Sharing love in the Burmese jungle

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 the story of one person she met during her trip.

Naw Po Gay follows a simple daily routine: She wakes up before sunrise, putters around the kitchen in her two-story timber house, and has breakfast ready just in time to hear the stomps and clamors of her four children getting ready for school. In the daytime, she feeds the chickens and the pigs, waters the green beans and garlic in her garden, and scrubs loads of laundry by hand in a giant tub. She likes having things to do in the house to keep herself too busy to worry about her husband.

Few people can imagine the sacrifices this gentle, unassuming woman of few words makes daily as the wife of the chief videographer and chaplain of Free Burma Rangers (FBR), a humanitarian relief group in Burma. Naw Po Gay met her husband Ka Paw Say—a scrappy, chestnut-skinned man better known as “Monkey” in FBR circles—when she was living in a Karenni refugee camp along the Thai-Burmese border. They married in 2001 at the refugee camp, and Naw Po Gay took on a new name: “Mrs. Monkey.”

At that time, FBR was just transitioning from a foolhardy mission to a “train-and-plan-as-you-go” ragtag group of volunteers led by American founder Dave Eubank. Ka Paw Say was one of the first rangers to march into dense mountains to help the thousands of internally displaced people (IDP) hiding from the Burma Army’s scorched-earth rampages. His duties include chopping out roots to make room for graves, digging latrines, cleaning infections and wounds from land mine explosions, and flattening bamboo to build shelters for homeless villagers. But his primary role is to document the military regime’s unreported human rights abuses—which often means crawling into the heart of the Burmese dictatorship’s savagery.

It wasn’t just the ranger’s love letters or tenderness or self-deprecating jokes that won Naw Po Gay’s heart. Neither of them made it past 10th grade, but both are well-schooled in human grief, guerrilla life, and a desperate trust in God—all vital lessons for their vocation as ministers to those who are hungry and suffering. Despite her constant worries for her husband’s safety, she admires what Ka Paw Say does for the IDPs. She herself grew up as an IDP in Karenni State.

Naw Po Gay barely remembers her mother, who died when she was 6 months old. But she vividly remembers spending much of her childhood hiding in the jungle whenever the Burma Army stormed their village. She and her family lived in crude tents under giant-leafed trees, sharing a few blankets among seven siblings, subsisting on rice, salt, and wild vegetation. When they were certain the Burmese military was gone, they snuck back into their village until the next invasion. As a young adult, Naw Po Gay lived in a refugee camp for 15 years, where the refugees were many and the supplies so depleted that even a bar of soap or a stick of toothbrush was too precious to barter.

Now 41, Naw Po Gay cheerfully feeds and houses any guests her husband brings home, be it white-skinned FBR volunteers, ethnic resistance fighters, passing refugees, or sick IDPs who need medical treatment in Thailand.

Her four children—three boys and one girl—peek out from the kitchen with shy smiles, the youngest son clutching his mother’s skirts. They make sacrifices too, losing their father to the jungles several months a year. They often cry to their mother, “When is daddy coming back? I miss him!” Naw Po Gay misses him too, but she tells her children, “Your father has a great duty. But we don’t worry, because we pray for him.”

One day, her oldest son piped, “When I grow up, I want to be like Daddy!” That made Naw Po Gay happy and proud, but also worried because she knows too well the hardships and sacrifices dominating her husband’s life. And so she teaches her children— and reminds herself— to “keep our life in God, and thank Him for everything, because if we don’t, we are not happy.”