Google Earth

If you ever need a bit of perspective, let me recommend Google Earth.

It's a pretty incredible tool, which I forget exists often enough to impress me every time I download it anew. You can zoom in to your very own house, and zoom out to the stars; it gives specific visual backing to the sentiment of feeling small in the world. Tonight, I was sitting at the monitor, surrounded by a few friends; Biju, the technology guru here at Visthar, and Ki Poh, a Karen boy (He's 20-- man?) from Myanmar.

We started the Imaging here at Visthar, excited to recognize the blurry image of the library take shape, right where we sat! We zoomed in to see the coconut grove, the square office with it's opening for the lotus pond, and the dormitory where Ki Po is staying, my room, the area where Biju is planting a garden.

Then, Biju zoomed out, refocusing on the southern state of Kerala, where his family home is located. He pulled the image closer, relying on rivers to guide his way through deep forests; the mountainous regions of eastern Kerala are densely wooded with dark canopies, making it difficult to discern roads and homes from a distance. But Biju accomplished his task, tracking up from the river causeway to his house upon a hill: a small home in a crook of the road, surrounded by the rubber trees that cover the area. It is a short walk from the nearby bus stop, but Biju informs me that the hill upon which his house is settled is a bit treacherous with a week's firewood balanced on one's head, as his father carried for most of his life.

My own home in Iowa was simple to find, its meticulous address accurately entered. Google Earth simply had to zoom out, flying across continents and oceans, making me feel very far from home indeed. It was a gentle landing, focusing slowly through Iowa, and Des Moines, and on to my beautiful house, my home of many years. It caused a sweet kind of homesickness, the gentle missing of a place well loved. Biju remarked at the inorganic orderliness of it all, roads mapped out in serious uniformity (I didn't mention the critique my neighborhood often receives of an arbitrarily wandering nature). Ki Poh looked for a long moment, staring, and said, "Your house is very big. A house like this... it would be..."

He sat down at the monitor, and in the address box merely typed, "Refugee Camp, Thailand."

Talk about perspective.

The houses are indeed, very small. The areas are clearly underdeveloped, 7 camps in all, scattered along the Thai/Burma border. In Ki Poh's camp, there is one clearing, where the traditional New Year is celebrated, but there is little other community space or resources. The roads are all but non existent, barely cutting through the mountains that box the people into their river valleys.

The Karen people are a minority in Myanmar, chased back and forth across the Thai/Burma border in a bizarre and sick sort of pinball; you can stay, you must leave, come back, go away… at 20, Ki Poh has lived most of his life on the Thai side, in a small refugee camp balanced on a riverbank near the border. He and some of his friends have started a youth group, to encourage their comrades, and themselves, to not to get swallowed up by the camps, by the governments, by the landmines sprinkled throughout their villages. It was announced yesterday that a recent camp, established only last year for Karen peopled chased across the border by the Burmese military, will be disassembled and the people returned to their now very dangerous village back on the other side. Ki Poh is worried.

I worry that it becomes too easy to lose one’s sense of awe; awe at the size of things, awe at the scope of the Earth’s great magnitude, as well as awe in the divergences between the lives that people lead. Even here, where I am so far removed from my norms, I become slowly inured to these massive gaps, and at times, the world seems very small.

Not tonight.