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.