The privilege of village work again came my way. Over the past month I traveled throughout lush, underdeveloped sections of Myanmar as part of a large UN survey about what households eat, earn, and grow. My role this time was closer to the ground than on the earlier surveys, when I was supervising supervisors.
Picture me in the village headman’s house, listening to him read out the members of all 49 households from memory. He stops from time to time to spit betel or to offer some side commentary about each name. A local civil servant writes each name onto a form. Someone over her shoulder checks the spelling, while someone else prepares 49 numbered slips to pull out of a hat for the lottery that will determine which 12 households get interviewed today. Various elders come and go.
I was again impressed by the undivided attention of the respondents to our questions. They surely knew somewhere in the backs of their minds that the cheroot they didn’t quite finish after dinner last night was still waiting in a special pouch that hangs from the bamboo roof beam. Yet they waited until our queries were finished before pulling it down and taking a puff.
At one house I recall a playful argument over the correct name for a fish species, which like so many other things in this country goes by several labels. When we learned that the fish were caught and not bought, an additional section of the questionnaire was then required. Nobody complained. Even after 90 minutes of such back and forth, seated on a bamboo floor, interviewers and interviewees alike seemed willing to keep talking forever.
Almost nobody wore a watch—somehow they just knew when it was time to head out to the paddy fields, or to traipse home from school, or to shoulder a metal jug and make a trip to the pond for the evening’s drinking water.
As before, it was a privilege to watch the rhythms and hear the stories of village life. I learned to recognize the vocabulary used when talking about how high the water gets in July and August. When I couldn’t understand, I could at least admire the pride of a 70-something woman who lives alone on income sent by four of her sons. Later I learned that she had outlived her fifth son. Her tight, unwavering way of staring at our team may just be the way she has always looked at people—or it may be how she copes.
Then there was the 60-something man whose situation looked to me meager, but not rough enough to explain certain coping strategies he said he had used during the previous seven days: cutting the number of daily meals, sometimes eating rice only, and so on. It emerged that he’d had to reduce his sole income source—firewood gathering—because a snakebite had swelled his hand large enough to prevent him working. On our survey form there’s no spot to mark “snakebite.”
Another family had spent a hefty sum on something the interviewer penciled in beneath the “other” heading in the expenses section. I had wondered about an earlier written-in answer, in the migration section, but decided not to probe it. At this point in the process my job is mostly to skim the surveys in search of major errors. It turned out the two Burmese-language footnotes were related. The eldest son had left home to join the Burmese army, a rare enough choice in this fiercely proud ethnic (non-Burmese) region. More surprisingly, he had stopped sending home any of his paycheck. How come? He’d deserted. The family was now supporting
him as he stayed on the run.
Every village was unique. Some collect crabs, some grow betel, some rely on relatives in Malaysia, some do all of the above. The people described lives that were just as interesting and complicated and troubled and joyful as any in urban jungles… minus such extravagances as electricity and motorized transport and phone connections. We learned about their complex systems of rice and livestock exchange. I believe the accounting abilities of some villagers would rival those on Wall Street or in the City of London.
