Flying Out

My folding umbrella is broken from use, but I pack it anyway, with a silk longyi, which I may never wear, and a couple of hand-carved Buddha statues. So many questions unanswered. How much has the country really changed? Is there hope for democracy in Burma/Myanmar?

Flying out through Bangkok and Beijing brings perspective. Both airports are a shock, their endless designer shops, Prada and Louis Vuitton, compared to the two-dollar earrings at tables in the Yangon airport, where you walk outside and up metal steps to get on the planes. Twenty years ago, I spent two months each traveling in Thailand and China, but now these mega-airport malls, passengers with overloaded luggage carts, are unrecognizable.

The Burmese, the rich ones privileged enough to travel, must see this contrast.  Myanmar is comparable to Thailand, in land area, culture, and population, yet the countries are night and day different. Over a million Burmese immigrant workers see this too, as they ride the Bangkok sky train, or pass beach resorts on their way to work in the fields and on fishing boats. Fourteen million tourists there, versus 300,000 a year in Myanmar, a number which has gone down in recent years since the last round of protests and Cyclone Nargis.

Photo: Geoffrey Hiller

China is a fair comparison too, since it is communist and was once just as isolated as Myanmar was during the ‘Burmese Way to Socialism’ years. When we visited China in 1987, westerners were such an oddity that ‘staring squads’ of Mao-jacketed adults followed us around, even in major cities. We faced the same strict regulations as we did that same year in Burma, forced to stay in certain hotels and use special foreign exchange currency.

During my one-day layover in Beijing, I take the train and subway- with English maps and audio, high-tech ticket machines- and am dumbfounded. No pushing, no bicycles, no spitting, armies of young people wearing Abercrombie-knock-offs, though the same gray haze of pollution. Granted it must be different in rural areas, and this is after the building spree for the Olympics, but still, French baguettes, and Haagen-Dazs ice cream for $5?

Somehow, Myanmar got left in the dust. This backwardness is in no way romantic, especially when the poverty is due to willful political repression. Ignoring US and European trade sanctions, Asian countries are doing business with Myanmar, importing raw materials, exporting machines and technology. And programmers- the Russians, along with the Chinese, are helping the government keep tight control of the internet. Even officials’ computer networks are censored, so they cannot read this either.

But it’s a finger in the dike. The Burmese will slowly but surely enter the world. The question is, who- only the generals and their business cronies? One minister’s grandson recently convinced him to unblock Facebook, and it has quickly become the most popular destination on the web. Yet the internet is used by only one percent of the population, limited to those who can afford the price in an internet café. Everybody else is biding their time.

Photo: Geoffrey Hiller

August 14- As I finish this final post, Aung San Suu Kyi has just made her first political trip out of Yangon since 2003, to Bago. So far without incident, despite veiled threats by the government. Only 50 miles, but this is huge. I imagine the thousands of bystanders along that highway. The real test is whether this visit to speak in public to her supporters will be reported, with a photo. No airbrushing.

Gems and Syringes

Ready to leave Myanmar, we decide to look for souvenirs at Bogyoke Market, the airy emporium where tourists can buy crafts from all over the country. Stalls and shops here offer gold jewelry, jade, cedar wood carvings, lacquerware, fancy longyis, and colorful oil paintings of rural scenes. Few customers are here, but these established sellers are reluctant to lower their high prices, they just shrug and let us walk off. In the cave-like food hall, on the other hand, women desperately shout to attract our attention, competing for us to sit down at the one table they each own.

We escape out to the back alley, which is packed with clusters of men with calculators and wads of cash, and well-dressed women sitting on the curb with their purses. A thin man wearing a polo shirt and a gold watch leans on a parked car, taking in the scene. “Can I help you?” he asks. Everyone else ignores us, intent on their business.

Photo: Geoffery Hiller

It turns out they are buying and selling stones, rubies and emeralds and jade, at what seems to be an informal gem exchange, in contrast to the official stores near the gem museum. “I’m done for the day,” says the man, who is eager to chat. He is from Mogok in the north, a town known for its rubies and jade, and his parents are originally Nepalese. He tells us he had a profitable day, sold eleven small rubies and earned 5,000K, or $6 (more than double the average per capita income).

“It’s a good enough life here, I’m able to feed my family. Burma is relaxed, and not so poor as Nepal.” He has visited there once. His kids are grown up, his son an air-conditioning installer, his daughter a waitress in Singapore, so he doesn’t have to worry. His only regret is that he would like to travel out of the country but can’t get a visa. We say good-bye, and I calculate, from the prices at the glass jewelry cases inside for tourists, that his rubies will end up selling for 10-100 times what he got for them.

Photo: Geoffrey Hiller

We cross the street to another covered market, with pots and pans and rice cookers, but then boxes and boxes of medications stacked up high. A variety of medical equipment is for sale, bandages, syringes and speculums, crutches, and even one wheelchair (we have a friend who brought one on the airplane for a disabled Burmese friend). As in many poor countries, patients have to bring their own supplies to the hospital.

Last week we talked to an American teacher, whose wife got pregnant in Myanmar with their first child. She was set to fly out to Bangkok for the delivery, but the baby came early. So they had to go to a hospital in Yangon. “It was just a shell,” the teacher told us, “empty.” Fortunately, they have a healthy baby girl now. Looking through this ‘medical market’ I think how Myanmar’s health system is considered one of the worst in the world, partly because the medical schools have been closed down for years at a time, like the universities. Also because the military receives the lion’s share of the budget. Many Burmese doctors practice abroad.

“If you get sick in this country,” the tour book advises, “fly out immediately.”

A Student in the Park

I am strolling through Happy World, dismayed by the brackish green water of the pond where paddleboats are for hire, with Donald Duck heads. Quite a contrast after our trip to Inle Lake. No jungle noises here, only crows. No tourists, hardly any locals either, except a group of young monks going into a video game pavilion. All the parks in Yangon charge an entrance fee, and most Burmese don’t have the money.

I pass some huts where maintenance workers are sitting idle, and stop to take a picture of a gazebo, with a view of golden Shwedagon in the background. A young man in green longyi and crisp white shirt appears beside me. “Please,” he says, “can I talk to you?” As if he has something urgent to say. “I need to practice my English.” He’s a university student, nineteen years old, studying economics at Dagon University, at the newer campus built out of town. We end up talking for almost an hour, as the sun rises high and I put up my umbrella.

Photo: Geoffrey Hiller

We’ll call him Tin. He’s lucky to be a student, he says, since the universities have been periodically shut down by the government for years at a time (after protests, from 1988-90, 1996-1999, and after 2007). But, he’d rather attend Yangon University, which is a closer commute to his home. Access is limited there to those with political connections. Some new university campuses have been built, divided by major, which are spread out across the city, but it is difficult for Tin to visit his friend who’s studying computer technology at one place, a two-hour bus ride, or his architect friend at another. He has studied English since first grade in school, but says he didn’t learn to speak it until he started taking classes from the monks, who told him to practice with tourists. His goal is to go to Dubai to work, for the money.

Tin looks over his shoulder. He frowns at a worker rolling some betel nut and we move away- maybe it is to be in the shade?  Suddenly he brings up the subject of Aung San Suu Kyi. He is the first Burmese stranger to do so. “Of course we know who she is, “ he says, after I tell him I’d read the younger generation didn’t know much about The Lady. 

“I have a story about her.” Not too long ago, walking around in the crowds downtown, he had the distinct feeling he was being followed. A couple of men, in plainclothes, it went on for a whole day. Tin had no idea why. Finally, he confronted them in an alley. It turned out to be police.

He asked why they were tailing him, and they pointed to a small medallion around his neck, which was a picture of Suu Kyi. Tin was surprised. “My friend gave it to me. I was just wearing it because I liked it.” The police told him it was illegal. He had no money for a fine, but was not arrested for further questioning. He got off with a warning.

“I have another picture of The Lady at home.” He glances back over his shoulder at the workers. “We all do, hidden away in a drawer.”

Photo: Geoffrey Hiller

In my weeks in Myanmar, I had not seen Aung San Suu Kyi in one image, poster, newspaper photo, or television show, not a sign of her anywhere.

Tin abruptly waves good-bye, after one more blunt question. “The political prisoners, how many are there exactly, about 400?”

“The number is over 2,000,” I tell him, according to both the US government and human rights organizations.

Neither of us knew then, as we were talking, that very day, that Suu Kyi, out of house arrest again since last fall, was meeting with John McCain. The official New Light of Myanmar reported on his visit, and printed a photo of McCain, but only with government leaders. None of the media mentioned the main purpose of his visit, which was to discuss human rights and plead for the release of the political prisoners. Most are not terrorist bombers or ethnic insurgents but pro-democracy activists.

Strangely enough, there was no internet service available in Yangon that day, or the next, during his entire visit.

 

Hill Tribe Market

Our boat glides through a narrow marshy canal, bumping up a bamboo lock, then another, and another, until we arrive at the isolated village of Inthein. We hired Mo Mo to take us to the five-day market, which rotates between different locations, this one most frequented by tribal people from the isolated hills.

As a note, Myanmar is surrounded by a horseshoe of mountains, where a third of the Burmese population who are not ethnic Bamar live: Shan, Pa-O, Kayin, Kachin, Mon, Chin, Kayah, Rakhaing, and others. For centuries the Bamar kings, like the governing generals now, were at war with these groups, grabbing farmland and moving or destroying their villages, forcing people to do unpaid labor. Lately most groups have signed peace agreements with the government, though flare-ups still occur, especially over planned damn projects.

Photo:Geoffrey Hiller

We dock in a jungle of the thickest bamboo trunks I’ve ever seen, and walk to the market. It is busier than the one yesterday, with a majority of women in black jackets, and men with colorful Shan bags. Vegetables and fruits have been brought in by boat or hauled in on foot, as well as stacks of plate-size tofu crisps, blocks of fresh noodle dough that is cut to order, seasoned with chilis or dried spices, turmeric or curry, and eaten hot or in salad. Besides fresh and dried fish, a single butcher cuts up a side of pork which steams in the chilly morning air.

Kids’ clothes, school uniforms and supplies, shoes, hair stuff, and on one blanket, a pharmacy, where unlike in Yangon, the pills are not sold in their boxes, but just the blister packaging, without instructions- including some birth control pills. Souvenirs like Shan pants, tops, bags, and jewelry are for sale, but no one speaks to us here, where even Burmese is a foreign language.

Photo: Geoffrey Hiller

Women with towels on their heads are sitting on the floor of a restaurant hut with their children, eating noodles and drinking locally grown tea. I am curious about a crowd of men at the edge of the market but as I push through for a look, am sternly told, “no photos”- very unusual. They turn out to be gambling, throwing bills down on pictures of animals as large colorful dice are dropped.

The bike repair hut is busy, next to carts hitched to water buffalo. Plump oxen graze. We mount the steps under a covered walkway, leading up and up, past souvenir tables, mostly closed.  At the top we see an army of stupas: ancient crumbling brick, or white plaster, or newly gilded, dozens, hundreds, it turns out over a thousand…at the top over the trees is a splendid view of the valley.

We climb back down along a path of red earth, incessant insect sounds, and people are trudging home laden with their baskets, disappearing into the trees.

Inle Lake

Mo Mo revs up the motor of his long wooden boat, throws us some life jackets and umbrellas, and we set off up the canal, through marshes, on to the lake for a day of sight-seeing. The sun has just risen, but we pass many identical boats, piled with baskets and motorcycles and a dozen people each, going between markets in the various villages.

The water becomes choppy, the mountains blue in the distance. Sure enough, the famous Intha fishermen, paddling long oars with their feet, are throwing out their circular nets, such a stock photo I wonder if they’re planted there. Some Burmese tourists wave and snap our picture.

Photo: Geoffrey Hiller

We navigate through villages of houses built on stilts, where women are washing clothes on platforms. Then we dock on solid land at Phaung Daw Oo Paya, a holy shrine for the Shan. On an altar inside, is an unusual sight of men layering gold leaf onto what look like four chunks of gold. They turn out to be Buddha statues. A sign reads ‘Ladies prohibited’.

Outside, a market is going on, food and household goods, with some hill tribe women in black trousers, army boots, and bright-colored cloth wound around their heads, babies slung on their backs. I am accosted by others, souvenir sellers, speaking better English than I’ve heard anywhere, “You just looking, ok,” “Name price any price”… I’m interested in what’s on their tables, jewelry, carved animals, Shan bags, but they are aggressive and the prices are crazy high. I duck into an outhouse. But these women follow me, explaining that if I buy their silver necklaces, they will be able to send their kids to school. School does start next week, and they reduce their prices drastically, so I buy several.

After lunch, we tell Mo Mo that we do not want to see the exploited longneck women, so we visit the weaving and silversmith workshops in other huts over the water. Most impressive are the wooden looms and hand-spinning of lotus fiber, thin as spider web in the stalk, into billowy fabric for scarves, which is much more expensive than the local cotton and silk.

It’s sweltering, even on the water. We pass a quiet hour at an ancient monastery, where boy monks are chanting lessons, and older ones are watching television in a back room. Later we visit the Jumping Cat Monastery, where dozens of cats are napping in the heat. One of them is roused finally, and manages to jump through a hoop before he drops back to sleep. Most remarkable is that the rare Tibetan-style Buddhas have feline faces.

Floating gardens are the last attraction on our ride back, centuries-old, the original hydroponics, squash and tomatoes staked up on matted vegetation. Back in town large billboards in both Burmese and English advise “Reduce the use of chemicals and fertilizers to preserve the environment!” That and motorboat pollution is apparently damaging this beautiful lake.

Road to Nyaungshwe

The flight to Inle Lake in the north takes a little over an hour, saving us a 20-hour overnight bus ride from Yangon.  The airport at Heho is in the middle of nowhere. A sign warns against drug, and human, trafficking, but no one is around, either to offend or enforce. A few other passengers get off the plane, and we share a ride in a luxurious taxi with some other Americans, a diplomat on a short holiday with her mother. The AC even works but it’s cooler here so we don’t need it. It will take an hour to get to the town of Nyaungshwe, on a mostly one-lane paved road that passes fields and villages. It’s a game of chicken when we need to pass a truck. Our driver is on the right side, and there are no seatbelts.

We bump onto the shoulder to pass a truck stopped in the other direction. All of us crane our necks around. “Did you see that?” A baby is in the road, crying, on top of his mother’s body. We don’t see anyone else around.

The diplomat talks to the driver in Burmese. Is there a doctor nearby? Or a clinic? No, says the driver. But we sat next to an Italian doctor on the plane, on his way to work in a clinic in Taunggyi. We don’t know if he will come by. We have to go back, we all agree, though none of us knows any CPR. So the driver makes a U-turn. When we reach the truck, the body is gone.

Photo: Geoffrey Hiller

Under a bamboo shelter near the road, a couple of people are talking to a woman holding a baby. She is alive, conscious, hopefully ok. Thank goodness. We will never know if she collapsed on her own, or was hit by the truck, or another vehicle.

We try to relax again as the road winds up into the red hills of southern Shan State in low-growing tropical forest that is home to what we know as giant houseplants, rubber and ficus. Small teak trees have been replanted, which will take years to mature.

We arrive safely at the Amazing Hotel in Nyaungshwe. In this dusty town full of tractors with their exposed engines, the hotel lies along a canal, redesigned into a waterfall, with cafe tables on a bridge, and tasteful rooms with balconies. Besides Bagan, it’s the closest thing to a tourist town, with horse carts and internet cafes and backpacker restaurants advertising smoothies and pizza. Despite evidence of many tourists in high season, I count only a handful of foreigners in the town.

Photo: Geoffrey Hiller

We trek along the big canal that leads to the lake, past warehouses with mounds of tomatoes from the lake’s floating gardens, that are packed into crates being nailed together on the spot. Soon we are out in technicolor green rice fields, with butterflies, swarms of dragonflies and a giant sitting Buddha. It gets muggy and as we walk back into town we hear the sound of buzz saws, cutting through wood- for all those crates?

Later, after a fierce monsoon downpour, walking along the edge of town in the dark, the sawing noise is louder than ever. Then we realize, it is not machinery. Like nothing we’ve heard before, insects, cicadas, and frogs. The Burmese night.

77 Boys and One Girl

An irrepressible musician friend, Maung, volunteers to teach after-school classes in several monasteries. He brings us to visit one place where a single monk runs a home for boys from poor villages in the north, so they can attend school in Yangon. He established this home twenty years ago, and depends on donations from as far away as Japan and Korea. The monk welcomes us in with a big smile.

The boys are running around in the courtyard, 77 little boys ages five to ten, chasing chickens and dogs. The government won’t allow older ones to stay there. A couple of young women who speak their tribal languages are supervising the scene. We talk to Maung and the monk for a bit, as the boys come into the main room and squat quietly in rows. Maung speaks to them gently, tells jokes, and leads them in a rhythm clapping game. Then a few of them get up, one by one, to sing us songs in their native hill tribe languages, Kayah and Kayin (Karen), and Kachin. They sing about the mountains, and their mothers. The last boy gives a break-dancing performance, taught to him by a student volunteer.

Photo: Geoffrey Hiller

The sleeping room upstairs contains bare wood platforms with shared blankets. Maung explains how they really need money for a housekeeper because the boys have been getting sick with pink-eye and spreading their infections to each other. Since monks are not allowed to cook, every day they depend on donors to bring in food.

Some of the boys are orphans, but there is no government aid. I ask about NGO’s, but local ones are stretched thin, and few foreign ones are allowed in. What about corporate aid, then, I ask, from the recent gas and oil profits. Maung thinks that’s a great idea, but unheard of in Myanmar. In fact the NLD, Suu Kyi’s party, which is barred from elections, focuses now on social projects such as blood donations and providing funeral services for the poor.

Photo: Geoffrey Hiller

The meal bell sounds, the dogs howl, and we see that some SUV’s have arrived, and well-dressed people are setting up low tables, carrying in enormous vats of noodles. A tiny girl dressed in sparkly pink is sucking her thumb as her father takes her picture. “It’s her birthday today,” he smiles, “She’s turning four!”

This is her birthday party, here with the boys. The family serves us some plates and insists that we sit down and eat. Every little boy gets a bottle of orange juice, most not opened right away, but used as toys to spin around on the tables. Second helpings are offered. Later, a few lucky boys get to feed the leftovers to the dogs. The tables are put away, and then the monk leads the boys in call and response chanting. Everyone, including the family, bows their heads and prays together.

When they leave, it is the family who profusely thanks the monk, and the boys.

If you would like to donate to these boys and receive a beautiful limited edition photographic print of Burma, go to collect.give

500,000 Monks

Everywhere, in the streets, buses, and shops, we see monks dressed in the maroon-colored robes distinctive to Myanmar, alone, in small groups, or in long lines early in the morning with their begging bowls.  A half a million monks (and nuns, who wear pink), children and adults, have taken vows at any one time. This is one percent of the population, the same number as there are soldiers. All Burmese males who are Buddhist must live in a monastery at least twice in their lives, once between ages 10 and 20, for at least a few weeks, and again as an adult, often longer. Some will find a vocation.

Photo: Geoffrey Hiller

Women do not have to do this, but you see more nuns here than in any other country. They give up their possessions and take up an alms bowl, shave their heads and go barefoot. Even if you don’t walk into a monastery, you are reminded every minute of every day of the precepts of the Buddha. A Burmese friend told us this spiritual presence keeps people in line, more than the threat of the police. If a man drinks too much, he is less likely to start a fight, say, or go home and beat his wife if a monk is nearby.

The monks serve as the conscience of the nation. In 2007, fuel prices shot up after the Myanmar government ended subsidies, and people were going hungry. Monks from all over the country took to the streets to lead protests. Sometimes the military goes easier on them, but the movement was so widespread that even monks were beaten, killed, arrested. Hundreds languish in jail from that time.

Photo: Geoffrey Hiller

We end up in at least one monastery or temple every day, unavoidable, since there are 50,000 of them in the country, filled with prayer, meditation, chanting, but also education and social outreach. The monks teach after-school classes, besides English, Korean (they receive donations from Buddhists there), and Pali (the ancient religious language), and math and science, to supplement the school curriculum, which many claim is lacking in rigor.

Morning, noon, and night, people go in and out to pray, every day of the week, not just old people, but families, couples, teenagers. Monastery grounds serve as a refuge from the busy-ness of the city and from the heat in the afternoon. Kids are playing soccer. Stray dogs wander in and out. We feel welcome everywhere.

English Lessons

The school year begins in early June, so we are here for the season of buying copybooks and tiffin lunch carriers and white and green uniforms. This year starts with more optimism than usual. The government has reduced public school fees by two-thirds, so more families can afford to send their kids to school. Sadly, others tell us, it is still too expensive. The Democratic Voice of Burma has been inundated with parent complaints (DVB, like VOA and the BBC, is one of the “killer broadcasts” “sowing hatred among the people” that the official newspaper New Light of Myanmar  warn citizens against daily).

Even during the ‘summer vacation’, which is April and May, I notice academic activities, like a snack seller on a crowded street with her five-year-old who is laboriously copying into a notebook what turns out to be the English alphabet. Amidst the crowds on the ferry jetty, a man is squatting with his daughter over math homework. In the back streets of old town Yangon there are signs all over for Private English or Computer Learning Academies. The Burmese know where their future lies.

Photo: Geoffrey Hiller

Everybody in Myanmar seems to be learning English these days, and many go to the monasteries, where lessons are free. In Bago at the bus station we meet a young man who wants to practice his speaking. I learned only a few phrases of Burmese while I was there, though in the past have always tried to learn the language a bit before a trip. The informal lessons on YouTube were too fast to follow. So, we don’t get much past “How are you?” and “ESPN good” until he takes out both a bi-lingual dictionary, and a Best Questions manual. This makes it easier as we can point to the questions.

Q. Do you want to go abroad? Yes-I’ll paraphrase his answer- to Korea. He is a bus mechanic, and since the buses come from there, he needs to learn more mechanic skills. Plus, he likes the new Korean rock bands.

Q. Do you like naughty girls? He laughs.

Q. Do you tell the truth to your parents? Always (seriously).

Q. Do you encourage depression in your friends? This one is poorly worded, in both languages.

Interesting, in the grammar section, to see the examples of basic verbs, such as I shot her. He killed her. She was raped. In all my years of ESL teaching I never saw these words taught, at least not at the beginning level.  This manual looks like a commercial text, not one published by an NGO or political group. A couple of other people we met were carrying around the same book as well. I sure wish I spoke Burmese.

Love Boat

Tourists tend to pay most attention to the exotic and the poor. The young in Myanmar wear knock-offs of knock-offs from China, and they enjoy hip-hop. Some very rich people are paying very high prices for golf clubs and cosmetics. Condos, offices, and shopping arcades are sprouting up, in the northern part of the city, toward Inya Lake.

The diplomatic district is pleasant to walk in, not too far from the center. On wide quiet lanes, historic villas of various embassies stand next to brand-new mansions, all protected by white walls topped with spirals of silver barbed-wire. Some of the embassies are guarded by bored soldiers in huts surrounded by sandbags, who crack a brief smile and wave their antiquated machine guns. Tea stalls are set up at the street corners where families camp out, selling items like shampoo, chips, copybooks, and offer their services on a sewing machine, or liters of gasoline in liquor bottles. Rickshaw drivers wait to give rides to language students and embassy staff as they come into the neighborhood.

Photo: Geoffrey Hiller

Outside of that oasis, the major avenues are perilous, with the broken up sidewalks, though it’s easy to forget that there’s much less traffic than in Portland, which has a tenth of the population. When we know where a bus is going, we hop on and stand for a few stops. It’s packed but less hassle than a taxi, and way cheaper, fifteen cents instead of two dollars.  We get out at City Mart, a supermarket that smells of fish curry and durian. It’s inside a glacially cold ‘mall’, just a few stores, where our bags are searched and we are patted down by guards (only going in). This is a place for the rich, with ice cream and sushi and expresso shops, though very modest in scale. We need to stick with the cooked food so we go to the Love Boat for noodles.

It’s important to note: there are no foreign franchises, food or retail, no McDonald’s, KFC, Pizza Hut, no Starbuck’s, none whatsoever in Myanmar, unlike elsewhere in Asia. When we were searching out clean places to eat, we did (almost) miss them.

Photo: Geoffrey Hiller

Across the way we go into another mini-mall, are searched at the door again, with thumping music and teenagers swarming over cheap jewelry and hair stuff. Shoppers are riding up and down the elevators but no one goes into the stores selling jeans or tops and dresses, which look cheap, but prices are expensive. Most Burmese just buy yards of fabric at the wholesale Mingala Market and have it sewn into longyis.