For about a year in my twenties, I lived and taught in Karenni Refugee Camp #3 in Mae Hong Son, Thailand near the Burmese border. I lived in a house built by hand of wood and bamboo with a thatched-leaf roof. I loved by house. In the camp, I was often asked, “are you only one?” At first, I did not understand the question. But eventually I realized that “only one” meant “alone” and I discerned that the asked was also usually asking after both my physical state and my emotional one. Are you alone, yes, but also: “do you feel lonely?” During the beginning of my stay there, I did, indeed, live by myself in my two bedroom house. As a result, I was often physically without another person in the same shared space.
But I very rarely felt lonely.
This was, in part, due to the nature of the space there. The next closest houses were a good distance away from me, but because the houses were all made of bamboo and wood, I could usually hear my neighbors. We were also on the edge of a jungle, in a fairly remote area and so there was little white noise. No street traffic. No air conditioners. For a few hours on some evenings, there was a generator that would run the lights so that students could study, but even that wasn’t all the time. In the cities of North America where I’d lived prior to that, the ambient noise covered over sounds of life. In the camp, the primary sounds were of life: people talking and chopping wood, roosters crowing and pigs grunting. I could hear the bamboo floors bending as my neighbors walked on them or even shifted in their sleep.
I think that maybe a reason my students and co-workers often asked if I was “only one” and my that meant “lonely” is that I must have radiated some sort of American-ness that was unfamiliar to them. In this community — as with many around the world I assume — togetherness was central to existence. How strange and off-putting my American pseudo-independence must have been! I cannot remember specifically, but I must have inadvertently pushed away bids at connection directed at me.
I remember hearing at some point that if you come across an injured or sick baby animal in the wild, you aren’t supposed to touch it. The theory goes that your human scent will mark the animal and frighten away the mother who will then leave the baby to die rather than care for it. I feel as though, having been raised here, I was marked by some sort of American-ness that, in a strange reversal, covered over my human-ness. Fortunately, my students and the rest of the community didn’t leave me to die. I think that they were pretty quickly able to smell through whatever it was that I carried on myself. Or perhaps the well water washed it away. Either way, eventually some students moved into my house. The “only one” questions became less frequent as I was so rarely without companions.
I’ve been thinking a lot about loneliness and being “only one” lately. I’ve read that America is facing an epidemic of loneliness and that it’s suspected that this is maybe in part due to people more often engaging with their phones rather than connecting with humans in-person. I don’t know about all of that. For me personally, being tethered to my phone makes me feel more lonely. When I am able to step away from my phone, I feel less lonely even when I am physically alone. I suspect that having lived in a community like the one in Karenni Refugee Camp #3 inoculated me against feeling lonely even now all these many years later and in the middle of a loneliness epidemic. Such that even when I’m only one, I’m never really only one.
Rhena Writes 