I had breakfast with a friend today at Panera. It was lovely.

We sat by their fire while I kept my mittens and hat on, and I had a Caesar salad at 9am. Yep, they let you get salads at any hour, which is pretty nice of them.

It’s been a month full of traveling.

From 2 December to 11 December, we spent 24 hours in the car.

In the week following, from 12 December to 16 December, we spent 26.5 hours in the car, with a majority of this being off-road 4WD with a cloud of dust behind us.

And then we left for America.

On 17 December, we started with an eight hour bus ride, followed by a thirty minute taxi, a six hour flight, an eleven hour flight, and a one hour flight. Oh, a few layovers in between each.

Totals, anyone?

With all layovers aside, that’s 77.5 hours moving.

But we’re here. We’ve actually been here a few days, so we’re obviously still running; we’ve just added family and friends, some warm coats, and a delicious meals into the mix! Oh, and a bed that is much more comfortable than we remembered.

In a podcast we have, Erwin McManus begins by praying, “Father, my wife and my kids are back home, and I just pray, God, that I’m not on the wrong side of the country for this moment; that you have something that you want to do tonight that requires all of us to be together.”

This is my prayer for us in this time at home: that we have just stepped off the plane on the right side of the world, and that we’d be on the right side of the world on 14 January when we step off the bus back into Mae Sot. In the times that we’re here with family as well as the times when we’re not there for life changing moments, I pray that we’re on the right side of the world. And I pray that God has something he wants to do with that.

I found this on a friend’s blog and thought it was too funny not to share.

In my political science classes at university, we studied Stanley Milgram and his experiment on obedience to authority figures.  Milgram was a psychologist who “measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience.” I find it to be a fascinating study, and would encourage you to read even a summary of it from the Wikipedia article I linked above.

In short, each participant was given the role of “teacher.” A trained member of the experiment was acting as a student, hooked up to an faux electric shock and required to recite back certain words. When he was incorrect, the “teacher” had to shock him at increasing levels, to which he then responded to, including screams of pain. Whenever the “teacher” hesitated to shock the student, he was given four prods to proceed: please continue; the experiment requires that you continue; it is absolutely essential that you continue; you have no other choice, you must go on. If they continued through the entire experiment, the final shock was 450-volts.

Before he began, Milgram polled fourteen senior-level psychology students, which estimated between 0 and 3 percent would go to the end and deliver the 450-volt shock.

In Milgram’s first experiment, sixty-five percent administered the final shock.

Milgram concluded, “The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

“Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”

[Is the connection of this to Burma’s army as obvious to the general public as it is to me?]

It’s hard to conceive this: that these are ordinary people in Milgram’s study; that the Burmese soldiers carrying out gross human rights abuses are as well.  That, in many ways, this is you and I.

How close am I to shocking an innocent person with 450 volts?

How willing are we to create destruction, perhaps based on authority and instruction?

How close am I to completely undervaluing human life?

Maybe not even directly, but how am I disregarding human life now–perhaps in my purchases, perhaps in ignoring the suffering of another?

Or a million others?

My college roommate, Mallory, wrote it so well in her senior thesis, Shake, Shake the Mango Tree:

“It is frightening to think that one person could forget or ignore the suffering of another person. What is more frightening is the ease with which people do it. And Gabriel, the most frightening thing of all is that we see that it is made so easy for others and they are so able to do it, which means we are at risk for doing the very thing we now see as horrible…”

On 28 November, Partners held a press release to publicly present its first official human rights report titled Crimes in Northern Burma: Results from a Fact-Finding Mission to Kachin State. (Unfortunately, this link is no longer available.)

Partners has begun human rights documentation in active war areas inside Burma, and is publishing these reports in an attempt to reveal what is going on behind the pseudo democratic reform in Burma. The European Union has already dropped some of its sanctions this year, and Hillary Clinton has just visited Burma to see what options there are for the United States to partner with Burma in the future.  One article states that the changes “are significant nonetheless” because the government has “recently released more than 6,000 political prisoners” and “in an uncharacteristic move…thwarted the Chinese-funded $3.6 billion Myitsone dam project in the state of Kachin, relenting to continuous pressure from the Burmese citizens in that region” (John Feffer, Burma: Engagement or Appeasement?).

And though it is all appearing optimistic, it’s falsified and construed. There weren’t 6,000 political prisoners released, namely because there were no more than 2,000 political prisoners incarcerated this year. A mere one hundred of the released prisoners were actually politically related; the rest were simply prisoners, most of which were very near the end of their term or near death. And the $3.6 billion dollar dam?  It was a disaster for many, and would have forcibly removed thousands. But in the same area where these people won’t be removed, they have been attacked by the government, and is precisely where Partners’ human rights documentation took place. People were forcibly removed from their homes, but not for a project; for war.

Conversation implies that everyone is on the brink: the camps are on the verge of closing; the United Nations is considering its removal from the issue, including huge amounts of funding along the border; Mae Sot is ready to purge itself of the migrant community and crack down on legal cards.

And honestly? We’re hopeful.

Stephen & I are hopeful, dreaming of how we could be a part of rebuilding, rather than picking up the pieces now.

But even in our hope, the international conversation continues, and we wait. We hear deliberations on secure borders, appearing strong, and helping people that are now free to return to their newly “democratic” homeland; such large-scale perceptions of the situation.

Everything seems to be discussed from a distance, and we forget that these big concepts–sometimes even considered “problems”–of democracy, refugees, migrants, development: these are people. People create a democratic country; democratic rights are for the people. The big “problem” of refugee camps and migrant communities are working fathers, young mothers, ambitious students, and newborn babies.

How do we forget the lives behind the masses?

And what do we do to remember them?

Currently we have two ideas for you.

First, write or call your local senator. Send the Partners’ human rights report; encourage them to hold Clinton accountable for what she’s seen and what she knows about human rights in Burma. This is an easy, tangible opportunity, and I know the whole group of children playing Go Fish outside of our door would be really thankful.

Second, can we please pray?  I suppose we ask this always, and we should never stop believing that “God will give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night” (Luke 18:7). Even so, please join us to pray now more than ever. We are seeing hope fill this place in a way it hasn’t in so many years, and we are praying that justice comes speedily (v.8).

Here’s to hoping, that it may never disappoint us.