The phone above my head jerks me awake what seems to be ten minutes after I put my head down. My first full day in Thailand looms. And again I ask myself if I can really be here. A shower off my room has a hose running out of a tap and through a gas heater on the wall that you simply turn on when you want the water warm. A primitive set-up, but, as I was to soon learn, all too luxurious in this land.

   After breakfast of bread and cheese, Gus and I go out into the gathering heat to await the driver who was to be bringing Davida. It seems that Thailand has exceedingly strict laws of liability and stringent insurance regulations that militate against westerners driving themselves. Gus' frustration is evident as he explains that if we don't get on the road early the traffic build-up will add an hour or two to our trip to the border.

    As Gus goes back into the apartment to call, I watch Bangkok life unfold on the early morning street before me. Clapboard houses with no apparent covering for door and window openings give out an unending stream of people who wait only moments on the street before being picked up by open-backed trucks which seem to serve as buses. Saffron-robed Buddhist monks, or bonzes, mostly very young with shaven heads, walk the streets carrying a sort of pot in which they collect donations of food. This is all they will eat for the day, and that only until noon.

    Gus returns with the news that the driver has not shown up at all, so we grab one of the many cabs and race, without apparent consideration for life or limb, through the city. Driving in Thailand, as in Italy, is primarily a game of "Me first!" and "Look out!" Speed limits, if there are any, and dividing lines are studiously ignored.

    Waking the truant driver, a man named Suchart, and collecting Davida, we set out for the frontier. East of Bangkok is a long, flat, fertile plain. This is the richest rice producing area in the country. It's owned and cultivated, for the most part, by large agri-businesses and one sees very little of the lone peasant farmer under a reed hat, walking with his plow behind his ox, a sight so evident in the less fertile areas.

    The two-lane road is in fair condition and the driver pushes along at a good pace broken periodically by Gus' urging to slow down, sudden badly constructed dyke-like bridges, a dash across the road by one of the thousands of wild dogs in the area, the casual stroll of an elderly peasant as he ventures into the path of the car, or a near head-on collision with a like-minded driver who is going the other way.

   Through all this and over the now familiar roar of the air conditioner, I am quizzed about the American political scene and informed of the niceties of local politics. Things are tense at the border, I am told, and they will "try" to get me the necessary passes to get through the Thai Army's many checkpoints. It would, I point out, be a hell of a note to get all this way and not be able to get into the camps. But some of the camps, I am quickly assured, are no problem at all. The passes are for those areas on the border that are sometimes under contention from opposing forces in the multi-part battles between Khmer Rouge (the Pol Pot regime's communist forces), Khmer Serai (the Free Khmer or right wing forces), Vietnamese troops supporting the Hang Semrin regime and/or the Thai military. There have been many incidents, they continue, and one refugee camp, Mak Mun was shelled until it had to be evacuated. Oh boy...

    After a stop for gas (500 Bhat, approximately $25.00 for ten gallons), during which I step out of the car into a blast of breath-catching near mid-day tropical heat, we press on. We stop at the CONCERN house in Aran Ya Prethet to leave our luggage before going any further. Davida points out that extra clothing is considered contraband because it is capable of being sold on the black market in the camps, so if we take our luggage (or too much film or more than one camera) through the checkpoint, it may be confiscated.

    The CONCERN house where we have stopped is called the "Country House" because it is one-half mile from the other, "City House," and consequently away from the heart of the city and its constant noise. It's an airy wooden structure built in the Thai tradition, high off the ground on poles to avoid flooding and snakes. An electric fan stirs the hot, moist air, and a towel around the neck to mop the ever-present perspiration is a regular article of apparel. After dropping our bags we set off, past the beautifully ornate Wat, or Buddhist temple, and into Aran to the "City House" so Davida can leave her things there. The city is hot and dusty and teeming with life. Shops and stores of every description open onto its few streets which are alive with cars, buses, trucks and pedestrians all going every direction at once, all of them, save the pedestrians, honking their horns constantly. Times Square in a small Asian city. And everywhere motorcycles. Like wasps buzzing, they whip in and out of traffic, across roads and around blocks, with one, two, three and four people at a time clinging to them.

    Aran has grown all out of proportion to its size, with shacks and board structures, huts and tents everywhere filled with people intending to take advantage of the vast marketplace provided by the flood of refugees to the nearby camps.

    Signs of western influence are everywhere. Besides the motorcycles, there are as many people in jeans and western style shirts as there are those wearing more traditional eastern robes and thongs. Radios, stereos and cassette players abound, all on, all seemingly set at the highest possible volume. The resultant din provides a strangely appropriate background to the scene.

    We leave Aran in a caravan of vehicles, motorcycles, bicycles and rickshaws bearing peddlers with their wares to sell to the refugees. A stop at Task Force 80 HQ produces my passes, and with a warning to keep both passes and passport in a safe place, we set off for the frontier.

    Thai military are regularly visible now. The show of force inherent in their combat-ready appearance and casually slung automatic weapons further impresses upon me the reality of this other-worldly situation.

    Passing through the green countryside I’m struck by the contradictions. The modern air-conditioned auto is again a time capsule which I share with two people of peace who have chosen to extend their hands to others in need. Outside, modern conveniences of another kind. The weapons of war; equipment designed to kill. And beyond that, the new/old. The westernized easterners. Wearing jeans and robes, on motorcycles, in buses and trucks or pushing carts, the peddler/peasants off to earn some money by trading with those even less fortunate. And finally, seemingly oblivious to it all, the farmer. Knee deep in mud he slogs along behind his primitive wooden plow turning the mud, planting his seed, depending for his very life on the tireless ox just as he has done through all the seasons, all the wars, all the centuries.

   The first checkpoint looks like a camp itself. People are squatting under trees or temporary shelters out of the sun waiting for their turn in the long line that shuffles slowly ahead. As we are passed through, rather easily today I'm told, I see a fire where soldiers are burning the "contraband." Anything over a certain amount of goods, any unacceptable items, anything which by dint of its possession raises the life-style of the refugee above that of the common Thai peasant is destroyed. "Even food?" Even food. "But why not just distribute confiscated food and goods to those who need it?" The authorities seem to feel that destroying it is better than the possibility of contributing to the black market system. "But that doesn't make sense!" What does, here?

    Next stop, Khao I Dang, the largest refugee camp in Thailand. The sign reads, "Khao I Dang Holding Centre for Kampuchean Nationals." It appears to be about one-half mile long by one-half mile wide and is divided into numbered sections. Sections Three and Seven are maintained by CONCERN volunteers, so after a brief stop to say hello to the UN representative in control, we head for Section Seven. Security of the camp is the responsibility of the Thai military, so the gate is another checkpoint, giving the decided air of a concentration camp (which in fact it is). Khao I Dang has a population of 135,000 Khmers (the people of Cambodia, or Kampuchea as they call it), and at that figure, according to Gus Finucane, it is the largest single concentration of Khmers in existence, including Phnom Penh, the capital of their country.

    Aside from large tents or huts serving as hospitals, schoolrooms, storage and feeding facilities, the camp is mostly made up of row upon row of bamboo and reed huts approximately 10' by 10' and about 5' high. With a bamboo floor raised off the ground close to a foot to ward off flooding during the torrential monsoon rains, the inside of the hut doesn't allow for a grown person to stand up straight. Inside each of these huts lives a family of Khmers in a space smaller than that of the average American child's playhouse. The military uniformity of the rows seems singularly rigid and prison-like, causing me to ask why they had been so unimaginatively laid out. The Irish engineer who designed them, also a CONCERN volunteer, told me that it was done this way at the specific request of the Khmers themselves. He had intended to construct the huts in a series of open-ended courtyard configurations feeling that at least would be more pleasing to the eye and more conductive to social contact. He found, however, that the refugees suffer from such over-crowding and such a high degree of public exposure that this system of row upon row, back-to-front design was created to provide for some small degree of privacy.

    Arriving at Section Seven and stepping from the car, I am again assaulted by the intense, wet heat. After meeting the staff, which at first glance is almost totally young, female and Irish (mostly, it seems, named Mary) we tour the various CONCERN enterprises. A large open hut serves as a Maternal and Child Care Center. There, nurses teach, through Khmer assistants who are becoming trained paramedics, the basic elements of sanitation, nutrition and medicine as it applies to pregnant women, mothers and children. They have arrived at a middle ground, demonstrating the techniques and effectiveness of western medicine while interfering as little as possible with folk medicine practices as long as those practices are not harmful. They look the other way, for example, with regard to "coining," the application of hot coins to the skin for the purpose of letting out negative spirits. The same seems to be the case with a very popular practice involving heated bottles which, when applied to the skin and allowed to cool, create a vacuum and consequent sucking effect on the surface of the skin, again toward the end of releasing spirits. The tell-tale marks of both the above practices are everywhere evident. The CONCERN nurses are not as sanguine, however, with regard to the more serious burning, usually on the chest and stomach of young children (sometimes with cigarettes) which has regularly been practiced in cases of more extreme pain, indicating, it is supposed, more extremely evil spirits. That practice has been seriously attacked and is rarely seen now, though its scars are everywhere.

   One of the chief thrusts of the clinic has been to encourage the mother's natural inclination toward breast feeding and much is made of the harm done by the Nestle Company and a few others that have been pushing the use of infant formula and bottle feeding on a people who know nothing of sanitation, the danger of diluting the formula, or what to do when the mother's milk dries up through lack of nursing and there is no more formula.

   Charts are kept of the physical progress of the children. While the results of the program are dramatically evident, there are a great many children whose growth has been seriously, if not permanently, stunted as a result of malnutrition.