she said, and teaches her children to “know God, love God, and be a good person.”

Doh Say, a full-time FBR leader since 2005, told me he’s witnessed many similar stories. He still remembers the hundreds of villagers fleeing Burmese invasions: the mother with two babies strapped to her chest and back, both hands gripping her other wailing children; the pregnant woman groaning in pain as her water broke; and snot-dripping children shoving knees into their shirts to keep warm in the winter night, too terrified to start a fire.

These people may never gain political freedom in their lifetime.

“I want to give you more than cash or rice or medicine,” Doh Say tells them. “All my life I wanted freedom, but I didn’t know what that is, and now I do. True freedom is Jesus. Nobody can take Jesus away from your heart. It’s not like the ceasefire, which can be broken.”