Episode #271: Monkey in the Middle
In 1988, the man known as Monkey was posed a simple question that he would spend years trying to answer. A friend asked him, “Are you a man? If you are a man, why do you just sit and look?”
For anyone even relatively associated with recent Myanmar history, the context surrounding this question will be clear enough. 1988 was the year a wave of public protests broke out against the military government… and soldiers responded with their usual violent crackdowns. Monkey did not take part in any of these protests, leading to this friend challenging him like that.
However, for the next 9 years, Monkey had the misfortunate of becoming more personally acquainted with the terror of the Tatmadaw. Their campaigns would regularly bring death and destruction to his community in Karenni state, and his continued inaction began to eat away at him. Eventually he joined a Karenni resistance group, but he found that he was still looking for something more. “I felt useless, I just felt so bad. I prayed to God, ‘Please give me a chance to do something! Because I'm getting older and older. I have to do something, so please provide a chance for me, and give me knowledge and wisdom.”
His prayers found an answer in 1997, when he came into contact with David Eubank, the American missionary who founded the Free Burma Rangers (FBR). Although Monkey knew almost no English at the time, he leaped at the opportunity that David was offering to attend an upcoming training course, which offered tutorials in basic medical aid as well as photojournalism. After the course, Monkey joined FBR missions to regions that the Burmese military had attacked, where his these new skills could immediately be applied. While their mobile medical clinic provided relief, Monkey conducted interviews and filmed footage to document the military’s ongoing atrocities.
Although he praised God for providing him this opportunity to gain knowledge and skills and then apply them in vulnerable regions of his country, those experiences began to take their toll, as he had to bear witness to so much needless cruelty and inhumanity. He saw entire communities sleeping in the open or on the run after their village was burned. He came across the the dead and dying, those without food and medicine, and people of all ages in various stages of distress.
Monkey has developed far beyond the raw recruit he started as, eventually becoming an FBR trainer. He has overseen the development of not only those in Myanmar, but has also traveled to Sudan, Syria, Kurdistan and Iraq to support medics and photojournalists there as well. Although a Christian faith animates much of the work that Monkey and the wider FBR team do, they do not limit their service to Christian communities, and they were easily able to gain the trust of Muslim colleagues throughout the Middle East. As he explains simply, “We're not coming to convert them to our religion. We just want to show the love of Jesus. That's not our business. Only God can do that.”
Since the coup, Monkey and the FBR team have more than had their hands full in training the many Burmese youths who have flocked to their camps. Monkey is primarily charged with teaching photojournalism. “We want the world to know what is happening in Burma,” he explains. “And also, we want to shine the light on who is doing these evil things. But we cannot change the people— only God can take on that responsibility. We just show what they are doing, if it is wrong or right.”
As bad as the current times are, Monkey sees an opportunity for a degree of unity and solidarity that he has never before witnessed in his country. He sees people from diverse ethnicities, religions, and regions now working together in ways that he could only dream of. “At first, only those ethnic groups are shining a light on the situation. Yet now, Burmese are also shining the light on the situation, and they can see the truth, and then go step by step like that.”
Still, Monkey has seen too much to naively assume that the mere presence of groups banding together could be enough to stand up against the Burmese military’s cruelty and inhumanity that knows no bounds. This is largely why he is so focused on raising awareness through photojournalism, so that the story of what is really happening in Myanmar gets out. He feels that without greater international support, the road ahead will be very hard, indeed.
Much has changed since Monkey sat out the 1988 protests. Although he did learn how to fight, the fury that once animated him has been placed with a wise maturity.
“When I was a teenager, I just wanted to fight! But now, we might fight sometimes, but it is only because we do not want any innocent people to be treated in the wrong way. So we fight with love, so that we can take control of our attitude Otherwise, we just waste our lives.”