Minbya Misfortune

Big flooding in late July and early August left its mark on many parts of Myanmar. The poorest regions of course suffer most. A British NGO sent me to check on one such region this week. Specifically, they want to know how well markets are functioning and what has happened to prices since the floods in Rakhine State’s Minbya Township.

Minbya was ranked by earlier flood assessments as among the most severely affected townships in the country. In many spots here, the water rose over 10 feet. Although Rakhine State is well-known for long and heavy monsoon seasons, nobody alive today can recall as extensive a flood in this region.

The NGO may decide to respond with a Cash-for-Rebuilding scheme, depending on what we learn about whether or not beneficiaries would have anywhere to spend the cash. So far it appears that the markets are open for business, that prices are up and sales are down.

This kind of assignment humbles me. The interviews we’re conducting with shopkeepers are nearly always cheerful, despite their descriptions of high water levels and stock losses. Yesterday we went by boat to an elbow in the Lemro River that is home to a market known as Pan Mrauk Gyi. Its location high on the river’s edge was a mixed blessing during July and August.

Shopkeepers in Pan Mrauk Gyi told us that flood depth and stock loss were generally lower for them than for sellers in the towns of Mrauk U and Minbya... except for the nearly one-third of shops that were swept away when the land slid at the center of the riverbend.

We interviewed one grandma whose wares were spread on the ground next to the new cliff edge. A makeshift green tarp above her kept the sun off. She said her shop formerly sat about 20 meters behind her, on the part of the riverbank that had crumbled into the deluge.

All of us became a little teary as she described what she had lost. There is no such thing as flood insurance here.

Got It Good

September in the States is really great. Back when I lived there, and was teaching elementary, I always used to tell the principals that I would prefer school began on October 1st and ended in July. That way we could still enjoy the beginning of autumn without being too busy lesson planning and so forth. In a way I sort of achieved that kind of schedule this year. These past few weeks found me in several parts of the American Midwest and Northwest. It was an easy decision to trade Yangon's worst weather for Washington State’s best. I managed several hikes in both the Cascades and Olympics.

I also became enlightened on concepts that pass me by in Myanmar, such as gluten freedom and gender fluidity and gun foolishness.

Not to mention: Paleo diets, the teenage music scene, and shops that sell pot. In some places I visited, kombucha and almond milk were all the rage. Just when my head had wrapped around those beverages, I was exposed to an astounding range of liquid refreshments with names from just about every zone of life: Double Bastard, Old Godfather, Spin Cycle, Justin Blabaer, Dirty Skoog, Dog Zilla, and Quadrophenia. Life in the US moves pretty fast.

It was also a delight to join in on family birthdays, to see a cousin officially join her first church as the senior pastor, and to hang out with delightful nieces and nephews.

Man, have I ever got it good. I’m feeling very very very lucky to be able to live like this.

Manage-for-Oneself-Land

Around here repairs tend to be of the make-do variety. Instead of pouring new pavement, you parquet the broken concrete pieces jigsaw style. Rather than rewire, you figure out which of the many old strands might still have some life left in them. If you can imagine yet another use for the perforated, preformatted steel planking known as Marston Mat, then you can be sure your supply will never run out here.

The ultimate example of this jury-rigging and MacGyvering took place on the way home from a bike race last weekend. Seven of us had told our friends and families to expect our return from Sagaing Region, north of Mandalay, by dinner time Sunday evening. Then, two setbacks.

First was that Ben won the race. Of course everyone was pleased by this result. But it did mean we couldn’t slip away until after the award ceremony.

Second was that the truck radiator burst. I’m talking about torn asunder. A serious schism. No bubble gum, black pepper, or eggwhite fixes for this badboy. We tried pouring in water, only to watch it gush right out the bottom.

No highway patrolman was going to rock up and ask how he could help. And there’s no such thing here as a roadside assistance organization like AAA. This is Myanmar, otherwise known as Manage-for-Oneself-Land. 

We had no duct tape, no matches, none of the things MacGyver would have pulled out of his bag. Only a truck full of bicycles, a knife or two, and some inner tube patch kits...

..."Hey, wait a sec," we said. If we have patch kits, that means we have inner tubes. And if we have inner tubes...

We set to work stripping the bikes of their tubes, slicing each one along its equator, and fashioning rubber bandages. After wrapping the radiator in bike-tube band-aids, we limped off down the road at 30 miles per hour. Home was about 225 miles away.

Topping up the radiator at the rate of about a gallon per half hour, we arrived in time for breakfast.

Low Inventory

Sometimes during the surveying job that just wrapped up, I had a chance to visit village schools. They slowly began to seem similar to me. Now and then I even wondered if even the students weren’t the same people, silently running ahead of me from village to village on unseen trails.

Typically what I found were one-room buildings containing between 15 and 30 kids, spread among five grades. The good news was that often each grade had its own green-skirted teacher, making for a pretty good ratio. The bad news was that student ages didn’t always match their grades, suggesting that kids start and stop often, in keeping with their families’ financial needs or migration patterns. All of the schools had space for lots more students than actually showed up. Rakhine State is known to have the lowest rate of primary school participation in the country.

On one of the visits I stayed long enough to take inventory. The school, which was among the better resourced I saw, contained the following:

12 very long, low student desks
5 plastic chairs (students sit on the floor)
6 blackboards
3 teacher desks and 3 bamboo pointers
2 flags
1 map of Myanmar
1 number poster
1 English alphabet poster that at first I could not figure out – maybe you can see the logic:
               AEFHIKLM
               NTVWXYZ
               OCQS
               BDGJPRU
1 five-gallon water bottle
1 broom and dustpan
1 Buddha image
1 vase under the Buddha containing dried-out flowers
no children’s art
no calendar
no books

The vision statement of Myanmar’s Ministry of Education aspires to “generate a learning society capable of facing the challenges of the Knowledge Age.” Yet education expenditures here, as a percentage of GDP, are among the lowest in the world. Perhaps it’s no surprise that families vote with their feet and don’t send their kids regularly. The primary school completion rate nationwide is just over 50%.

Wonderful Work in Rakhine State

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.

Under Water

The monsoon always pounds Myanmar during July and August. But this year the heavens (and surely many earth-based causes) created hundred-year flooding.

I watched the rain fall from inside Rakhine State village homes. For the past two weeks, I followed survey takers from the government’s Department of Rural Development as they asked female heads of household an hour’s worth of questions about hunger and poverty.

The answers kept returning to the rising waters. A few households reported hunger, but rarely because of shortages. In this part of Myanmar, emergencies are more common than food gaps. Sometimes we were told that flooding had left people with no dry spot to cook the food they stored, so they went to bed hungry. Lately the water has risen as high as six feet, said our informants. This difficult situation is compounded by Rakhine State’s crazy politics, which often translate into horrifying injustice.

In one village near Taungup, farmers described having to essentially pay to work. Floods wiped out their first crop and their seed stocks. The local landlord (one government official owns the whole village) offered to advance them their wages in the form of rice. Because of interest payments, they’ll still owe at the end of the harvest.

Yesterday Myanmar’s president declared this state a natural disaster zone, along with Chin State and Magway and Sagaing Regions. Personally, I’m safely holed up in a hotel (the only guest at a place that can hold 300 people!) where I'm humbled by the adaptability of the local people. They continue to go about their routines despite the deluge. Many of them put on shoulder-width conical hats. They know they’ll get drenched, but at least the rice will get planted. Some families add layers of bamboo flooring to their homes as the water rises, and bring livestock in to join them.

While I wait for the storm to let up, I stay at the hotel, trying to track the movements of five survey teams that are still in the field. One team is stuck on an island where ferry service stopped a week ago due to the tropical storm. I hope they’re OK there. I haven’t been able to contact them directly because mobile phone connections to much of the state have been down for the past three days. My fingers are crossed that the team isn’t in danger, just maybe wet and discouraged. When we were last in touch, I told them that the survey is less important than their safety. Hope they listened—during training I could see they were quite serious about this project.

The hotel TV features flicks starring Stallone or Jackie Chan. If I switch the channel to CNN I get non-stop coverage of a plane fragment that’s supposed to solve a several-month-old mystery involving a flight that left Malaysia one night and was never heard from again.

Last night an Austrian couple showed up in the dining room. I asked them if anyone had mentioned that it rains in Rakhine State during July. They said no, they were shocked! They had booked a 12-day holiday! I laughed a little bit and suggested they could proudly tell all their neighbors back home that they were in Myanmar when a state of emergency was declared. They did not smile. Their expressions said, “No laughing matter.” This morning they were gone.

The “Up” in “Upbeat”

Among the best places to rise and shine is the back of a bicycle. It’s hard to beat early morning rides for putting the “up” in “upbeat.”

These days a few pals and I meet up once or twice a week before sunrise for a quick circuit to downtown Yangon and back. Our halfway point is a pier where local folks do group exercise to sounds from a boombox.

Their choice of tunes are the best part: jazzercised versions of Beethoven's “Ode to Joy” and the overture from Bizet’s Carmen. They follow up that routine with group laughter.

We’re back home by 7, at the office by 8:30, feeling positive. How could we not be?

Missed Connections

Surely you know the parallel meaning problem: when you talk or type past somebody without ever really discussing the same thing. Sometimes even close friends or couples experience conversations that edge by each other, either by design or by accident.

Let’s say two people are planning how to spend some free time together. Both might already have their own plan, making it hard at first to hear the other person’s idea, or to imagine that a different idea could even exist. With luck they know each other well enough to eventually get on the same track: “Oh, you wanted to go shopping first and then watch the video. OK, no problem. We can do it that way.”

Here in Asia the parallel meaning problem can have many added causes: culture clash, status difference, language gap, crackly phone connection. I prefer to think that most of the time such disconnects are innocent and unintentional, as in this recent text message exchange during a village survey project I was supervising:

Me (8:04 pm): Have a good day tomorrow in the village. Let me know how it goes.
He (8:07 pm): By car.

Now and then I can tell that somebody doesn’t want to answer a question directly, as in the case of a done deal:

Me (7:31 am): Don’t go by boat today. Bad weather coming. Too dangerous. Please let me know that you are safe now.
She (3:35 pm): We are finished with that village. We will go back to town now.

The problem gets trickier when fed by the risk of that most delicate of this continent’s threats: face loss. Sometimes people here deliberately derail two-way communication when they fear they will suffer a disgrace. I suspect that’s what was going on in this exchange:

Me (8:15am): Please let me know if u can get rate info. If not, just tell me u can’t. No pressure. Better than letting me guess. Please phone soon.
He (10:57 am): Sorry I’m late for information because of one funeral of my relative.
He (10:58 am): I will send that information right now.
He (10:59 am): Now I could not contact them, please wait.
Me (1:19 pm): What time can I call u?
Me (4:08 pm): Are you still there?
He (4:09 pm): Sure.
Me (4:10 pm): What news about rate information?
Me (4:35 pm): Can u help me?
He (4:37 pm): I’m waiting. For u.

My mistake. The more I persisted, the more desperate this guy’s attempts to fog the situation became.

In between the text messages, he also avoided answering his phone. When I tried to use a go-between, he dodged her too. In the end, cornered, he claimed he had been waiting for more information from me before he could proceed.

I should have known from the beginning that face loss was behind his foot-dragging. Early on, I should have tried another source or given up on getting that rate. Even though I was getting pressure from above, you would think I had been here long enough to see that one coming….

Such a Deal

The magicians at the photocopy shop here crank out new business cards in less than a day. Usually a box of 50 (4,000 kyat, or around three dollars) lasts me long enough to decide that I want to tinker with the wording. This time I decide nothing needs changing—just a refill.

I return the next day to pick them up. The owner hands me a box he says contains 108 cards. Is he playing around with me? I know that number often shows up in Buddhism and other spiritual contexts around the planet. There's also something astronomical—the distance from the Earth to the Sun, or energy lines, or whoknowswhat. But I was very clear about only needing 50. I ask him how much I owe.

"8,000 kyat."

He can see I’m a little annoyed about paying double what I expected.  

“Eight cards for free!” he smiles. What a great country.

Is Myanmar Poor?

You decide.

• Most daily incomes are less than the cost of a latte in the West
• Few people are hungry
• Huge natural resources wealth ends up in very few pockets
• Only about one-third of the population is connected to the electricity grid
• Two-thirds work in agriculture
• Good statistics about the economy are rare, partly due to the huge influence of smuggling and drug-related earnings
• Foreign aid pours in

On Heat in Asia, after Several Days in a Row of Temperatures above 40 Degrees Celsius

"Fish manage better; fish, as the tanks dry, wriggle into the mud and wait for the rains to uncake them. But men try to be harmonious all the year round, and the results are occasionally disastrous."

~ EM Forster, A Passage to India

After Eight Days Away

On returning to burgeoning Yangon, the first thing you notice isn’t the city’s attractive sides, of which there are many. Rather you see the clutter, the thread bareness, the cobbled-together nature of life in SE Asia’s once-bad-boy brother.

Here is the smiling though smudged pair of children, scurrying along the corrugated iron fence that hides a construction site. At first they seem bound for a secret entrance, nimbly skipping over ditches that only the experienced would know to look out for. On reaching the comparative seclusion of a droopy-limbed tree, they slow. Will they suddenly drop into the rabbit hole that allows them access to the other side? Is another pair, hiding and counting slowly somewhere just out of sight, about to begin the seek phase of the game?

No, these kids have reached the peeing place. Not an especially private choice of toilets, alas, but perhaps the easiest spot to get the job done quickly so the day can move forward. Mom and older sister have to hold it in until after dark before they can venture out on a similar errand, but nobody pays particular notice to these two, being just the latest in a long line of village children whose families have brought countryside customs to the big city. They’re not too recent—brother knows enough to stand watch while sister squats. Then he turns and splatters the fence before they skibble off.

Now comes the old-style loudspeaker, shaped like an ear trumpet, pushed and pulled through the street market by white-shirted men broadcasting a virtuous Buddhist message. Inevitably this procession ends with a donation—small change, usually, but every little bit helps. These things add up.

Around the corner is parked the most recent string of vehicles imported from Japan, windshields still marked in grease pencil with shipping numbers or destination identifiers of one kind or another. These cars and SUVs will be scrubbed and spruced at one of the many auto detailing establishments along this thoroughfare. The owners’ instructions will specify that while everything else must emerge spotless, the windshield markings are not to be messed with—the better to indicate the car’s vintage to jealous admirers in the neighborhood.

Now finally you’re almost home. Grandma holds court on her usual corner with this morning’s cheroot cheerfully lit. A bus coughs. The rummager-recyclers make their way back to wherever.

Ah, Yangon. Welcome back.

Lottery Day

It’s fun to be ignored here in my mother-in-law’s village. Most times I visit, Mom talks to me nearly non-stop. Today there’s a queue of people waiting to talk to her about their lottery numbers.

This scene gets re-created on the 1st and 16th of every month. The foot traffic increases steadily all morning until just before 1pm, when the betting officially ends and all purchased tickets get sent to some neutral site to await the televised drawing at 3pm. One time I walked in from the train station just as the frenzy was peaking. Mom didn’t even notice I had arrived for several minutes.

Another time, when I knew lottery day was coming up, I had the presence of mind to pick up one of the many titles published around the New Year that claim to have an inside track on lottery rhythms for the coming 12 months. Normally she accepts my gifts with a thank you before putting them down on the kitchen table and changing the subject. In this case the book hardly left her side throughout my visit. She proudly showed it to neighbors (though didn’t offer to loan it, I noticed), saying, “John knows what I like.”

How could I not know? This is a woman, after all, who has subscribed to the same daily paper for two decades, ever since her son was hired to write for it. Yet on last day of each month, and on the 15th, she also takes a competing paper, because she prefers its column about how to pick winning numbers. The delivery person doesn’t have to ask—she just forks over both broadsheets on those two days. How cool to watch life in a place where everyone knows everyone’s routines.

Tea Time

Soe Soe phones to say that she and a Western tourist from her guest house want to meet me for tea. She describes a small stand tucked in the corner of an old market near my place. Business has been a little slow for the owner, Soe Soe hints. The tea is made the classic way, she says. "Less sweet. You will never find 'no sweet,' but here you can at least request 'less' sweet."

We meet up and I see that it really is a small stand. There are only three stools, including the one used by the aging proprietor. He insists on giving up his stool so all three of us can sit. He serves me and the tourist. Soe Soe doesn't order anything for herself. I protest, pointing out that it's weird to invite but not to join. "He only has two nice cups," she explains. Once again Myanmar changes the picture in my head of how things are supposed to be.