Traffic and Bicycling

For five days on either side of New Year’s, a small group of us from Yangon went biking up north. Now that we’re back in the big burg, traffic feels like it doubled while we were away.

According to the latest numbers, Myanmar owns 15 times fewer cars per 1,000 people than Thailand does. But most of this country’s cars must live in this city. Every day the bottlenecks here come closer to matching Bangkok’s.

I’m inclined to get around on two wheels no matter what in 2015. A bicycle nearly always beats a taxi. Another plus for us pedal pushers: Yangon law forbids motorcycles.

In this climate, cycling means carrying an extra shirt to change into at the destination. Sometimes it also means traveling further than a car would, to avoid risky major arteries. For me those drawbacks are worth it.

The other day I gave myself plenty of extra time. I was headed to an office in a part of town I hadn’t visited before, planning to ask a favor from some people I’d only met by phone. They had sent me a map, but somehow its streets didn’t match the real signs on the ground.

To not be late, I stopped at a garage for directions. The mechanics pointed me back the way I’d come. In turning around, somehow my tires passed through a puddle of oil and grease.  I tried to rinse it off with a water bottle I carry.

Soon I was back on my way. I smiled, now that I was on the right road, still with plenty of time to spare… until I saw that my off-white trousers were becoming hardly white. Damn! To show up looking like a leopard wasn’t going to work for this appointment.

I rescheduled. Do I now need to start carrying a spare pair of pants? Either that or…

Dust

Yes, the rain is over and gone.

No, the flowers have not appeared on the earth; the time of the singing is not come, and the cooing of the doves is not heard in our land.

Yes, it is the time of the dust.

No, it’s not weird that shopkeepers and homeowners throughout Myanmar begin their days by sprinkling handfuls of water into the road out front to keep the dust down. This ritual takes place even at the airports… on the terminal floor. In neither setting does anything really change as a result.


Near as I can see, in Myanmar, dust bats last.

Re-Pats and the Outsourcing of HR

A friend here runs a placement agency. She called and suggested I apply for a Midwife Educator job here offered by an NGO connected with The Johns Hopkins University in the States. I laughed and explained that I don’t even know how to spell “midwife.”

My friend said not to worry, that the NGO wouldn’t be able to find anyone in the country with the high qualifications they were looking for. Just put your name in the hat, she urged. She thought my resumé, which includes a long stint with a public health agency, would intrigue the NGO enough that they would ask me in to talk about what else I might be able to help them with. Which is exactly what happened. I start this month on a sort of retainer basis as their knowledge management consultant.

I’m pleased to take on this challenge. The NGO is staffing up quickly, from 4 people to 40 in the next six months, so they’re looking to establish some good habits early. Equally interesting to me has been the inside glimpse this episode provided me into decisions faced by so-called “re-pats”: Myanmar-born workers who left during the bad old days and are now wondering if now might be the time to repatriate.

According to most estimates, between 10-20% of Myanmar’s workforce lives outside the country. You find them mostly in Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, but there are other pockets of relatively skilled, relatively English-fluent Myanmar people in Japan, the Middle East, and the West. Agencies like my friend's are cropping up to help these folks find the best matches between their talents and the country’s needs, from finance to telecom to tourism.

Some of the returnees are just testing the waters. They’ll rent out their Singapore condo while weighing the tradeoffs. If their expertise is IT, they may find themselves as big players in an area that has never really existed here. In other fields, making meaningful contributions may be harder, given Myanmar’s sometimes outmoded, entrenched ways of doing things. For example, as my friend noted, potential public health re-pats may shy away from the challenges of fixing a broken system.

Sore Spot

One of Myanmar's 14 provinces, an ethnic state let’s call R State, is a sore spot.

Roughly three million people live there. About one-third belong to Group M, the other two-thirds to Group R. These two groups have lived alongside each other for a long time. They’ve rarely gotten along very well. They follow different religions, and they're often easy to tell apart through skin color and dress.

(I use initials because the problems of R State, while severe, aren’t unique. They have implications and echoes throughout the whole country. For a short backgrounder on the specifics of R State’s dilemmas, click here.

Group M and Group R have moved in recent years toward a permanent segregation in R State. In 2012, extremists organized mob attacks and home burnings. As local police looked on, about 140,000 people became homeless. Three years later, the resulting internally displaced person camps still house more than 10% of Group M's entire population.

This suffering sometimes gets the attention of the international press. The conflict has a long history. Racial intolerance, colonial mistakes, migration pressures, and heavy-handed governance all intersect to create what the New York Times has called an “appalling apartheid.”

R State’s issues surfaced often during a panel discussion I attended last week in Yangon. A few faith leaders came together to comment on local media portrayals of religion. They noted that even though journalists could do a better job of understanding religious principles, pure doctrine is rarely the problem in R State. When people there talk about faith, they’re often talking about nationalism.

Nationalism is a big deal in Myanmar. People here often define themselves and others by ethnicity first. The government keeps a long official list of recognized ethnic groups. All of the seven states ringing the country’s borders are named for their leading group. Many of those groups follow a different religion from the Bamar, who make up about 70% of Myanmar’s population. Bamar dominate the seven interior provinces, which are known as “regions” and are named for geographic features.

Ever since a military coup in 1962, Burmese military leaders—nearly all Buddhist Bamar—have partly justified their nationwide grip on power by saying that Myanmar’s many ethnic and religious minorities lack the skills to self-govern. In fact those groups have never truly been granted the chance to try. Federalism, or power sharing between national and provincial governments, is a controversial concept here. Tensions in R State may have ripple effects on the chances for federalism, and eventual civilian rule, to succeed in the other states.

The generals may warn that without them at the helm, people will be freer to act on their racial prejudices. Regardless of the truth of that claim (some people say that the armed forces actually inflame those prejudices), hatred in Myanmar toward Group M is pervasive and extreme. Feelings go beyond the negative views in other parts of the world towards Islam, the religion of Group M. The presence of Group M here stirs a snake pit of issues, from caste to carpet-bagging to commerce. Many people who looked like them dominated Burmese business during colonial times. The country’s largest share of Group M lives in R State.

The panel audience’s questions strayed from religious differences to other causes of trouble there: economic opportunities, demographic trends, and citizenship rights. About a quarter of R state’s population doesn’t have citizenship at all, ever since passage of a 1982 law that omits the majority of Group M from the list of recognized ethnic groups. Group R does make the list.

At the panel, questions also arose about interfaith marriages—specifically, about the belief widely held among Myanmar Buddhists that Buddhist women married to Muslim men will lose everything if their husband dies or divorces them.

Especially in a province like R State where everyone is poor, the notion of taking away marital property doesn't sit well, and has led to calls for outlawing such marriages. Parliament has also drafted legislation that would limit religious conversions and birth rates. Population growth is a hot-button issue. Group R fears that some day it will be outnumbered in the state that bears its name.

Way back before Myanmar was a country, R State was its own kingdom, tucked between the Bay of Bengal and a long mountain range. Group R speaks a language that is closely related to Burmese. The English translation of its name is “people who protect their race.” Ever since the British in 1824 decreed that R State would be absorbed into Burma, Group R has actively struggled to run its own affairs, arguing as do many other ethnic groups here that because its land is ancestral, it should be in charge.

Group R’s political leaders find that their prospects improve when tensions and the risks of violence are highest. They intensify the situation in R State by putting restrictions on citizenship, movement, health care, education, marriage, birth registration, and even food and water for the majority of Group M. Human rights researchers write of Group M that its members have also suffered arbitrary arrests, forced labor, torture and death in detention, rape, and the denial of due process and fair trial rights.

All of these provocations happen with the blessing of the central Myanmar government. Journalists have labeled the largest subset of Group M, a people estimated to number nearly a million, as the most friendless people on the planet.

You might think that such obvious human rights violations would prompt an outcry from the UN and other humanitarian organizations, and you would be right. Some go as far as to label the situation a state-sponsored genocide. However, Group R has successfully portrayed itself as a victim too, arguing that the generals are the real villains, and that international aid favors Group M. Indeed, nobody has it easy in R State. The region’s low level of economic activity and poor infrastructure mean that many people leave—nearly three quarters of Group R under age 30, according to some estimates. (Most Group M members aren’t allowed to migrate—even out of their townships—without permission.)

With desperation similar to migrants leaving Libya for Europe, many from Group M pay traffickers to take them by boat from R State to Malaysia or Thailand, only to be turned back or sunk en route. The state’s long coastline along the Bay of Bengal makes it prone to weather-related disasters.

What might improve things in R State? For starters, as in all the ethnic states, it’s important to promote harmony and pacts through increasing opportunities for dialogue and teamwork. At the moment, Group R and Group M hardly ever see each other, let alone talk. There’s seldom such thing as an information sharing event attended by both communities. Schools are rarely integrated. Likewise in the rest of Myamar: Islamaphobic bias appears in local newspapers every day, despite most writers and readers never having had a real conversation with a Muslim.

A speaker at this week’s panel discussion cautioned against framing Myanmar religious issues as Faith A compared to Faith B. Instead, he said, write about good people compared to bad people, because all faiths have their share of both. Another panelist urged journalists to track down available translations of religious texts, to create knowledge that goes beyond stereotype. Simply using correct terminology goes a long way toward creating dialogue, he said.

Obviously, reconciling R State requires more than nice words in the press. To plant seeds of tolerance and fairness there, group leaders might consider making economic plans together. That way, they could begin to get infrastructure that works. However, to produce good electricity, roads, ports, and so forth, R State will have to keep lots more of its laborers, from both Group R and Group M, than are currently sticking around. Outmigration, as in the whole of Myanmar, frustrates development.

Indeed, over the long term, if R State and Myanmar want to survive, they will both need to figure out how to be multi-ethnic. Identifying with a cultural community and a country at the same time isn't easy, as we see everywhere from Catalonia to Kurdistan to Scotland. At the state and national levels here, leaders must truly take into account grievances from members of all groups, not just the ones who look, speak, or worship the same.

View image | gettyimages.com

Big Agenda

Obama visits Myanmar tomorrow and Friday, his second visit in the past two years. Some of the questions he wrestles with every day are familiar to the government leaders here: How to govern a country so that minority groups feel included? How to manage natural resources sustainably? How to make rules that guarantee a wide sharing of benefits?

These questions are interrelated. Answer one, and you’ve partly answered the others.

One writer, trying to address them all with a broad prescription, suggested that

…the solution lies in unifying a diverse group of interests that could move away from the extraction, violence, and poverty of the past….

This unified group would have to include reform-minded elements in the government and parliament, democracy forces (including the National League for Democracy and ’88 Generation), nationalist military officers who want national development, progressive industry and business interests including “good” cronies, and ethnic groups…. This will be very difficult because elements within each group may prefer the unsustainable present to a better future. (David Dapice, 2013)

The top priority for a broad coalition of this kind, Dapice writes, would be the election of state governors and local parliaments. This federalist approach also assumes the meaningful taxation and sharing of natural resource revenues.

Elections will be on Obama’s mind when he chats with his hosts. In the coming year this country will decide who is eligible to serve as president.  The current constitution bars Aung San Suu Kyi from that post. Obama will certainly bring up this issue with both the Naypyidaw leaders and The Lady herself. Also, new members of Parliament are scheduled to be chosen about a year from now in a vote that most people expect will be dominated by members of Suu Kyi’s party. The U.S. president, through the Embassy staff here, will push to make that balloting fair and on time.

He’ll also have China on the brain, having just come from there. Offsetting the rise of China in Asia explains much of Obama’s agenda on this trip. Human rights won’t top the list as it did in forming past U.S.-Myanmar policy. Now that most economic sanctions have been dropped, a more important issue will be making things easier for American businesses.

To be sure, Obama will bring up the humanitarian situation here, especially in Rakhine State, and he’ll discuss press freedom. Gender equality will come up. He may even talk about teaching critical thinking in a culture that discourages the questioning of teachers and elders.

The challenge of the federal approach mentioned above may not be one that Obama has much standing to do anything about. The level of social trust here remains very low, especially between ethnic groups and the government/military. If you think that’s an easy problem to fix, just ask the people of Ferguson, Missouri.

Bounce

At how many other airports in the world does the plane bounce three or four times upon landing? Seems like it always happens here in Myanmar.

I’m just back from a several-airport circuit that involved landings in Tokyo, Chicago, Philly, Houston, Tucson, and Denver. I didn’t feel a single bounce on any of those runways.

The problem here isn’t caused by the pilots. If it were, then we would also bounce in the other direction, at the end of each short flight from here to Bangkok. Perhaps Myanmar has a special runway construction technique?

In-Laws in Myanmar

You may have mixed feelings about your in-laws visiting. Not me. I was delighted that Jip’s brother and his wife wanted to fly to Myanmar for a few days. They had never been outside Thailand, and never been on a plane.

Since forever, their daughter had been encouraging them to go somewhere, anywhere—especially during the time when she worked with Emirates Air as a flight attendant, a job that took her to nearly 50 countries.

She noted that her parents had gotten passports years before, but allowed them to expire without a single stamp in them. Now their replacement documents were about to suffer the same fate. “Why not let’s go see Uncle John? He’s right next door in Yangon!” she suggested. And they bit!

Jip’s niece and I made a good tour team. She organized the overall itinerary; I took on the small details. From long experience traveling with Thais I knew to reserve plenty of time for both photography and snacking.  Luckily, the first few Burmese meals went down well. After those successful test runs, we made sure to eat on a Thai schedule—roughly every three hours.

Thai travel priorities in Myanmar differ from those of other tourists. Certain must-see destinations and must-do routines have spread via Thai social media. Following these paths, we were surrounded in some places by more Bangkokians than Burmese. Vendors addressed us in Thai before we even opened our mouths. At the Golden Rock, we even attracted our own “bodyguards.”

A group of young urchins approached us there, promising in excellent Thai to protect us for as long as we stayed. Of course we needed no protection. However, they sized us up correctly as disciples of Thai web forums. These websites claim that the Golden Rock bestows a special blessing on anyone who makes three unique treks to it in a 24-hour period. (Burmese I’ve asked have never hear of this boon.)

We had dutifully booked lodging a short distance away to ease our three pilgrimages. Seeing us set off on the first one, around 5pm, our bodyguards pounced. These fellows were actually pretty entertaining, and so we answered honestly when they asked about what time we would make visits number two and three. Sure enough, they were waiting for us each time. Their flashlights, umbrellas, and good humor always improved our journeys. They earned their large tip.

Another Land

After nearly ten days in Myitkyina, Yangon feels several time zones away. The air here in Kachin State is fresh and the skies are clear more often than not. The people look and sound different from the Burmese of central Myanmar. Baptist churches way outnumber Buddhist temples. The dogs don’t bark when unfamiliar faces run past them.

Sunday I rented a bike at the Myitkyina YMCA for three dollars and rode up a wandering tree-lined road. People waved as they putted past on motorcycles. Steeples of all shapes, sizes, and colors appeared at every bend. At one sizeable church I stopped to listen to hymns wafting out the windows. A bold pair of teenage girls stopped to interview me in halting English, taking several minutes after each question to formulate the next one. Cows munched on a nearby football field as we sat enjoying the day.

My pastoral Sunday surroundings never once hinted at the conflicts, injustice, and poverty that have plagued Kachin State for several years. It’s a resource-rich place with very little self-governance—rarely a good combination. Jade, timber, and precious metals have been mined* here for as long as anyone can remember… and for almost that long, people have fought over who gets to keep them.

Further complicating tensions this century are proposed hydroelectric schemes and pipelines between China and the Myanmar coast. Especially since 2011, conditions have worsened for a large share of the state’s population. More than 100,000 people have been internally displaced by fighting.

Monday I visited a camp that is home to about 500 of those people. It sits on the edge of a town, meaning that its residents sometimes have opportunities to work for money, unlike at the many camps set up in rural areas. More than 150 camps now exist in Kachin State, with some spillover into northern Shan State. Camp populations often come from the same home villages. Sometimes they share a church affiliation, or a common language other than Kachin.

My little bit of Burmese language doesn’t help me here. Using it only plays into the Kachin/Burman hostility that is a fact of life in this state. Reducing that hostility, and many other kinds of suffering here—from land confiscation to drug use—will mean working out tough problems related to economic and educational gaps. The resource curse is glaringly obvious in Kachin State.

Lots of humanitarian organizations come to help work on issues such as physical and legal protections, rehabilitation, and livelihood. At this camp alone, I counted logos of at least nine different outfits, ranging from the Kachin Baptist Convention to Oxfam, the European Union to Australian Aid. They sponsor projects centered on skills like sewing, pig rearing, snack making, knitting, and food preserving. Yet at the heart of the problems here are long-held grievances and disagreements that will not disappear quickly, and that must be worked out primarily by local actors.

*Mining is so taken for granted in Kachin State that the photos adorning the walls of my hotel all honor the practice. In other places around the world, hotel décor tends toward bouquets or bunnies or bad reproductions. In Myitkyina hang Chinese-captioned enlargements of open pits. In some of the pictures, scores of men march ant-like up temporary staircases, carrying buckets of rock on their shoulders.  

Preach It

An international children’s development organization sent me north to Kachin State last Tuesday as part of a three-week-long job. My first task was finding myself a translator.

Back in February and March, during the UN food security survey here, a guy I’ll call Laka had impressed me as a leader. He negotiated his team through several military checkpoints and no-man’s-lands. I texted him to ask how he was spending his days lately.

It turned out that like many Kachin people, nearly everything in Laka’s life revolves around the church. His pastor sends him on missions throughout the Kachin-speaking areas of Myanmar, he studies English to help him better understand the Bible, and he even makes time to cheer at church-sponsored football tournaments.

Happily for me, after we talked he agreed on very short notice to help train a group of researchers to do focus group discussions in 10 distant refugee camps. He and I will also work together on transcribing the tapes when the researchers return to town. Midway through yesterday’s first day, everything was going well.

Laka and I were both unknowns at the training center. The staff there thoughtfully invited us to join them for lunch. Christian symbols decorated the walls. Everyone seemed pretty devout. So it didn’t surprise me that the group would pause to give thanks before the meal. But who would give that blessing?

Without any signal that I could see, Laka rose and delivered a grace in Kachin that sounded as polished and professional as any sermon. I wondered what unspoken (divinely inspired?) message had led to him being chosen. He claims that for now he isn’t drawn to the pulpit, preferring instead to study theology. I won’t be surprised, however, to return some day and find that he has his own flock.

Monsoon Mindset

I thought from living in Thailand that I knew the monsoon. Turns out I was not even close.

Next door, in Bangkok, people refer to the “civil servant rains.” Meaning: a heavy shower begins mid-afternoon, after the bureaucrats have safely returned from lunch. This downpour drenches everything, brings traffic to a crawl, and sometimes backs up the sewers for an hour or two, but it does nothing to interrupt the lives of the desk jockeys. Many of them may not even realize that the torrent has come and gone, working as they do in windowless rooms. By the time they’re ready to drive home, the sun has come out again and the roads have cleared.

That’s how rainy season works in Thailand. You can almost set your watch by it.

Here in central Myanmar, you gotta think about things like, “Did my pillow mold?” “Is my phone wrapped in plastic?” “Has my passport grown fur?”

ImustsweartoGod the rain in Yangon doesn’t let up. Morning, noon, night. We are talking about a deluge, not a cloudburst. Endless, persistent, continuous, interminable, and uninterrupted.

People who arrive here from elsewhere bearing leather goods end up giving them away. Belts and purses turn green when not used daily.

I’ve heard that some folks leave their home air conditioners on all day, even when they’re at work, because they believe the slight wind keeps mold away. Even if they’re right, it’s an idea that most people here can’t afford. More often, living with the monsoon involves scrubbing the walls with a vinegar solution, wearing damp clothes, carrying extra umbrellas, stashing spare rubber shoes at frequent destinations in case a swollen street swallows one up, and adjusting the attitude. In other words, deal with it.

This last task hasn’t come easy to me. Maybe next year I’ll find my way to a monsoon mindset.

God and cod

Slow going with the Burmese language learning. Still moving forward, but certain sounds still elude me. My first teacher braced us for this struggle. When we whimpered that we couldn’t tell the difference between two words he had just pronounced, he answered that “to a Burmese, they’re as different as ‘God’ and ‘cod.’”

Notably, the three kinds of “t” give me fits. One of them sounds just like an English “t,” while another—the aspirated kind—has a breath built into it. The third “t,” explained my teacher, is a bit like an English “th” with a “t” sound out front of it, as in “Henry the Eighth.”

When words containing these three types are rendered in English spellings, the second and third kinds often appear as “ht” and “th.” Not long ago I had two work colleagues whose names to my ear were not at all different. I knew that one of them wrote her name “Htet Htet,” and the other “Thet Thet,” but I never spoke to them both at the same time, and frankly never gave the spellings much thought.

Until of course one of them phoned me. A Burmese man answered, then pointed to the receiver and said, “Thet Thet has a question.”

“Which one?” I asked. He gave me a withering glance that I can still feel, weeks later. A God-cod moment.

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.