The Moei River separating Myanmar from Thailand is a modest-sized waterway, wide enough to make someone think twice before swimming to the other side, but sufficiently narrow to allow smugglers to pile motorcycles, furniture and food onto rubber rafts and paddle across, as they do almost every night.
Yet the water also symbolizes a wider, more basic gulf between the nations: the major disparities in health, well-being and prosperity.
On one side, millions of Myanmar's people suffer from chronic malnutrition. On the other, Thais enjoy a much more affluent society, where people are generally so well fed that obesity among children is a big concern.
Children die in Myanmar of diseases so easily preventable that most people in Thailand have never heard of them.
Burma, as Myanmar was known when it gained independence from Britain in 1948, was considered one of the most promising economies in Asia during the immediate postwar years.
Today, the comparison with Thailand highlights Myanmar's missed opportunities under the grip of its military government and the breadth of the country's problems beyond the well-publicized political repression.
The world's attention has been on recent crackdowns in Yangon and Mandalay, the country's largest cities, but many if not most of Myanmar's 47 million people are either too poor or too isolated to raise their voices. Their main preoccupation is survival.
According to UNICEF, 10 out of 100 children in Myanmar die before reaching the age of five. In Thailand, two out of 100 die. A woman has a one in 75 chance of dying in childbirth in Myanmar, compared with one in 900 in Thailand.
Tony Banbury, the regional director of the UN World Food Program, says poverty and malnutrition in Myanmar are "one of the sad, forgotten stories of Southeast Asia."
"There were a lot of wars and conflicts in Southeast Asia, but most countries have moved on," he said. "There are millions of people in Burma that the world has simply forgotten about."
The World Food Program has quadrupled the amount of food it distributes in Myanmar over the past four years, but still feeds only 300,000 people, a fraction of the 5 million who it says do not have enough food.
In colonial times, Myanmar's Irawaddy Delta was so productive it fed large parts of the British Empire. Today it is a measure of the country's dysfunctional economy that Myanmar can no longer produce and distribute enough rice to feed its own people.
Farmers have no effective means of borrowing money for seed and equipment, and the rice that is produced is not distributed to remote areas because of bad or nonexistent roads.
The contrast with Thailand, the world's leading rice exporter, is stark.
Crossing into Myanmar means stepping back in time. Bicycle rickshaws are a major mode of public transportation on the Burmese side -- not because they are good for the environment, but because many people are too poor to be able to afford a car or a smuggled motorcycle from Thailand, which earns US$10 billion a year shipping cars and pickup trucks around the world.
Because of the smuggling along this border, Myawadi is prosperous by Myanmar's standards. Some of the buildings resemble the multi-story apartments on the Thai side.
But there are significant differences in the salaries of construction workers: a daily wage the equivalent of 100 baht, or about US$3, on the Myanmar side, compared with double that in Thailand.
A teacher on the Myanmar side earns the equivalent of US$47.50 a month, residents say, compared with upward of US$158 in Thailand.
In both Thailand and Myanmar, the military has been deeply involved in politics in recent decades.
Thailand has had more than a dozen coups since the 1930s and, after the overthrow last year of a democratically elected government, power remains in the military's hands.
The salient difference, says Sean Turnell, an expert on the Burmese economy at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, is that Thailand's leaders have allowed businesses to thrive.
During 45 years of misrule, Myanmar's generals have almost entirely dismantled the economy, he said. There are no effective property rights and contract enforcement is nonexistent.
"If in other countries ruling regimes behave occasionally as mafioso in skimming a cut from prosperous business, then Burma's is more like a looter -- destroying what it can neither create nor understand," Turnell said.
The economic dysfunction means there is no financial underpinning for better healthcare or more widespread distribution of medicines.
Because children in Myanmar are malnourished, 32 percent are significantly below the expected height for their age compared with 13 percent in Thailand.
Cynthia Maung, a Burmese who runs a nonprofit health clinic on the Thai side of the 1,800km border, has become accustomed to detecting malnourished children.
"The skin peels easily," she said. "The hair becomes brittle. The eyes look drowsy. There's muscle wasting -- you can't see the muscles, just bone and skin."
Terrence Smith, a US gynecologist and obstetrician at the clinic, says most of his patients are unnaturally lean.
"We do ultrasounds and the transducer goes straight to the organs," he said.
In one corner of Smith's ward were two tiny, malnourished newborns dropped off and abandoned by their mothers.
Maung's clinic was set up to treat sick patients from Myanmar who cannot afford health care inside their country. The clinic treated about 2,000 patients in 1989 when it opened. Last year, 100,000 Myanmar people came for treatment.
The health care system in Myanmar was ranked one of the world's least responsive in a 2000 report by the WHO, placing it 151st out of 191 countries. Thailand placed 33rd.
Myanmar remains a place where very basic vitamin deficiencies kill people. Beriberi, for example, is caused by a severe lack of vitamin B1, which is found in so many types of food -- fish, eggs, brown rice, pork and peanuts among them -- that most people need not be concerned about sufficient intake.
But in Myanmar, "you have a high level of babies dying from infantile beriberi, which is a disease that you read about in medical school but never thought you'd see a case," said Stephen Atwood, a pediatrician who works as an adviser for UNICEF.
"I felt that I was reading a Dickensian novel when I saw this," he said.
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