Adapting to Terror
More than any other interview we’ve released, Thiri provided a ground level, gritty view of what it actually feels like to live through this terrible coup, one day after the other. Although she has safe passage to Thailand and the US, with visas to both countries, she has decided to stay and help the resistance until the end. Thiri shares how even though she has come to accept, and no longer fear, her possible arrest and even death, the thing that keeps her awake at night is the risk of being caught with her phone in hand, thus revealing and exposing countless contacts. She describes in this excerpt the precautions she must now take every day to avoid this from happening, even as she prepares for security forces to storm into her room every night…
“Every night before I go to bed, I hide my phone in my underwear box. The soldiers are superstitious, and they don’t want to touch women’s underwear.”
“We're not safe in our own homes.
You can be arrested, and you never know when your doors will be broken into. Every night after 8pm I'm scared for no reason. When the dark comes, I just feel like something's going to happen. Are they going to arrest me? Or has anybody gotten arrested? With those kind of fears, this is how we are living.
And then we never know when they going to break into your home. So I'm not living at my home anymore, I'm living at another place. Every night before I go to bed, I have to hide my phones, into different places like in my underwear boxes, because the soldiers are superstitious, and they don't want to touch women’s underwear. So I usually hide my phones among my underwear so that they don't touch it if they break in.
There are many nights where we have to turn off the light and stay alone in the dark for hours, because the soldiers are on the street. And sometimes even in the daytime when they walk past. When they are in the neighborhood we have to hide inside any home we find and cover the windows.
They can come into your home and take you, arrest you, destroy your property for no reason! You can be arrested just staying inside your home, and you can be shot to death there as well. Or you can get injured staying inside home because they may randomly go into a neighborhood and they may randomly begin to shoot at your home, for no reason! And so we can be targeted and shot at home with real guns or slingshots for no reason. They just come in and scare people.”