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WHEN WE SAW THE FIRST green blossoms of the bamboo, we took the advice of our grandfathers and built fences around our fields, and roosting posts to attract owls to our paddies. We constructed string traps and bamboo cages and spent our meager savings on poison to mix with rice and strew at the edges of our land. When the Burmese soldiers came to take our men for porters and human minesweepers, our women carried on building in their place.
But the bamboo fruit piled high in the forest, and the rats feasted and multipEed.When the fruit was gone, they swarmed with a desperation we'd never seen, in numbers we'd imagined only in nightmares. Our traps killed hundreds, and our poison hundreds more, but it was Eke draining a river with a teacup. By day, we patrolled with sEngshots. By night, we spread our femiEes around the fields, but our children woke...