Built From Scrap

About this episode

Fred Stockwell shares his transformative experiences in Mae Sot, where he witnessed the struggles of Burmese migrant families living in a garbage dump.

Episode #551: Fred Stockwell arrived in Mae Sot by accident more than twenty years ago while traveling through Thailand to photograph temples, a wrong bus dropping him off in what was, at the time, a bustling border town filled with NGOs and young volunteers. Someone told him to visit the garbage dump, and a man drove him there by a route that felt deliberately hard to retrace. “It was like it was a secret where it was,” he recalls. At the dump, Burmese migrant families survived by salvaging and selling recyclables, building shelters from whatever they could pull from waste. “They were living on top of the garbage!” he says. “Everything they built was what they found in the garbage.” Before Mae Sot, his life had already been shaped by self-taught risk and logistics—having introduced paragliding in the U.S. through early testing and instruction, and later becoming the first person to fly in and photograph the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina, doing so from the air, when ground access had largely collapsed. And now back in the United States after that first Mae Sot visit, the contrast stayed with him: a comfortable life at home, and a border world where small…

People in this episode

Guest: Fred Stockwell

Topics covered

• migration
• recycling
• humanitarian work
• border issues
• personal transformation

Keywords

• Mae Sot
• Burmese migrants
• recyclables
• Hurricane Katrina
• humanitarian aid

Mentioned in this episode

Places: Mae Sot, Thailand

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