A grim World of Poverty and Tension

from MSNBC

By Ian Williams, NBC News correspondent

Myawaddy, Myanmar- There are two ways of traveling from Myawaddy to Thailand. There's the official crossing over the Friendship Bridge, where day laborers and small traders queue for passes, and there's the numerous illegal transit points across the muddy Moei River, some within sight of the bridge.

Smuggling thrives here, all manner of goods -- and people, looking to escape the poverty of Myanmar, a country rich in gas, gems and timber, but where millions live on less than a dollar a day. Such has been the enormity of military misrule.

This morning we traveled into Myanmar, across the bridge and into the border town of Myawaddy. We entered on a tourist day pass, carrying a small camera, into a world filled with poverty and tension, where everyone we spoke to had heard about the military crackdown in Yangon, but where nobody dare talk openly.

The grounds of one temple were filled with street children, their dirty clothes hanging loosely, chasing each other, sliding on the floor, wet from a heavy downpour. One of them break danced, sliding his body round and round.

Life goes on in this ramshackle town, but they are nervous of outsiders. Everywhere there are Buddhist temples. Its the monks who are held in highest regard here not the generals. At one temple a pavilion was packed with the faithful, meditating. We could only imagine what they were thinking -- in these dangerous days, thoughts and prayers are best kept private.

I spoke to the head monk at another temple, an amiable English speaker. Had he heard about the events in Rangoon? He nodded nervously, looking around for some unseen presence, before changing the subject.

"Everything fine here," he told me.

Earlier, on the Thai side of the border, we'd met three monks who took part in the protests last week in Yangon, and had fled from the crackdown that followed.

"There were raids day and night," one of them told me. "If monks were arrested, they were beaten, kicked and slapped."

The brutal suppression of the revered monks is likely to have a lasting impact.

"They are like our parents," said Khun Saing, a former political prisoner, who heads an opposition group in the Thai border town of Mae Sot. "When they treat their religious leaders like enemies, like criminals, it is not acceptable to us."

Khun Saing spent thirteen years in prison. From Thailand, he's trying to compile lists of those arrested or missing in the crackdown -- which he says runs into thousands.

In Myawaddy, in a rubbish strewn street behind one temple, there was a row of fortune tellers. They're popular in Myanmar, not least with the Generals, who are said to routinely consult mystics to justify their policies.

I entered one small hut, where the fortune tellers was chewing betel nut, a habit that had already claimed half her teeth. She looked at my palm and told me in Thai that I should be careful about driving. I thanked her, and asked what the stars were telling her about Myanmar's future.

She looked nervously at her friend. "Things will get better," she said. "I hope."

And with the crackdown continuing, their most revered religious figures targeted, hope is perhaps all they have to cling to.