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. 

Oral Exam

The church nearest our apartment here in Yangon did a brisk business for Christmas. There were three separate services—in English, Chin, and Kachin. I happened past during the changeover from Chin to Kachin. Folks of all ages in their finest traditional attire came and went. They paused every few steps to admire and greet. Good tidings of great joy. Peace, good will toward men. People urged me to come inside but I wasn’t dressed right. Also, I don’t know a word of Kachin.

Then today a friend and I stumbled upon a gathering that also happens only once a year. We hadn’t been searching for anything particularly seasonal or spiritual. Mostly our outing was touristical. The Buddhist temple that we visited appears in most travelers guides to Yangon.

Before we explored it, all I really knew about the place was that its name is hard to pronounce. I had failed several times to say "Kaba Aye" (World Peace) correctly to taxi drivers when heading to other destinations along the major thoroughfare that is named after the temple. My friend and I arrived on foot, sparing us from mangling the name yet again.

We trudged along a twisting entranceway. I looked for spires and gold and the usual bits of Buddhist architecture. Instead, up loomed a cave. The tall lump of rock seemed alien on so many levels. None of it fit with the province’s flat terrain, the city’s cement landscape, or the right angles of the nearby pagoda’s outbuildings.

Sure enough, a sign out front explained that this cave hadn’t always been there. It was built 60 years ago, modeled on a real one in India where the first Buddhist Council was held in 543 BCE. The replica grotto here looks genuine enough from the outside, but after you enter it’s clear that this ain’t the Buddha’s cave. It makes a first impression similar to a high school gymnasium. On either side of the cave’s brightly lit interior are rows of bleachers. Scoreboards twinkle in the corners. There is space for 10,000 people. Back in 1954, at the sixth Buddhist Council—evidently they don’t happen too regularly—2,500 monks from all over the region gathered in the newly inaugurated cave.

On this day, the cave housed about 200 Myanmar monks and their entourages. The monks recited several lengthy Buddhist texts from memory. It was the ultimate oral exam. Three mistakes and you’re out of the competition. The scoreboards kept track.

A large support crew accompanied each examinee. One senior monk listened, a junior followed along in the multiple books covered by the exam, and a collection of lay volunteers provided moral and nutritional support. Red Bull seemed to be a sponsor.

My friend and I sat out of the way, tucking our feet behind us as one does in the presence of Asian monks. We took up about 10 square feet of floor space. Which left approximately 29,990 for the monks, if the dimensions on the sign out front were to be believed.

Their sound certainly filled the room. For a while I thought the reverberations might bring down the artificial roof. The process called for twenty minutes of recitation, followed by ten minutes of rest. We watched and listened throughout two and a half cycles. A volunteer came to sit with us during the breaks. He explained that the monks would be at it for three days, eight hours a day. The last monk standing, as it were (in fact all of them were sitting cross-legged on individual platforms), would successfully have memorized more than eight volumes of dharma, chanting their contents with fewer than three errors. The volunteer, who said he was 64 years old, claimed to know three of the volumes by heart himself.

We emerged from the cave mighty impressed. I wondered about the longest string of anything that I had ever successfully memorized. For sure it wasn’t the lyrics to a song—I’m notoriously hopeless in that department. My phone number, perhaps? Pi, calculated to about six digits?

SEA Regional Stage

Myanmar watchers looking for signs that the country is serious about returning to the regional stage now have two new yardsticks.

Here in Southeast Asia, where image is everything, countries can score special points when their turns come around as chair of ASEAN, the regional bloc, and as host of the SEA Games, the neighborhood athletic contest. This month and next, in a rare overlap, Myanmar will take on both roles.

Beginning January 1st, it will lead ASEAN. The country has never before held the annually rotating chair, despite joining this 10-member association 17 years ago. The last time Myanmar’s chance came around, in 2006, it opted out, bowing to strong pressure from the rest of the community because of its lousy human right record.

The SEA Games, which Myanmar has hosted twice before, but not since 1969, got underway a few days ago in several cities around the country. During the run-up to the competition, people debated Myanmar’s preparations: Is the infrastructure up to the challenge? Who came up with that weird slogan (“Green, Clean, and Friendship”)? Will anyone show up to watch?

Banners brandishing the slogan hang from lampposts all over town. Many hotels feature signs welcoming the athletes. But I haven’t sensed much enthusiasm on the ground for the sports themselves. Until last Saturday night, that is. The men’s soccer match between Myanmar and Thailand captivated the whole country. Awakening a rivalry that goes back centuries, the two teams scrapped to a draw in front of a Yangon crowd that had queued up all day to get into the stadium.

This week SEA Games t-shirts are everywhere. When Indonesia eliminated the men’s team three days ago, flashes of hooligan/patriot-ism erupted in parts of the city. Last night, I again heard cheers ring out all over the neighborhood. Tracking down a TV, I realized it was the Myanmar soccer women’s turn to play Thailand. The game turned out to be chock full of highlights.

Both teams played remarkably even for 90 minutes. Although the Thais led most of that time, it was hard to say which side was better. Myanmar tied the game just before the ref whistled, adding a 30-minute overtime. Again the Thais went ahead, and again Team Myanmar answered with only seconds to spare.

Which took the contest to penalty kicks—never a satisfying way to finish, but a necessary evil if you want to award a medal. The Myanmar goalie stopped the fourth Thai shot but the fifth Myanmar shooter hit the bar, meaning another round of five. From that point every kick went in until the very last. So frustrating for the poor 10th Myanmar player to watch her ball bounce off the hands of the Thai keeper!

Impressive performances like those of the soccer teams may have converted many folks who appeared earlier this month not to care about the SEA Games. And high medal tallies—only Thailand has more at this stage—whittle away at Myanmar’s well-earned black sheep reputation in the neighborhood. Those numbers also downplay the muttering that Myanmar couldn’t have done it alone (China contributed over $30 million toward the cost of putting on the events).

Most likely it won’t be 44 years until the games are hosted here again. The sporting success maybe even bodes well for Myanmar’s confidence as it wades into managing the thousands of meetings that come along with chairing ASEAN in 2014.

Shaking the Bowl

What’s up with the ceremonies in the street? The question arises often after ten weeks here in Myanmar. Each time I go out it seems there’s another new Buddhist celebration.

At first this country struck me as having a comparatively genuine devotion to the religion. Monks on their alms rounds looked like they were doing more than going through the motions. Their eyes were lowered in a way that suggested seriousness and purpose, as though they were truly trying to reconcile yesterday’s teachings with today’s realities.

Opportunities to practice faith appeared to be built in to daily routines. Most homes feature altars in a prominent niche that practically calls out for people to stop and pray. In many neighborhoods and towns, a loudspeaker chants mantras in an endless loop. Pairs or trios of pink-robed, shaven-headed nuns circulate through neighborhoods. They stop outside small businesses, whose owners drop either money or uncooked rice into the nuns’ bowls. Think trick or treat, 365 days a year.

For about a week last month, the nearby street market transformed itself at night into a religious revival meeting. Posters advertising talks by well-known monks generated a huge turnout of people who sat on a five-block-long string of carpets that replaced vendors’ stands every evening. Projectors and screens set up at frequent intervals ensured that the entire river of listeners could see the monks’ faces as they preached from a stage at the head of the street.

And now this week clusters of smiling faithful have emerged everywhere, soliciting contributions from passersby. The silver bowls they shake contain not just donations but also a few beads or pebbles to generate sounds that Myanmar’s all-paper currency cannot. I’m reminded of my youth in Chicago, when volunteers for the Salvation Army rang bells outside shopping areas.

Yet lately I hear an undercurrent of hostility in the Buddhist speechifying and fundraising. The monks’ sermons last month sounded to my uncomprehending ear more like halftime peptalks than dharma lessons. The clatter of the pebbles in the bowls seems to say, “Donate or else.”  I may be imagining or exaggerating this tone, but there is no denying that the dominant faith in Myanmar has a paranoia problem. Many of its adherents feel that Buddhism is under threat.

Population estimates suggest that this perception doesn’t make logical sense—most guesses put the percentage of Buddhists at close to 90. But in a multi-ethnic country where good information is hard to get, it doesn’t take much stoking to ignite followers. Rumors, hate speech, and growing social media usage have all led to interreligious violence this past year. Hundreds of people have been killed here, most of them Muslim.

At bottom, the issue probably isn’t really about religion, but rather about power, fear, immigration, land ownership, and similar quagmires. Western governments wish the whole problem would go away, preferring instead to cheer for the country’s positive political changes as they look for reasons to encourage investment.

Aung San Suu Kyi also dodges the subject at every opportunity, falling back on vague references to “rule of law,” which everyone knows are a cover for “Don’t make me commit on this hot topic while I’m running for office.”

Unfortunately, this conflict will stick around for a while. Though it was less obvious when the government was more repressive, these passions have simmered longer than anyone can remember. Moderates are few and far between. Solutions will first require progress on many other fronts—cronyism, citizenship, poverty, and press freedom, for starters.

Meanwhile, I’ll continue to smile at the fundraisers on the street, and hope that they smile back.

New Digs

Long-term Yangon residents say, when I describe the building in which I began sharing an apartment last month, “Oh, you mean where the great tea shop used to be.” Clearly the new seven-story condominium was not a welcome change for many people in the neighborhood.

I don’t take it personally. The whole city is gentrifying. High demand will mean lots more disruptions of this kind. Nearly every block has two or three projects under construction. Former tea shops, old full-of-character pharmacies, and wooden houses on stilts are everywhere giving way to car dealerships, restaurants, and glitzy towers.

From our balcony I look out on a fascinating mix of modern and traditional. About 15 meters away is a slightly older building. Measured by the amount of mold on the outside walls, I’d say it was built about five years ago. Its open windows reveal kids reading out loud from their textbooks at lightning speed, moms singing, and dads spitting betel.

Between us and them is a filthy creek full of way too much wash- and waste-water from way too many of the neighborhood’s residents. Behind homes is a maze of tangled electrical wiring and blue plastic pipes, many no longer leading anywhere. A street market, looking like markets have always looked in this country, sends up scents and sounds from a few hundred meters away. If I walk just beyond the market’s boundaries, I encounter a department store. These are slowly popping up around Yangon and Myanmar’s bigger cities, the first to appear in the country since colonial-era Burma.

I’m starting to understand the neighborhood’s rhythms: bustling early and late, nearly empty in the middle of the day. Most mornings I wake up to ululations of various kinds that I cannot trace. Sometimes I think they’re coming from the floor above, but when I walk up there for a better listen, the chanting sounds ventriloquize across the creek.

The source of cooking aromas, on the other hand, is easy to determine. The kitchen in the apartment next door is separated from ours by a weird three-foot gap that’s probably designed to give fumes somewhere to escape. We both look out onto this dark space through windows that are coated with something that makes them two-way mirrors. Whenever I walk in there without turning on the lights, I’m startled by what appears to be a stranger cooking Burmese curries in our kitchen.

In fact my flat-mate is an American guy. At work the office contains lots of Burmese, a few Norwegians, a Cambodian, and an Irish. Last night I celebrated Thanksgiving with people born in Austria, Bangladesh, Colombia, France, Germany, Jamaica, Japan, Mexico, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam. Little wonder that the city is changing to meet the tastes of outsiders.

Strolling the Streets

Pedicab bells chime throughout the small alleys where most Yangon residents live. There’s not enough room for four-wheeled traffic, so these three-wheel “sidecars” (aka bicycle taxis) provide the transportation for anyone with heavy packages or worn-out legs. The riders swerve but don’t stop. You have to keep your ears open to avoid being run over.

Usually a few sidecars look for passengers at the street market. They wait next to the spot on the corner where all the vendors agree to pile up their fruit peelings and crumpled packaging throughout the day. You pass dozens of such spots in the evenings. By morning they’ve all disappeared.

Minstrel salespeople also pack the lanes, shouting or singing to advertise their wares. The law prevents electric amplification of sales pitches. Slowly you become able to match what’s on offer to individual sounds: the cry of the recycling man, the gong that goes with the pickled plum cart, and the tune of the lady who carries something long and fried in a ceramic bowl atop her head.

Customers call down to the street from an upper floor window or balcony when they want the attention of one of these vendors. The transaction then happens via a long cord with a clip attached to the bottom end. Why climb the stairs? These personal ropes can hoist nearly anything— breakfast, a newspaper, payment for last month’s electricity, younameit. Some buildings have half a dozen such “mailboxes” hanging out front, the longest stretching 6 or 7 stories high.

Myanmar’s not a convenience store country. If you want a snack, you have to buy your apples from a street market and slice them yourself. In spots where Thailand would likely have a mini-mart, here you’re more likely to find a temple. Sometimes the neighborhood holy place is just an altar or a tree whose trunk has been painted gold. Shrines are everywhere, outnumbered lately only by shops selling mobile phones or perhaps by corner newsstands.

Carrying around store-bought food, with its bright packaging, makes you feel a little self-conscious. Most people put home-made lunches of rice and chilies in a steel tiffin. Men carry these tiffins by the handle. Women seem to prefer placing them in a pastel plastic tote basket, a second handbag. It’s part of a uniform look that’s unlike what women wear in other lands.

You feel scruffy by comparison. They’re just about always dressed up. At bottom is their traditional skirt, which they combine fearlessly with countless top types, sometimes contradictory, often flattering, always appropriate. You suspect that they discuss new color combinations and designs during long evenings at home or at the beauty “saloon” (who’s to say that the American spelling of “salon” is the right one?). It doesn’t matter how they come up with so many ways to be attractive. As long as they keep doing it, strolling the streets will remain a pleasure.

Turning Off the Tap

Nearly every week here in Myanmar, a new expo or summit or forum happens, highlighting some until-recently-dominated-by-domestic-firms business sector. Last month you could have attended the Myanmar Agribusiness Forum, or the Into Myanmar Telecoms and IT Summit, or BuildCon Myanmar. The idea, I presume, is to stimulate foreign investment now that the government has declared such a thing both possible and desirable. 

This past week featured Myanfood, the first-ever international food, drinks, and hospitality exhibition. Among the many sponsors of the event was a high-end wine importer whose Canadian manager sometimes joins the same group of Friday-night bicyclists that I do.

When he showed up last Friday, he was enraged. “I told my wife that I needed to get out of the house… I gotta try and forget this day!” It seems his exhibit at the expo had been closed and cordoned off by the government. Same with his warehouses on the edge of town.

“I’m standing there under a huge banner, looking up at my company’s name as a lead sponsor of the event, and some goon is basically telling me that I don’t exist. No notice. Just ‘go home, seeya later, your stuff belongs to us now.’ For two years I work 14-hour days to build this business, and as of today I am finished. I really need this bike ride!”

None of us listening to his rant had a clue what to say. We could tell that he wasn’t looking for solutions anyway. Best for us to just keep nodding. It emerged that much of the problem revolved around inconsistent enforcement of an import law that restricts foreign alcohol sales to hotels. Evidently this guy brings in his wine on behalf of hotels, but also sells some of it through his own channels… just as most supermarkets and other liquor stores here do.

The old-timers in the group began whispering. “Obviously he’s gotten too big, and somebody in the government wants a piece of his action.” They muttered to themselves that his major mistake was not hiring staff who have friends in high places. “With the right people on board, issues can be avoided,” they said.

As it turns out, the old-timers may be in for a surprise. Already newspapers are reporting that many bigger wine importers, even those locally owned, are saying they will stop all sales voluntarily until the government clarifies the rules. Nobody else wants to get shut down without warning because of an arbitrary or even vindictive decision by a bureaucrat. Historically, who-you-know has trumped what-the-rules-say in this country. Will this episode be a small victory for transparency?