poverty in the midst of plenty

I spent this morning in a slum. Not everyone's ideal weekend, but yknow, I get bored easily.

I was filming a documentary with TYAP: Thai Youth Action Program, an HIV and AIDS and human rights charity based in Chiang Mai. Well, I say I was filming a documentary, my main task was taking photos of other people filming a democracy, and playing with the cute but dirty kids.

The location was a village that looked like it should be in rural Cambodia rather than central Chiang Mai, one of Thailand's richest cities. I was in that same area last night at Airport Plaza, Chiang Mai's shiniest, most western style mall, where you can get "emporer class" at the movies and buy an iphone case in every conceivable colour, shape and texture. This was about as far away from that as you can get, in style if not geographically.

The community live in a set of buildings made out of bamboo and corrugated iron on swampy land somewhere behind a backstreet, invisible to the rest of the world. Most of them are hill tribes who have given their traditional way of life, either through the impact of 'development' i.e. building on traditional lands, logging or sheer poverty. In Chiang Mai they're the kids you see selling flowers to tourists in the Old city, betting a sale on games of 'rock, paper, scissors' with backpackers. They wash windows on the highway, or hang around at the end of nimenhaemin (the trendiest street in Chiang Mai) selling strings of flowers used to make merit.

It's weird, but despite being here and being familiar with the major denial of rights to these people, I never really noticed them before. This week, I've been doing research on the issue of statelessness among hill tribes. Most of them never had their births registered, and so don't have Thai citizenship. This means they have no access to employment, state healthcare, education or pretty much any of life's essentials. Some hill tribe people, especially Karen, Lisu and Hmong, cross borders with neighbouring Laos and Burma regularly, despite the danger, because their ethnic groups live on both sides.

The ones from Burma are in the most trouble - constant fighting in Karen state means that many of them are now refugees in Thailand, where they are confined in camps along the border pretty much indefinitely. Some of them have been there over 20 years, and fatalism, depression and suicide are on the rise. The ones who break out of the camps end up in places like the slum I visited today - living in absolute poverty and still without any hope of getting the magic Thai ID card that would give them access to basic services.

Getting Thai citizenship is a nightmare in itself - you need birth registration to get citizenship, but to get registered you have to be born in a hospital, and to be entitled to state hospital care you need... you guessed it... Thai citizenship! There are ways round it but they're just as difficult to access - anyone got two witnesses to their birth and lack of registration thereof who both have Thai citizenship? Nope, thought not. And just try navigating the maze of bureaucracy and forms to be filled in when you're illiterate and can't speak Thai (most of the hill tribes speak their own languages).

To be fair, the Thai government and the King are working on getting more hill tribe peoples citizenship, and so are NGOs such as BABSEA (where I work) and IMPECT (Inter mountain peoples' education and culture in Thailand). I'm spending this week trying to get my own head round the citizenship rules and figure out a simple way to teach it to a group of hill tribe women at the refuge where we do our human rights seminars.

But despite the work of Chiang Mai's millions of NGOs, it's going to be a long time before anyone pays attention to the people in the slums behind Airport Plaza. It's just like when they try to sell you the flowers on nimanhaemin - you roll up your tinted windows and drive smoothly by.