New Challenges

Life here hasn’t cooperated this week. Lots of rain, more than the usual number of power cuts, down with a flu bug, nursing a broken collarbone.

I know I said before moving to Myanmar that I was looking for new challenges. But today’s aren’t the ones I had in mind.

Of course everyone has problems. Consider the difficulties of the men of Myanmar’s Parliament. Recently they debated a motion that would have allowed them to remove the special turban worn while Parliament is in session.

From a summary of the debate published in a local newsletter:

·        MPs said that wearing turbans for a long time during parliamentary sessions was harmful to health. However, a member of the Health Promotion Committee said that wearing turbans is a tradition in Myanmar and male representatives are required to wear turbans on their head as a token of respect, auspiciousness, nobility, dignity and grace. Therefore, it is a historical tradition for parliament representatives to wear turbans as an insignia. The member of the Health Promotion Committee added by saying that people consider those who wear turbans as the ones working in the interest of the country and honouring the national tradition. From a health point of view, the head might feel tight from wearing turbans and heat might be kept inside, causing hair loss, but this is not a serious health problem considering that the tradition should be honoured, the health promotion committee member pointed out.

Birthday in Scotland

You can’t win them all, I realize. My latest consultancy, for a consortium of UN branches and NGOs, wasn’t quite as stimulating as my previous job. Luckily, it lasted only half a month. And when it was completed I could look forward to a long-planned bicycle trip with some Thai friends to the Outer Hebrides of Scotland.

While riding more than 250 km along the beaches, inlets, and seriously steep mountain tracks of these seven islands on the edge of Europe (closer to Iceland than London), we have enjoyed the distinct culture here a great deal. 

Road signs are written in Scottish Gaelic first, with English translations below. Each night we’ve sampled a different brand of peaty whisky, some so local that they’re not available on the next island to the north. At a community center supper on Scalpay, we ate seafood that was swimming only hours before.

And the aura doesn’t get much better anywhere than the one we took in around sunset tonight at the 5,000-year-old Callanish Standing Stones. Didn’t hurt that it was my birthday.

Let us just say that I haven’t given much thought here to the recommendations for Myanmar disaster risk reduction that I was crafting for the UN just two weeks ago. Perhaps I might have focused a bit more yesterday on my own risk, however. My bike hit a patch of gravel during a downhill and I came off, snapping a collarbone in the process. Ah, well. Can’t win them all.

Investment Opportunity

You want to invest in a growth industry? Consider putting your money into vehicle mirror replacement in Myanmar!

Wider and wider trucks and cars here try to squeeze past each other on roads built for bicycles, more than a century ago. Plus, for long-story reasons,* the vast majority of these vehicles have wrong-side steering wheels. Drivers are trying to guess how much room they have to pass without really being able to see around the car in front of them. Left turns are accidents waiting to happen. Mirrors get snapped off all the time.

In fairness, things could be worse. Not so many years back in Myanmar, most cars had much bigger problems than their mirrors or their steering wheels. Like, say, holes in the floor big enough to see the road through. Or non-existent exhaust systems. By government decree, an entire generation of cars was completely replaced, and at the same time import restrictions were loosened. Now, Myanmar has more and wider cars, most of them gently used models brought in from Japan or Singapore, where traffic travels on the left.

Many of the buses on this country’s roads likewise come from those two countries. To avoid passengers stepping into traffic, new doors are cut into the right side. Interior signs, however, remain written in languages few people here can read. (Some buses still look like they are driving the streets of Japan, sporting announcements that implore passengers to "Preserve the Nature of Mt. Fuji.")

*When cars first came to Burma, drivers used the left-hand side of the road. One night in 1970, apparently on the advice of a fortune teller, the lead general ordered the move to the right, effective immediately.

Rickety

Most locations in today’s Myanmar tend toward the rickety and the untidy. Even elegant spots designed as showcases contain avoidable flaws—a stain, a lack of symmetry, a piece fastened with packing tape.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that few places here appear completed. Wires aren’t hidden, caulking is uneven, extra tiles are left stacked in a corner to be collected on some future day that never arrives.

Some of the structural flaws I notice may have become invisible to local eyes. People here might not find it unusual to discover a motorcycle parked in a corner of the hotel ballroom. Nor to mind that an extension cord used in the kitchen travels out the window, along the building’s exterior wall, then back into a bedroom… where it plugs into a socket whose plastic cover plate went missing in 1965.

By contrast, personal grooming is highly valued. As elsewhere in SE Asia, in Myanmar it’s important to keep up appearances. In Thailand I observed people going to great lengths to hide or downplay difficulties. Sometimes they would flaunt a new watch or car while making sure nobody ever saw their substandard housing.

Maybe here the veneer is thinner. It’s possible that most Myanmar people don’t have enough extra to be able to put up a front. The door that doesn’t quite close properly might not stem from a lack of caring, but rather from a lack of money or tools to fix it.

Accepting things as they are might also be easier than fighting against reality. Choosing not to mind a flyspecked front window or an intersection nearly blocked by community trash may be a sane response to a crazy system. (Though I have to say I draw the line at the widespread habit here of tossing heaps of garbage into every running stream. Where do people think it’s going to go?)

Probably I too should spend less energy wondering about exterior maintenance, or about the stacks of yellowing brochures piled up in the lobby of the National Museum. Yet I don’t think I’m wrong to be concerned about a lack of follow-through here. Finishing what you start results in more than just personal satisfaction—it sends a message about priorities. I prefer “Okay, so it’s not great, but it doesn’t have to be that bad either!" to “It is what it is.”

Full Bloom

Everybody’s up in the treetops this morning, collecting yellow flowers. I had to dodge ladders while out for a run.  Men are throwing big sprays of fragrant blossoms down to waiting women.

I phoned around to find out what’s the deal. A friend told me that the padauk (Pterocarpus macrocarpus) only blooms one day per year. Today’s the day.

Often it happens during the three days of the traditional SE Asian New Year and Water Festival, 13-15th. Some Burmese say it’s not really time to celebrate until the padauk blooms.

A popular song this time of year translates as “Padauk Gifts of Love.” People know that young couples are getting serious when the man presents his sweetheart with a bunch of padauk. Older folks offer blooms to the Buddha.

It’s strange to me that the padauk’s day should fall in April, when many other trees’ leaves are curled up and dry. Temperatures here this month tend to scorch. I’ve heard of night-blooming cacti that only flower once a year. The padauk shows up in broad daylight. How does it know?

Change of Lens

It’s Thai New Year here in my mother-in-law’s village. The house cleaning, temple visits, and water blessings all feel familiar. Yet I’m looking at this seaside community with new eyes after the past several months helping to lead a UN poverty survey in rural Myanmar.

What would the survey teams learn if they asked their income, food security, and ease-of-credit questions here along the Gulf of Thailand? Compared to the places we interviewed last month, this village appears prosperous. It’s likely getting moreso as city folks discover it.

There’s also probably more need here than a casual glance would suggest. About 60% of the district’s land is planted in coconuts. What I hear from family and neighbors suggests that this labor-intensive business isn’t as profitable as it once was. Many trees are getting old. Others are destroyed by coconut hispine beetles. I notice while running on the back roads that farmers are replacing their orchards with pineapples.

A few statistics I found online indicate that incomes in this district average much less than what farmers make elsewhere in Thailand. My guess is that the tourism revenue in this village isn’t staying local. Neither is the next generation—young people from here head to Bangkok for work. Their parents can't always afford to hire helpers. When they can, often they employ workers from Myanmar, who accept low wages.

Even though the UN survey is finished, and I’ll be looking for new work when I return to Yangon next week, I still find myself thinking like a rural planner. It would be interesting to know what information the village leaders here are using as they chart the future.

Just Enough

The survey is winding down. Fewer surprises now. These days, we simply savor the lovely places where we’re privileged to interview.

Yesterday we landed at a quiet, simple, “just-enough” village. In Myay Pyo, near Taunggyi, the Buddha image in the meeting room is just big enough, the photos on the wall showing community efforts are just varied enough, and the tobacco they grow is just lucrative enough.

As in many of the villages we visited, we were treated to lunch by people who wouldn’t hear of our paying for the food. Yet their answers to the questions about what they eat, earn, and grow, suggest that they don’t have anything to spare.

I had a few minutes to sit with the young leader of the efficient team that gathered the data. He and I had met briefly a few weeks earlier at his training session. Like many of the surveyors, this fellow comes from a different class of people than the folks he’s interviewing. He grew up in a town, not a village. While not wealthy, he finished school, and some day would like to get an advanced degree. He can speak at least four of the local languages, in addition to having pretty good English.

Now he and I had a chance to look back at the highlights of our efforts. At first I thought we would discuss what we’ve learned about the amount of food stocks most villagers keep on hand—happily, it’s several days’ worth. I thought he might also want to talk about where people search for casual labor when crop problems compel them to leave home for a short time. And I was looking forward to hearing more details about how he handled the handful of checkpoints he hadn’t been allowed to pass.

But instead the young team leader reflected on the diversity of customs and conditions that make up his country. Sometimes, what he enjoyed seeing most matched the things that had caught my eye about village life—the expert bullock-cart-driving skills of the young people, the impressive financial savvy of the rural women, the rarity of white hair among the elders.

We discussed the strange dialects his team members had encountered, and the times they were moved by generosity or saddened by addiction. Then he mentioned what for him had been an unexpected outcome of doing this work. At age 25, he had never had a real conversation with a Muslim in Myanmar until he met the driver we hired for his team. The two of them had sat next to each other in the car for two weeks straight, and of course they had lots of opportunities to compare notes.

The survey will really help policymakers pinpoint programming. We did a good job getting a specific picture of people’s diets. This guy’s team was especially expert at talking respondents through the complicated bits of the questionnaire—those that dealt with income and borrowing and financial management. Such things work differently in villages than they do in towns.

It’s great that the UN has been able to achieve this project’s goal of assisting Myanmar’s government ministries and the region’s development agencies as they take the next steps toward reducing poverty in this country. It’s just as great that the survey helped grow understanding between people of different religions.

CRUSH

Outsiders sometimes come here to Myanmar predisposed to look for evidence of past wrongdoing or present paranoia on the part of the country’s leaders. It’s not hard to find those things if you’re oriented that way, especially at institutions connected to the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s armed forces. For example, I passed a sign this morning boasting that:

THE TATMADAW AND THE PEOPLE COOPERATE
AND CRUSH THOSE HARMING THE UNION

I shuddered at the starkness of the message. By contrast, the Burmese colleague I’ve traveled with nonstop for six weeks consistently exhibits a spirit of reconciliation and pride regarding the country’s history. He acknowledges poor governance during the recent past, but mostly faults former leaders only for sticking too long to policies that clearly weren’t working. As a person who has lived under the Tatmadaw his whole life, he explains that the military sees everyone as either a friend or an enemy: “There’s no in-between. If you’re an enemy, you must be destroyed. It’s not the same as the political way.”

My colleague’s background is part economist, part diplomat. He grew up in one of the provinces where we’ve been surveying. Over dinner in the evenings, having listened to villagers describe their lives all day, he and I sit and make sense of it all.

The two of us have arrived at solutions to most of the planet’s ills... Not to mention authoritatively chosen the best movie ever made in our home countries, endlessly divided the world into two kinds of people, and settled on the characteristics of an ideal colleague. In his words:

  Everyone should strive to drive the wheel rather than stick the spanner.
  Wheel drivers keep their eyes on the goals of a task; they don’t allow small
  problems or minor issues to prevent the machine from moving forward.

Of course he’s not talking about crushing those who would harm the union. In fact he doesn’t even always follow his own maxim. For example, in keeping with Asian tradition, he defers to my age—though I’m only a few months older. “You’re the decision maker,” he says, even in situations

where his language and experience make him much more qualified than I am to drive the wheel.

We’re pleased with the progress of the survey, and the skill of the teams we oversee. Yet recently permission to survey has been hard to get in some sensitive villages. These locations were chosen by computer to ensure that the data will represent the province as a whole. We're not sure if our interviewers will be stopped from reaching those places by one of the region’s many powers that be—including the Tatmadaw.

Because we have a central government ministry as our project partner, we know we can’t officially negotiate with the ethnic rebel groups. But we feel our survey’s mission is neutral, and that both sides will benefit from having the information we plan to collect about food security and poverty.

The lines of control shift frequently. We have contacts on both sides. Nobody has given us a green light. We have a deadline. The longer we wait, the more we suspect that nobody will ever tell us we can’t go there. Should we simply send our teams down the road toward the disputed areas and trust fate? Will we be putting them in danger? Will we be harming the union?

Roadblocks

Security issues have loomed recently during the survey we’re running in the northern border states. Fighting between the Myanmar army and several different armed ethnic groups is unfortunately not rare here. Interview teams whose assigned villages lie in areas beyond central government control are sometimes blocked at checkpoints, even though we deliberately hired question askers who come from those townships.

Every so often politics get in our way. We have our doubts, for example, about one of the companies we hired to provide interviewers. This firm claimed during the bidding process to share our interest in collecting high-quality and representative data. They talked about using the information to create targeted follow-on projects of their own. But now it appears the boss may have another agenda.

You see, visiting every township in a province is a good strategy for an election campaign as well as for a survey. With important national leadership questions to be decided in 2015, now is a good moment to build a voter base. We’re hearing from the interviewers that during village focus group conversations, the boss has been asking more for votes than for information.

And why not? Since Independence, folks here have learned that self-reliance succeeds more often than help from outside. If you had lived under this regime during the past few decades, wouldn’t you also be tempted to take advantage of the chance to spread your name using UN money?

There’s some good news about this self-interested company boss. If he wins his election bid next year, he’s going to deliver on his promises. He belongs to the local ethnic group, and would suffer serious loss of face if he didn’t make good. And he’ll at least have reliable data to base his new programs on… if he can convince his campaign survey teams to work Sundays, that is. The looming national census means we’re on a tight time schedule. Many of the interviewers in this heavily Christian part of the country say they need to attend church in their home towns.

Many Villages, One Survey

It’s the third week of the UN food security and poverty survey. We’re gathering good information, despite some difficult conditions. Families appear happy, even honored, to talk about their food and spending patterns. If they’re skeptical about our explanation that new, better-targeted development programs will result from the data, they haven’t said so.

We think they may be holding back on some answers, however. Farmers who work somebody else’s land without the owner’s knowledge might be leery of telling everything. Or if poppy growing provides the bulk of their income, they may prefer keeping that fact to themselves. Considering the heavy-handedness of Myanmar’s security apparatus over the past several decades, such caution is justified.

The survey teams stress that nobody in the government will ever see individual households’ responses, and that no names will be collected. At the beginning of the interviews, we tell people we’re partnering with the Ministry of Livestock, Fish, and Rural Development. Then, to build trust, we ask about the weather, the children, the football matches.

We also emphasize that we’re not part of the national census, which begins just after we finish. The census, overseen by a sister UN agency, is controversial mostly because it asks about two hot-button issues here, ethnicity and religion.

Though our survey doesn’t ask such questions, we’re certainly seeing the wide diversity in this crazy quilt of cultures that calls itself a “Republic of a Union.” Language has been our biggest challenge. Two or even three translations are routinely needed in the villages to get information from, say, Shan or Chin or Pa’O interviewees to a paper questionnaire that is printed in only three versions: Myanmar, English, and Chinese.

During the seven-day training for the interviewers, we tried to form each team of four so that at least one person could speak one of the 10-15 languages we thought we would encounter. Even with that attempt, we find we sometimes need to enlist translation help from village schoolteachers, who can usually speak something besides the local dialect.

The remarkably varied villages, sometimes just one valley away from each other, were chosen at random using GIS software programmed to exclude towns and cities. All of them grow most everything they eat, but that’s where the similarities stop. Lack of water and transportation mean that many places we’re surveying subsist much the same way they always have. Others are moving away from cultivation into service provision. Irrigation and new crops provide a few villages with more income than ever before. And a handful of places exist largely on remittances from relatives abroad.

It’s generally gorgeous landscape: forested, rippling countryside gouged by rivers and sprinkled with hilltop temples. Surveyors often have to drive or walk four to five hours from the previous night’s stop, then that far again after the half-day’s worth of questioning is finished.

Checking in with other interview teams is tricky in this land of few cellphone towers. We almost never connect on the first call. Usually it takes five or six tries, each separated by an hour or so, to reach somebody who’s moving around the rural areas of Myanmar. The most remote teams will be outside cell range for about 10 days.

How Many Village Elders Does It Take To Screw in a Lightbulb?

The shouts! The murmurs! The laughter! All in response to the first and perhaps simplest of 26 focus group questions about food. We’re sitting on the floor of the village chief’s big open receiving room. Surrounding us are smiling, barefoot adults.

How far to the nearest market?

It’s the first of about 40 days we’ll spend surveying in rural Myanmar. If this beginning is any indication, the process will be amusing and worthwhile.

What are the normal yields per acre?

The main task is collecting information on hunger and poverty for an arm of the United Nations. Native speakers will do the actual questioning in 500 villages throughout the country’s four northernmost provinces. A Burmese colleague and I will travel from Monywa to Hakha to Lashio to Myitkyina, trying to keep the mission moving while minimizing unexpected dramas. When the numbers are all crunched, they’ll become the basis for a Myanmar food security atlas that will help drive development priorities.

Ours is the biggest event today for the 250 people who live in this sandy community. Nearly half the adults turned up for the focus group. Arguments are flying back and forth about the most important crops in the village, the number of female-headed households, the commonly seen diseases. Each question triggers a flurry of facts and counterfacts. All of the elders say they know best.

What we mostly want to learn is what they eat, earn, and grow. The last time anyone systematically collected data about hunger and poverty was several governments ago. It’s been even longer than that since a government cared to do anything with that information.

Results from two other sections of the country, sampled last year, didn’t show extreme hunger. In Myanmar poverty is a major problem, but it doesn’t always translate to chronic food shortages, the way it can in some areas of the world. Here, a lack of irrigation issues, casual labor, and credit all contribute to occasional food gaps. The UN and the Myanmar government wonder how long those gaps last. The diversity and remoteness of this border region surely holds some surprises for us. It’s not even clear that we’ll be granted permission to reach all of the locations that our geographic software randomly selected for us.

When we’re finished with the village profile that’s causing all the hilarity right now, we’ll pull 12 names from a hat. Those households will get a visit for the hour-long chat that is required to complete the entire 15-page form. I expect no shortage of shouts, murmurs, and laughter over the coming few weeks.

Bike-Skiing

Some people find freedom through meditation, others through medication. One person defines it as a day spent skiing, another person as a day spent reading.

As of yesterday, I’m gonna say that perfect freedom comes from riding a brand-new bicycle across Myanmar hills on a cloudless January day.

It was meditative on the flats, then better than drugs when we came to the hills. I was in a groove, like you can get while you’re on the ski slopes, or in the midst of a great novel.

My mountain bike was a Christmas present to myself. It’s fast becoming a trusted friend, as we get to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

The highlights of the ride built slowly. A group of us turned off the pavement and onto a single track, about an hour outside Yangon. Our beginning pace was pretty tame—one woman struggled on the hills. I had ridden this loop before, so I hung back to offer some moral support.

Cycling unhurriedly through shady orchards and along grassy ridges was an antidote to a week spent in the city. The sun obliged, never baking nor blinding us. Sometimes we got down off our trusty steeds to avoid crashing on the tricky bits.

Finally we reached a spot near the end where everybody usually stops for a rest. The struggler by then was pretty through with the whole biking concept. She kept smiling for her husband, but you could tell she wished she was home with a book.

Somebody suggested that a few of us might want to go back over the rugged section rather than finish the circuit along the paved road. I volunteered before you could say “mountain bike heaven.” Soon I was at the front of the pack, bouncing through moguls and spinning around blind corners.

It was like driving the family car for the first time as a 16-year-old. I became the poster child for that old bicycling maxim, “If everything is under control, you’re obviously not going fast enough.” You couldn’t wipe the wild grin off my face.

Somehow I never made a wrong turn, even though the trail didn’t always look familiar in reverse. Everything is colored brown at this time of year in central Myanmar. The country hasn’t seen rain for several weeks. Dust clouds kicked up behind me like snow sprays.

I swear the new bike has turbochargers. The others who chose to retrace never drew near. They looked at me like, “How did you know which way to go?” I just knew. Impossible to lose my way. Nothin’ left to lose.

Powerless

Roughly once a day here in Yangon, the power goes out for a short time, often less than 10 minutes. I’m not complaining—only a quarter of the country’s population has any electricity at all.

Many unfortunate consequences flow from these frequent outages. Fires break out in homes when people walk away from electric stoves and then forget to check them later. Other appliances suffer from dips and surges in the power supply. Air conditioners and refrigerators, for example, must be connected to separate compressor protectors to prevent them from “early retirement.”

Maybe weirdest of all are the human-powered Ferris wheels. After the customers are all seated, daredevils climb to the tops of the wheels and swing there to start the momentum. Then they jump before they hit the ground, only to grab on again to repeat the cycle.

Calendar Confusion

Over the past couple weeks, in the markets and at busy intersections, vendors have been walking up and down hawking new calendars. Fair enough. It’s time to replace the old ones hanging in kitchens and tea shops all over the country. But wait…

These calendars are laid out sideways. The Sundays boxes travel across the top of the sheet, not down the left edge like I’m used to. The next row contains all the Monday dates, and so on until the bottom row—only Saturdays. To make it look correct to my eye, you would have to rotate it to the right 90 degrees, and then flip it horizontally.

I bought one. Slowly I’m adjusting. When in Rome, and all that. But now that I have a chance to study it every day, new weirdness is emerging. For instance, in Burmese, the year is written as 1375, not 2014.

At first I thought, I get it—they’re using a starting point other than the Common Era’s, just like next door in Thailand, where this year is 2557. Thais say it was that many years ago that Buddha reached enlightenment, and thereby got released from the cycles of birth and death.

But then I Googled a little bit and my brain started to spin. I was coming across concepts like the Indian Chulasakarat System from the 7th Century, and lunisolar years, and Metonic cycles. I mean, what the hell is an intercalary month, anyway? And why would you want to add one now and then to make the year 384 days long?

I gave up pretty quickly trying to understand all this stuff. Now I just tilt my head whenever I look at the Burmese calendar, and I figure out what day it is quickly and easily. Somebody else can worry about when the Sun is scheduled to enter Aries. If you feel like messing around with all the stuff, be my guest. Here’s a link.