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.

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.