Note to Readers: So many of my poignant memories about the intriguing country of Old Burma (Myanmar) and so many of the miracles that took place in that country include the life of my very dear friend, Daniel Kalnin. Daniel has now gone on to heaven, but I want to share some of our stories with you as a tribute to him directly from my on-the-spot travel journals: “Roads I’ve Traveled Delivering Health and Hope.” JWJ
Chiang Mai, Thailand: February 22, 1998: I believe Daniel Kalnin and I first met in 1995. Someone brought him to meet me in Denver at our Project C.U.R.E. office. I was immediately intrigued by both the man and his story. He was a quiet, dignified Asian in his fifties, and his placid demeanor prompted me to look for signs of deeper flowing character traits beneath the surface.
Daniel came to Denver to ask me to help him with his Barefoot Doctors program, headquartered in the northern city of Chiang Mai in Thailand.
“We are training village people from the closed country of old Burma in basic health-care and medical procedures,” he told me, “and we’re sending them back to areas where they are the only thing that resembles a doctor. But I don’t have any medical supplies to send back with them, and I also need help training them. Mr. Jackson, could you and Project C.U.R.E. help me in Thailand and Burma?”
His request was straightforward, and his urgency and sincerity compelled me to agree that I would help him in the future. Our agreement wasn’t just an idle promise. Almost immediately Project C.U.R.E. started furnishing Daniel with medical goods worth tens of thousands of dollars from our Denver and Phoenix warehouses. Eventually I traveled to Bangkok and Chiang Mai, Thailand, to evaluate Daniel’s complete operation.
During that needs-assessment trip, I rode motorbikes through all the hill-tribe villages of northern Thailand. What I saw impressed me even more and resulted in Project C.U.R.E.’s further involvement donating additional medical goods and sending teams of volunteers to Thailand.
Over the ensuing years, I came to understand Daniel’s dream and his underlying motivation. For nearly forty years, he had been a refugee from his beloved country, separated from his mother, sisters, and brothers. But the older he got, the brighter and more intense the flame in his heart burned to do something significant and lasting for the people of Burma.
Let me see if I can weave together the bits and pieces of the story that took me about six years to unearth.
The rush during the 1800s to colonization drove European governments to frantically conquer and occupy every tribe and valuable piece of real estate around the world. Burma was one of the last targets. England sent in its royal troops, and soon valuable tribute was being transferred from Burma to the queen’s royal throne in fair London town. But many advantages were also being transferred from Great Britain to Burma, from Rangoon (Yangon) to Mandalay. Roads were built, railways were extended, and bridges were constructed over dangerous rivers that had previously separated the people and commerce of Burma. In addition, schools were erected, doors were opened to missionaries to tend to the needs of the indigenous people, and hospitals and clinics were established throughout the land. Along the borders, the English built military forts to prevent countries like China, which had previously marauded and pillaged Burma, from disrupting the peace and security of the people.
Then one day in 1948, the Brits decided to go home and give Burma its independence. Unlike many of England’s colonies that had pushed for independence, the Burmese weren’t all that keen on being abandoned. They had become accustomed to the rule of law and the new developments of civilization. They had enjoyed the benefits of an organized economy and an introduction to such things as health care.
Of course, there were those who could hardly wait for the fair-skinned British islanders to leave so that they could inherit the powerful positions, the sturdy homes, and the well-built office and commercial buildings with corrugated metal roofs. Those would-be rulers were convinced that status and position were the only differences between them and those who occupied their land. When the Brits departed, those waiting in the wings assumed that all the good things would be left behind, and whatever set all the benefits in motion would continue. Those folks looked eagerly to the day when the last British ships would sail away. They could then be the powerful substitute rulers.
When the English decided to pull out of Burma, they did so in a hurry. But who’s to know whether the outcome would have been significantly different had they stayed around for a more protracted transfer of power?
The years that followed independence were chaotic years. Power struggles, tribal jockeying for position, and bloodshed became the order of the day. Burma turned inward, living off residual benefits from the British but not knowing how to multiply or even utilize those benefits to advance their country.
Daniel Kalnin was born into that Burma. His only hope was to escape to a new opportunity and a better life somewhere else. But that was hardly thinkable. No one slipped past the military. But Daniel was brave enough to at least dream. He read books about people who had gone through suffering to succeed politically. He determined that he would escape, go to law school somewhere, and return to help his country. He was only eighteen years old.
Daniel’s mother was a devout Christian and, in his words, a prayer warrior. He knew that she would always pray for him and his success as long as she lived. But he couldn’t bring himself to tell her what he was planning because he knew that his leaving was going to break her heart.
One day while working with a labor team in the border town of Maessi, Daniel was allowed to cross the bridge. When he was on the other side of the bridge, he realized that he was in Thailand. The other workers returned across the bridge that evening, but Daniel kept on walking. Surely he could find someone who would help him keep going and escape repressive Burma.
By quietly keeping to himself, Daniel was able to join up with a Thai work team for the next three months in a mountainous village named Lahu. He had left Burma on the first day of November 1965. Now it was January 1966. He lived every day knowing that if he were discovered as a Burmese in Thailand, without any identification or papers, he would be shot as a spy.
After January he moved on and worked for another three months in a hill-tribe village. His goal was to eventually make it to Chiang Mai, Thailand. The fact that part of the country was embroiled in the Vietnam War made things all the more precarious.
One day Daniel crossed paths with a Baptist missionary and asked if the missionary would help him get to Chiang Mai. The man didn’t want to get involved, so he refused to help Daniel. (In later years, the missionary had to live with embarrassment and regret when Daniel and his successful ministry became so well received in Thailand.)
As a worker Daniel was then sent to a rebel military camp and was forced to help them work. He was unable to escape for an additional three months, but a sergeant of another rebel group eventually offered to take Daniel to Chiang Mai. He hid Daniel in a large truck loaded with sacks of rice. Daniel was wedged between the top of the truck’s metal covering and the rice. The sergeant stopped at a town called Faang, and Daniel walked to the bus station. He sensed that if he could find some Christians, they would help him. At the bus station, Daniel took the only money he had and paid a rickshaw driver to take him to the Baptist center. But the rickshaw driver was confused. He took Daniel’s money and delivered him to the compound of the Seventh-Day Adventists.
Daniel had no more money, but he found the correct directions to the Baptist center and told the driver to peddle him there. When he arrived at the Baptist center, a man came out, and Daniel introduced himself and told the man he needed help to pay the rickshaw driver. That night Daniel met Mr. Ted Hope, the head of Overseas Missions Fellowship (OMF), and stayed with his family for a week.
Everyone was suspicious of Burmese people traveling without proper papers, so Ted Hope sent Daniel to another area in the mountains to work in the fields north of Chiang Mai. Daniel had to keep moving from one village to another, and at the third village, he stayed with a family in exchange for work. But the man’s neighbor had a long-time grudge with the farmer, and to spite him, he went to the authorities and told them the farmer was harboring a military spy from Burma. The police moved quickly and surrounded the farmer’s home that evening. Daniel had just finished bathing after a long day’s work.
“I was standing next to the outside cooking fire, trying to stay warm after my bath. The police grabbed me without allowing me to retrieve anything and threw me into jail as a foreign spy. I had no papers and no defense, and they had a signed complaint that I was a foreign spy,” recalled Daniel.
Eventually Ted Hope heard that Daniel was in jail and sent a fellow with an old Volkswagen Beetle to bail him out of jail in April. Daniel’s court date for the spy charges wasn’t until August.
At the trial the judge made a strange ruling. He fined Daniel five hundred baht but gave him permission to stay in Thailand. For the first time since he had crossed the bridge from Burma into Thailand, a person in authority had told him it was all right for him to be in the country. But he still didn’t have any official identification papers. He wasn’t able to move about freely, so he returned to the farmer’s family and worked there for another six months near the house of the man who had turned him in as a spy.
While in jail, Daniel remembered the name of a missionary man who had come to his home in Burma several years before. He recalled that the man’s home was in Cincinnati, Ohio. After asking a lot of questions, Daniel was able to secure the man’s address and wrote a letter to him. About six months later, the man returned to Thailand for a missionary visit, and Daniel met up with him. The missionary told Daniel there was no way he could help him because Daniel didn’t have proper paperwork for identification or travel. Once again it seemed that Daniel’s efforts were being blocked.
It wasn’t until late 1968 that a pastor in Thailand came to Daniel’s aid and helped him secure the legal paperwork. With those official papers, it was legal for Daniel to live in Thailand, and he was also allowed to apply for a passport. Once again Daniel wrote to the American missionary in Cincinnati and informed him that he now had legal paperwork. But again Daniel heard nothing. In the meantime he was working for and living with another missionary family. When they noticed how sharp Daniel was mentally and observed his social skills, they told him they wanted to send him to school. However, before that could take place, the missionary from Cincinnati showed up and said he was taking Daniel to America. He had decided that Daniel could be an asset to him in his radio-broadcasting enterprise. Daniel could speak Burmese on the radio and also help him raise money for his missions work.
Before Daniel could bat an eye, he was in America. He landed in Cincinnati on August 22, 1969. On September 9, he started classes at a local Bible college. Everything had happened so fast, and he was struggling to cope with all his classes in the English language.
Enrolled at the same Bible college was a young, blonde-haired girl from Canada. Beverley’s family was involved in politics and government in the Toronto area, but she felt that God was calling her into missionary work somewhere around the world. She was hoping that the school in Cincinnati would prepare her for missionary work. Little did she know that by the time she graduated from Bible college in 1974, she would be married to Daniel Kalnin from Burma. That decision to marry on New Year’s Day l974 set in motion lots of consequences. Daniel and Beverley both graduated in June of 1974 with a dream of going as quickly as possible to Chiang Mai, Thailand, to begin missions work that would somehow aid the people of Burma, which had changed its name to Myanmar.
Next Week: Daniel’s Homecoming – Thirty years later