Details

At a temple during a late night walk through Laputta with friends Binay and Sai "Baba"

On my last day in Laputta, most of the office stopped what they were doing and attended the funeral of a project officer called Mya Zaw Oo; he was a thirty-nine year old father and a devoted husband. He had worked with Merlin for less than 4 weeks.

Almost every day in the office I had heard a cart being pulled along the road, with a bell ringing and a man speaking words I could not understand through a speaker. When I heard it that day my colleague U Zaw explained to me he was reading out the details of the recently departed, in this case for Mya Zaw Oo.

Thirty-nine years old. Father. Worked for Merlin. Died on Sunday morning at 2:20 in the Pathein hospital. Heart attack. Funeral today at 11:00.

Later on that day I joined a procession through the streets of Laputta. There were hundreds of people joining a crowd that twisted through the streets; colleagues, neighbours, friends, well-wishers. Some people were walking beneath umbrellas, some were on motorbikes, some (like me) were on trucks. The man next to me explained how this was a normal response – people in Laputta give a huge amount of respect and time to the departed and their families, at least during the first few days.

The entire procession walked out of town to visit the home of Mya Zaw Oo's wife, which for me was my second time in three days. We all met with his wife, who bravely held back the tears and hugged her young baby daughter. The family even gave each visitor a bottle of water and some shampoo. I wasn't clear on the reason for the shampoo, but I imagine it was something to do with cleansing oneself after the funeral. As we left the house to follow the body, which was encased in a wooden box within a rich glass case, I stood not far from his wife who looked up at her husband and fell into quiet tears. His body had rested outside their home for two nights and now it was finally ready to move on to its end point.

The funeral struck me as being not unlike a church service, there being a religious focal point talking and leading the service, with the occasional mass reply of religious words in perfect familiar union. It lasted only forty-five minutes and then Mya Zaw Oo made his last trip, just a few minutes away, to be cremated.

We went back to the office, back to work. There was little expression of emotion anymore, and the mourning time was over. Four days ago he had been in the same office, introducing himself to the team at his first meeting. He had complained that day to a colleague of chest pains, but he had dismissed them. The day after that he was vomiting and it was only just before 2 on Sunday morning that he reached the hospital, too late to fend off what should not have been inevitable for a thirty-nine year old man.

I returned to Yangon and tidied up my things. The end of my 6 months had come to abrupt halt and I quietly thanked the team and made my last few walks into town, introducing some new staff to a few of my favoured coffee shops and reasonably clean restaurants, the sort of things I found necessary to stay sane for an extended period away from the UK.

And was it worth it? I had a lucky opportunity to be away in a very exciting country and to explore a part of the world I hadn't visited before. I learnt a good deal of things and I have met some fine individuals. But I had two other responses to the whole trip I hadn't expected: I experienced neither a feeling of success, nor of accomplishment, nor of having added value; and I realised the best experiences were the brief times I had with my family and friends. On the former issue, I am reliably informed this is a normal response in humanitarian work. There is generally no reward and no glamour attached to sitting in an office, speaking in acronyms, and making sure you remembered your first aid kit for the car. And on the latter issue; well, I think I should have known that before.

So I returned home, grateful to be able to do just that.

At the local tea shop, called Forever

Empty streets at 9:00pm

Wearing less than appropriate footwear on an early morning walk with Binay, Zaw Win and Asok

Near the expat house

Sunday lunch, food looks great.

Stopping off at a tea shop on a lake, somewhere along the road to Yangon

Moralising

In my life I've raised my voice a few times; it turns out I'm quite capable of venomous words when the situation calls for it. One such time was in Dar es Salaam during when Becky and I had to collect a visa. We queued for hours and reached the end of the line.

“No, sorry, you need to go in the other line,” said the man.

I felt my temperature rising, and not just because there was no air conditioning. My hands screwed into tense fists. “Fine,” we said. “But why didn't anyone tell us anything?”

Another hour or so later and we reach the end of the next line. “We don't take shilling, only dollars.”

“What? Why? Nobody's said anything – that man over there didn't tell us, and he saw our money?”

“Look, just come back tomorrow, it's okay.”

“No, we can’t do that, the visa runs out tomorrow, we have to come back today!”

A short while later we return with dollars, queue up again, and with only one more person in front of us we see the cover get pulled down. “I'm sorry we're closing,” said the lady.

Cue lots of shouting and demanding to see the manager, like good expats do. Culturally, we Brits don't often cede to authority, or to someone saying you can't do something. We always like to argue and say “why”? Usually if such behaviour is necessary, it's good practice to think first and share one's grievance with care and sensitivity (which I didn't necessarily display that day). I'm not particularly proud of it, but we got what we wanted and our visas were extended, even if we suffered the appalled gaze of the locals.

Here in Myanmar displaying anger or any emotional response is looked down upon. One should always take no for answer if given from someone with more authority than you. Don't shout, don't cry, try not to laugh too much, and – above all – do not get angry. It makes for a veneer of very peaceful people, which is comforting and nice. If someone from Myanmar doesn't like an idea you have, they won't say anything and instead will just keep quiet. And smile. That sometimes works for me because, if you listen closely enough, silence can speak for itself.

But sometimes those cultures clash. We had a meeting a few days ago and discussed the need for more mobile phones, because some people are working in areas so remote there are no phones and no way to communicate with the outside world at all, except using newly installed mobile phone masts. They are incommunicado, on the dark side of the moon.

“Let's get them mobile phones,” I suggested.

“No we can't,” said the local staff (all of them, and very politely too) “the Department of Health [from whom you need permission] won't let us.”

“Have you told them how important it is we have them?”

“No,” said one, “we heard from someone else that we can't get phones.”

“Who?”

“Someone from another organisation.”

“So not the department of health?”

“No.”

“So, let's chase them. Push them for it.”

Silence.

Two days later I checked the actions and it was not there. I asked why not, and I was told the same answers about the department of health, so I put it back on the actions to do anyway.

Myanmar has an authoritarian culture, where you do as the big players say. You always follow orders from superiors, and you never question things. I read Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers recently, in which he described the crash of Korean Air flight 801 in 1997. In that case, 228 people died because the first officer and flight engineer of the flight both feared contradicting the pilot and telling him his course of action was wrong. Culturally, in Korea too, you simply don't contradict or challenge a superior.

We obviously didn't witness anything quite so tragic in our small office, but I did recognise the similar, root difficulty – my suggestions must have seemed too challenging for them, and perhaps even rude. Maybe it was. But I thought it a shame there is a fear to approach the department of health when people's safety is at risk in remote villages, just as the first officer did not say anything to the captain, even when more than 200 lives were at risk, including his own. Sometimes silence is a good cultural – and personal – trait, sometimes it’s not. We can learn from each other.

Soon after the meeting, I got a welcome and reassuring email from a colleague with a fitting thought for the day. It made me think about the one time silence is inexcusable. It read:

‘If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor’ – Desmond Tutu.

Holiday

Becky came to join me in July for a Burmese holiday, and it involved sewing, giving presentations, and getting rashes.

She arrived at the airport on a Friday morning and I was obviously pleased to see her; 5 years of marriage and we’d not had a week apart until I took this trip. We stayed initially at a hotel with wooden floors in the bathroom (note to all hoteliers – please avoid doing this, it attracts eye-melting smells). We visited the usual tourist areas of Yangon, the pagodas, the city centre and the restaurants.

Shwe Dagon Pagoda

Our plan was always to get to the beach though, to do some serious nothing. In our time together, we've only had one holiday, which was our honeymoon in the Peak District in the middle of January (a tad cold). We also had a good trip to Spain, but that was with her parents so technically it doesn't count. And I don't count Zanzibar because: a) we had no money; b) we were with friends; c) we stayed for 2 days before discovering we'd been burgled in our home in Dar es Salaam.

This was going to be a proper holiday. We had 3 choices of beach: Chaung Tha, which is the oldest of the tourist beaches and very popular with local people; Ngwe Saung, which is affordable and relatively easy to access; and Ngapoli, which can only be reached by plane. We chose Ngwe Saung because we could get there by a single coach, and we had found a hotel called Emerald Sea Resort that had a bungalow on the beach for a discount price.

Ngwe Saung Beach Bungalow

We were very fortunate, actually, because no one else was there. Most of the restaurants and the resorts were shut. At the Emerald, the staff ran around solely for us; the rainy season does not attract tourists. A waiter even taught us some origami. As we had hoped, the bungalow had a stunning view of the sea at sunset too, if the clouds were ever kind enough to give us a peek.

Sunset with Bextra

And there was a family of cows on the beach.

After travelling back on a hot coach and discovering new heat rashes, our next stop was the Baha'i Centre of Yangon to attend the Martyrdom of the Bab celebration on 9^th July. We had visited the Baha'i Centre the week before and had been taken aback by their kindness and hospitality. They arranged for us a visit to a village about 2 hours west of Yangon that now claims a population of Baha'is numbering many thousands, more than 90% of the total population. We jumped in a small car with our guide, pelted along the new roads into the depths of the Delta and arrived at Daidanaw by midday. We were invited into the village's large meeting hall, which was built in a compound that also housed the village primary school and the shrine of Siyyid Mustafa Roumi, whose remains are now buried at the same spot he was murdered in 1942. Next door to the centre was a home for the village elderly.

After a short meal prepared especially for us, we saw a large crowd gathering in the hall and we were invited to meet them and join them in a Q&A session. The Daidanaw Baha'is don't get the chance to meet outsiders often – not only has their country been isolated from the world for so long, but as villagers with little economic resources, they are isolated themselves. Even with forty people there just for us, they apologized sincerely that there were not more.

“It is the harvest season,” said one, “everyone is working.”

Daidanaw Baha'is

It was nice to learn that some of the community there had visited Haifa, Israel in 2011, as part of the first wave of Burmese Baha'is to visit the Holy Land. They had saved money for many years or else had been supported by their local community to go. And by some stroke of luck, Becky and I had been on the very same pilgrimage that year and had already met them, not knowing we would meet them again at their homes 2 years later.

The story of the Baha'i faith in Daidanaw is in parts illuminating and tragic – several Baha'is were killed there in 1945 – including Mustafa Roumi – and hundreds of properties burned to the ground and looted by a large mob, because the village was seen as being influenced by foreigners. In 2008, it was also hit by Cyclone Nargis. The village today remains resolute and unique in both Myanmar and the world; it's not every day you can walk down a street in which almost everyone – the shopkeeper, the taxi driver, the gardener – is a Baha'i.

After thanking the Baha'is both in Daidanaw and in Yangon for their time and their sacrifices, we could see the end of the holiday rear its head, and feel the approaching panic of returning to work. The final few days are a blur – Becky managed to pull down a mosquito net by mistake and we spent hours looking for a sewing kit to fix it. I also fell sick the day before Becky left, so that the last time she saw me at the airport I was hunched-over and pale.

And now that we're both back at work – and healthy – there are just over 30 Burmese days to go…

Reading

Here’s a sobering thought. I've now written 14 blog items for (184) Burmese Days over 5 months, and most blogs out there fail to live beyond 6 months; a statistic I'll reinforce because I inadvertently put the length of time into its name.

During those 5 months I have wondered what the demographic of readers might be, or how many people might have read it. That's fun to do, and I can see some statistics, but what has just struck me is how many people couldn't have read it, even if they wanted to.

In the entire world, the number of people with access to the internet is roughly 2.5 billion, leaving more than 4.5 billion people without access, the majority of whom are illiterate women. That’s already a lot of people I've missed out. I appear to be shooting for the rich, educated, male demographic of the world's population, a desperately small and unfair proportion.

Of those who are educated, not everyone speaks English. But, assuming my English writing can be translated to any language via the magic of Her Googleness I don’t have to worry about that number and I can focus instead on the small number of people who have a level of education that stretches beyond 12 years of schooling (i.e. if you started school at 5, then you left school at least aged 17). Without trawling the web for stats, I think we can safely say it isn't very many people at all.

Why 12 years' schooling? Because that's apparently how many years' education you need to understand my blog on the first read without throwing your phone/tablet/laptop/PC out the window, onto the head of a passing pony. I arrived at this figure using the FOG index, which calculates the number of big, bad words you use against the length of your sentences and the banality of your tone. Not really the last one.

This is 6 years more than your average comic book, 4 years more than gossip magazines, and 2 years more than Time magazine. If you haven’t killed any ponies yet then I’d guess you were a bright so and so, and quite above those sniveling Time magaziners. Either that or my calculations are wrong.

This puts it firmly in the “professional business writing” category, which wasn't my intention, and you would rightly scoff at the suggestion. Not many business writers go on about killing ponies.

To reach everyone else, my only option is to walk the streets of the world and shout stuff at everyone, like your local bearded man who you thought was crazy. But now you've got a reason to listen; he’s just trying to maximise his audience. He’s only missing the deaf, the agoraphobic, the infirm elderly, the babies, those who speak different languages, those who ignore him, and those who are at home on the internet reading blogs about Myanmar. And ponies.

Merger

When two objects collide, they ostensibly carry energy with them, whether that’s of the static or kinetic kind, which can be released in different forms. Or something like that, it’s not like I took a great deal of notice in physics lessons; when I was fourteen I was too busy swinging Bowser by the tail. The point is a collision is usually followed with a loud and satisfying BANG. Like running onto a motorway and falling over twice, or accidentally setting yourself on fire with petrol, both of which I’ve proudly done.

Last week, two objects collided. Those objects were Merlin, who I work for, and Save The Children, who I don’t work for (I think). Merlin, a health expert, has been asking financial questions of itself for a couple of years now, because its main source of income is institutional and it has fairly limited flexibility. Save The Children has lots of flexibility but not so much health expertise. So gravity has brought them together and they have collided. Or merged, however you define it.

The outcome of this has been…okay, something of a whimper. But the trembling has definitely begun. On 16^th July, when the news came through that Merlin was merging with Save The Children, at the mutual benefit of both organisations, there was a slight shrug of shoulders from lots of people, including me. That’s fine, we thought, we like Save The Children, and the merger won’t happen for a while.

But of course we also know that a “merger” is a polite form of saying “one of you is the chicken, one of you is the fox. Now FIGHT!” Torn feathers and broken bones will be cast off. And then people will start to lose jobs and there will be tears and people looking for work and questions and goodbyes. And there will be a fox (read: organisation) licking its lips. The ground will be full of splattered blood and a farmer will run out holding a folded shotgun over his arm shouting “ar dang it”, and after all that only a few bits of chicken will be eaten, and only the juicy bits too.

Now I don’t know if I’m a juicy bit or not, I can only hope I finish my contract and find myself with something to move on to, wherever that might be. And I don’t blame the fox. It’s the fox’s nature to be foxy. I just never expected this sort of thing when I was fourteen.

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The news of the merger came the day after my birthday, which was spent on a plane being evacuated from Myanmar to Thailand. Evacuation sounds like a strong term, but it was only because hospitals in Myanmar are not yet up to international standards, whereas the Bangkok hospitals are genuinely world class, if a little like walking into a ministry building in Brazil (the film, not the country).

I had come down with a brief sickness in Yangon, after which I visited a GP and discovered I probably had an infection. A few other things about my heart came up too – nothing serious – which were cause for further investigation. Consequently, I spent my thirty-first alone, thirty-thousand feet in the air and heading for a city that bears more resemblance to Gotham City than real-life.

Everything turned out fine, as I expected, although I didn’t see Batman and the insurance company were keen to keep me there for nearly a week, living in a hotel room which had walls no thicker than skin and a waiter who questioned why I was alone every night in a city where being alone is not, um, all that normal. Needless to say, I wasn’t alone because thankfully the Baha’is of the world once again came to the rescue and I met with some friends who lived nearby in a great flat full of smiles.

Now back in Yangon, I wait with baited breath to see if I can return to Laputta or not…or if my time is up already. At least my birthday wasn’t at work; culturally, I’d have been expected to buy everyone else in the office a present. And this news of a merger gave them one anyway.

Laputta

View from a boat coming into shore (Merlin office visible centre-right)

Laputta is a small town, with 3 parallel roads and a market. At each end of the main road there are two Buddhist pagodas and a series of tea shops, with chairs so small and low when I squat down on them my knees touch my chin. There are no roads as such, just a few stones and an opportunity for the rain to make puddles so large you have to wade through up to your knees in the morning.

The office is beside the river, where all the boats are ready to travel to the many villages in the delta. Some of the villages are a 6 hour boat journey away, so you can imagine how remote they are and how difficult it is for them to access trade or healthcare. My desk overlooks the river, which means that I’ve upgraded seriously my office position from being behind a pillar. The river actually has a tide, so I wonder if it’s technically the sea, which would make it the Bay of Bengal, which in turn means that I have a desk overlooking the Bay of Bengal, which sounds a lot more romantic than it is.

If it’s raining, there's nothing to do in the town. If it’s not raining, there’s still nothing to do. But the local staff make the best of a quiet town by getting together and cooking, singing or watching films. Food choice is limited to rice and tofu, rice and chicken bones, rice and pig bones, oily noodles, rice on its own, rice and some green things, rice and crab shell, or there is a single shop which sells paratha. I’ve eaten a lot of noodles, and below is a picture of the sort of thing I have to eat. These noodles were kept in a bag in a fridge, the fat condensing on the bottom to emerge as what can only be described as a brain. The actual human brain wasn’t designed except by the chance outcomes of natural selection, but if it had been we now know that the designer was inspired by some frozen old noodles in a plastic bag. That’s a useful insight to have made 5000 miles from home.

Chilled monkey brain (aka chicken noodles)

On the weekends, the staff members (many of whom are from different parts of Myanmar) get together and cook the same sorts of food and eat with their fingers. I’ve not seen anyone yet who can eat rice with their fingers because it falls through the gaps in their hands and they have to scoop it up and throw it into their faces. That doesn’t stop me getting ridiculed for using a fork. Sometimes we play board games, and so far I’ve lost every single game of Pictionary and Scrabble I’ve played. Having said that, I may be the only person playing Insecure Scrabble.

Freudian slip?

The bathroom of our house is also the kitchen. I know that doesn’t make much sense, but it’s normal here. The shower and toilet are right beside the cooker, so during day-long cooking sessions for all the staff (every Sunday) one must also be very adept at not needing the toilet. And going for a shower means emerging half-naked to a table full of smiling faces. I don’t know if that’s a positive thing or not.

At night, when the kitchen is eventually free, there is still no peace. The frogs are out and loud, the mosquitos are biting any exposed flesh, and the lizards are running around every surface they can find. Occasionally a mouse might run through the kitchen in a blind panic, and I’ve been warned about rats coming through the toilet. Most mornings we have to wake up to a kitchen and lounge with strange poo pellets dropped across the tables and chairs, and I don’t know if these are from mice or from super-sized cockroaches. It’s not pleasant either way.

And still I’m aware this is nothing. I’m living in comparative luxury to many of my colleagues. “It’s like being in New York,” said one visiting staff member, so I hope I don’t sound like I’m complaining. Laputta is a special little town; it’s peaceful, happy, content and calm, which makes it one of the nicest places I’ve had the pleasure of staying. Fingers crossed the country opens up enough to let tourists come down and take tours along the river. Until then, I’m more than happy eating noodle brains.

Acronyms

Yet again this blog piece is nothing much to do with Myanmar; my apologies, I can’t seem to bring Myanmar to light except through my own head filter.

So today, as I’ve probably mentioned before, I need to talk about acronyms. They’re supposed to be beneficial and make life easier for people but recently, as I sit here trying to do a job in a remote town with few links to the outside world, I can’t see how they do anything more than breed confusion. And they do breed. During one of my first jobs, as an order picker at a clothes factory in Rutland, England, we discussed shortening the word ‘warehouse’, because we used it so often.

Let’s just call it the ‘ware’, someone suggested.

Or the ‘house’

We should just call it the ‘W’

’W’ has 3 syllables in it, I said. Warehouse only has 2; it’s easier to just call it ‘warehouse’

Oh yeah

The suggestions of either ‘ware’ or ‘house’ were preferable in the context of the discussion, but only to save one lonely syllable. Generally, word or term shortening is pointless. The letter ‘W’ should (almost) never be in an acronym; if it is hidden in an acronym, it’s probably wasting time. It’s the equivalent of a late substitution in a football game. Only the WI can barely get away with it, because ‘institute’ is such an annoying word. I suppose it would be technically simpler to call it the ‘Women’s I’, but that doesn’t come across very well. Nobody wants to hear you discuss women’s ‘i’s.

WHO is another. That’s double ‘u’, aich, oh. It’s a 5 syllable brain teaser to say three letters. We’re all better off calling it the World Health O, and then we can all save ourselves 2 syllables each time. Over a lifetime that’s probably enough syllables saved to feed a starving family for a year. A syllable saved is a syllable earned. Imagine all the times you’ve said ‘www’ and didn’t save time by saying ‘world wide web’ instead. Even George Bush cut it down by a third.

Acronyms are not needed for single syllable words and are only required for multiple syllable words at a push. Yesterday, I was looking for the meaning of the acronym ‘PSF’ in the context of sanitation activities Merlin recently finished, so I googled it and discovered more than 20 alternative interpretations. These included: Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, Prolate Spheroidal wave Functions, Palestinian Popular Struggle Front, and Price per Square Foot. It took me more than 15 minutes to eventually find what I was after (we have very slow internet here), but somebody could have just saved me all that time-wasting by writing down ‘Pond Sand Filter’. It was a 4 syllable term, which had been conveniently shortened to a 3 syllable term.

I can understand their use in text-speak, because text messages take a while to write out and they are, in most cases, widely known, such as LOL and LMAO. LOL has even become a single-syllable word in itself and has yet retained its meaning, which I like. That’s language evolving and being useful. If people in the aid world called the WHO the ‘hoo’ it would be both funny and useful, but they don’t; they make it, literally, 5 times more difficult to say.

And as a favour to you all, I’m going to acronymise (new word?) that last sentence - IPITAWCTWTHIWBBFAUBTDTMILFTMDTS. Look that up on google.