2012 Year in Review

Reminders

Over the past ten days, I've reached another set of milestones of life in Phnom Penh.  My “virgin” contract was successfully completed and the document is being printed.  I got a tooth extracted that was ready to fall out anyway.  I enrolled in Khmer lessons and have checked out some gyms.  I’ve created lists, mulled over plans, and analysed my financial situation.  I've rationalized the long dry spells that can sometimes characterize the life of a consultant.  I've done networking of some form every day.  Despite the complexity of my self-directed inner life, there are times when circumstances change in the world around you, which ripples out into other changes, and moves on and on through the universe. 

The man on the lower right calls out as
he approaches up the alley.
He sells noodles

.

Men have started working on the terrace outside of my apartment.  What previously was relatively quiet place to work was corrupted by the construction of a bamboo scaffolding outside the front window late last week.   The space is now crowded with a couple of guys who’ve spent the past two days hammering off the chipped ceramic finish off the concrete pillars that hold up the railing.   When they showed up at 8am on a Saturday, I knew this was the time I would go on a morning loop bike ride through town.   I had a general direction in mind, but the intention was to circle around town.  Phnom Penh has a generally logical layout, thanks to the French.  My concentration on navigating traffic has really impeded the awareness of the “bigger picture.”   I am hoping that with enough circumnavigation, I can recognize thoroughfares and eventually figure out the shortcuts across town.  

I happened to pass by the pharmacy that is the only place in Cambodia that stocks the glucose testing strips I use.  I needed to restock and I had enough money with me to buy them, so I dropped in for a resupply.  The young guard gestured me into a spot right next to the front door.   Ten minutes later, I came out and my bike was gone.   I’d forgotten to lock it.  The poor security guy avoided eye contact, mortified that it happened and scared of what I will do.   The pharmacy staff jump into action, reviewing the security tape.  They played it on the monitor in the retail area and we all clustered around to watch. One young woman obligingly placed her palm over her mouth in a typically Asian gesture that indicates you are watching something horrible about to unfold.   

The time clicks by at the bottom of the screen.  My bike is poised in full view of the camera. The customers come and go from the front door.   An old woman with a stick across her shoulders and the baskets of noodle makings hanging from each end walks by and the group murmurs in a universal, “definitely NOT her” confirmation.   We’re all waiting.  Then, there’s a movement in a corner, a young male passerby, a glance to confirm, and a split second decision to move.  My little red bike and the helmet in the basket was gone.  I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders.    The owner was apologetic and I was chagrined at my distraction.  There was little to be done.  I apologized to the security guy in pantomime before I left.  He was at risk for losing his job.

I got a tuk tuk home,  replenished the money stash and went shopping for a replacement.  Fortunately, I’d been through this drill before.  Bikes come into Cambodia from both China and Japan, collected from thieves and cast off shops in richer countries.  There’s a two block radius where nearly all bikes come to be bought and sold.   Meandering on foot through the area, I passed by wafts of spray paint, very dark skinny men squatting in front of bowls of grease and turpentine, women shopkeepers with their cash purses slung across their shoulder. The bikes are in various forms of destruction and construction, newness and oldness, colors and styles. They are lined up as soldiers on attention, poised for action.  As I stood on the sidewalk discussing price with one vendor, a man pulled up next to me on his motorbike.   

Bikes in transport. Gil Sopes.com

“Do you remember me?” he said, “I work at the pharmacy. I’ve been driving around looking for your bike.”  He shows me a few photos of red bikes on his camera, and mentions the thief’s distinctive blue headscarf.  I thank him for his thoughtfulness and kindness, give him my phone number in case he sees it and we part ways.  At after that moment, I am ready to move on and make a decision.   I thrill a bike vendor by agreeing on a beater bike and negotiating only a couple of dollars off with a replacement brake cable and a headlight thrown in if I buy a new bike lock.  All for $31. I venture around the corner for a new helmet and make my way home. 

On the ride home I consider a few options for lunch, but in the end I’m pulled to the stalls that line the street in front of the school that’s across the street from my apartment.    A nice woman agrees to make me noodles and vegetables, I purchase an iced green tea from her neighbor and sit down on a bright red stool in the shade under the big umbrella and dig into a beautifully presented and simple meal that brings sustenance, hope and reassurance (75 cents).  The students on their lunch break look at me with curiosity and I bust out a few words of my newly acquired Khmer language, which results in lots of smiles and giggles.  I let the food vendor know that I will see her again soon.  We exchange names.

It’s the first time I've explored the food vendors in my own neighborhood.  It’s the first time I've not locked my bicycle when I’m out and about.   This is, for many months, the first time that I've had more than a week of relatively unstructured time to fill up all by myself without the endless list of home improvement projects or travel adventures.  Every morning, I wake up and wonder what is going to happen next.  What new things will I learn?  What new projects or exploratory challenges can I cook up for myself?   What emails/texts/or other signals will arrive? 

New bike in the secure parking area on the ground floor.
 If I'd parked my bike farther from the door, it might have survived.

Last night, I was reading The Marriage Plot, a Christmas present from my sister.  The Society of Friends shows up in one of the character’s lives.  In an instant, I was triggered back to my early twenties.  I was active with the Friends meeting during college and followed the practice as I moved to Cambridge and lived with a few girls in a shared house on a quiet street on Huron Avenue.   The Friends meeting in Cambridge was held in a 200 year old brick colonial not far from my neighborhood.  The meeting was big; over one hundred people gathered each Sunday for silent communion.  Quaker practice believes that the spirit of God lives within each person.  When people are moved to speak, they stand and do so.   With a bit of a trembling voice one Sunday in 1985, I talked about my bicycle.

For a few months, I’d been looking for an old bomber bike to commute to the train station at Harvard Square.   I needed something that would be unattractive for thieves and reliable. At the time, I was working on the streets of Boston with homeless youth bearing witness to trauma, prostitution, , mental illness and alienation.  At the end of my night schedule, I needed a simple and fast way to get from the Harvard Square station to home.  Since I had free time in the mornings, I walked nearly every day on the loop around Fresh Pond.

One morning, in the midst of the detritus of the Brahmin intelligentsia lined up on the sidewalks outside of their mansions, I found my bicycle waiting in a trash pile.  Cumbersome in its heavy black steel frame, the chain was rusted and the tires were flat.  It was completely and utterly abandoned.  

Gleefully, I hauled it off the pile of Hefty bags, wheeled the bike back to the house and set about to get it into action.  That Sunday I spoke about the providence of my bicycle.  The belief that the world will always provide what you need when you keep your desires simple.  That often by slowing down, we can see things that others would pass by.  In casting off what we don’t need or those things that no longer serves us, we can sometimes open new doors or create joy.   

These are days where I’m loaded to receive and waiting for the next step to unfold.  I know that each action creates ripples of reaction.  I’m both the person tossing the stone in the pond and the still water waiting.  Somewhere, deep in the recesses of Phnom Penh’s vast urban poverty, someone will benefit from my forgetful lack of stewardship: a month of food for a family, transportation for a student, a helmet for a teenager.   I am bonding to my new silver clunker.  The bike vendor installed a new bright blue bell just for me.    

Angelas Bike, Artwork by Sean Breithaupt.

The New Year

The weather was breezy with a hint of fresh coolness when I stepped out of the Phnom Penh airport after nearly 30 hours of transit from Maine. There’s a lot of time to think on a trip like that.  I appreciated that my dad was recovering after his hospitalization from pneumonia while they were on holiday in Kauai.   I noted that my oldest  nephew is gripped with the self-consumption of adolescence, but ralied for a walk on the beach with the family on the day I left.  I felt the searing cold winter air cause my lungs to swell as I shoveled.  I drifted into luxurious sleep swaddled in bed warmers and down blankets, so delectably comfortable amidst the peace of my parent’s house in the woods.   I noticed that much of the western food made me feel as  bloated as the Americans I saw bustling around with loads of Christmas presents and merchandise and the prices of everything. I had a brief visit with my brother and his family, made phone calls to friends in the states, wore jeans and sweaters. I touched down into Maine as I always have, as a waystation for rest, resupply and face to face relationships with my family. 

With the hectic conglomeration of my trip to Myanmar, my dad’s illness and my first work contract and the trip to Maine behind me, it was reassuringly familiar to be back in the thick of Southeast Asia.  I've returned to the New Year and the yawning chasm of an open chapter.  On the tuk tuk ride back from the airport,  the  motorcyclist weaved a bit under the burden of long stalks of sugarcane strapped on the back of his bike,  stretching across an entire lane of traffic, with no precautionary flag attached to the end.  Welcome to your latest home.  My first work contract is wrapping up this week and I have nothing definitive lined up.  Unfortunately, I've uncovered the next chapter in my personal series of dental trauma.  After a visit to a well-regarded dental hospital here in Phnom Penh on the day after I arrived back, it’s clear that staying in the area for another nine months will force the attention to my beleaguered  teeth and gums.

The view from the waiting room at the dental hospital.
The King Father's new pagoda in the distance is under construction
24 hours a day for the cremation ceremony scheduled
for early February. A $5 million dollar price tag.

On Friday night I was walking home with the newspapers from the English bookstore down the street when I heard someone call my name.  Bonar the Tuk Tuk Guy crossed over with a U turn against the incoming traffic and pulled up next to me on the sidewalk.  We visited briefly: he looked well and asked about my visit with the family.   Then he became sad.  His wife died and he had no money for the funeral. He muttered something about her brother also dying and something about Thailand, then gestured me into the tuk tuk and went the wrong way up the street, amid honking cars and speeding motorbikes, to deliver me back to the apartment and to inquire about my travel plans for the next day.

Friday’s Phnom Penh Post featured a front page story about a sugar cane plantation and refinery in Kampong Speu, a province that I’d visited on my site visits last month. In an all too typical scenario here, land titles are disputed, farmers are vacated from their land and a new factory/processing facility/highway is built. Without a farm to sustain them, families are forced to work for the corporation.  And in this case, children as young as 7 are earning less than a dollar a day cutting down stalks of cane that tower over them.  (Nephew Ian, while I love your 11 year old self, I recalled your Christmas Eve disappointment over the malfunctioning helicopter drone that you felt was a paltry substitute for the Xbox you really wanted and played a tiny violin for you after reading this article.)

Phnom Penh Post

 The injustices and life in general seems so raw here, like the eviscerated chickens and pigs that I saw in the neighborhood market that I explored for the first time on Saturday.  And there are also threads of community and humanity that transcend the cultural differences in this country.  Through an expat email forum, I learned about a hairdresser who speaks English and was excited to find she had a booth in the neighborhood market that I hadn’t had a chance to explore yet.

 After winding my way through the uneven brick flooring scattered with flip flops and scanning the mirrors and walls for booth numbers, I found Sookie.   She was surprised and delighted to hear me ask for her and I got set up in the chair for a long overdue haircut.   Her assistant spritzed the water on my hair and began to trim.  Another assistant set to work on the toenails. Then it was time for the shampoo.  The Khmer shampoo is a melange of scalp massage and copious foam that lasts for minutes in the seat where you got your hair cut.  It involves a small bottle of water, a rake of fingernails through thick hair, creamy foamy mounds of bouffant hair piled up like you were in a bathtub when you were five, and long stretches of thumb pressure into the place where your head meets your neck.  The shampoo cleanses like the waves surging against a rock wall. Then, you are rinsed in the sink and the massage continues across your forehead and down to the tip of your nose, across the cheeks and behind your ears.   Two people are blow drying me from opposite sides of my body and at this point, I don’t really care that a young boy points and me and exclaims something.  Sookie looks at me with gratitude and appreciation for my business.  I thank her for a job well done. “I am so happy that you come to see me.  That will be $5.”

A few days later, I was handing over my credit card to the Khmer owned and operated dental hospital.   I like my Dentist. Everyone wears white crocs in the facility.  He seems young but he has gray hair, speaks English very well and is gentle and practiced.  Then dental hospital is just around the corner from my house.  All of this bodes well because I’m going to be seeing him a lot over the next year.    I sat for a few minutes and collected myself in the waiting room, then planned a stop at the printing shop to get a hard copy of my long won final draft of my report.  The only thing I had to do was cross Norodom Boulevard.

Norodom is a major artery that runs north to south. It’s  lined with embassies and high-end housing, banks and coffee shops. For most of the day, it’s filled with the legendary Phnom Penh traffic.   In my neighborhood, it has wide sidewalks and a traffic light on the corner when I cross most frequently to go to the supermarket.  I stood at the corner and hesitated about walking up two blocks to the safety corner with the light, but noted a young student who was doing usual “cross away from the intersection and walk into traffic” maneuver on her way to school.  I stood next to her as the traffic lightened on my left and I walked across two lanes.  When I reached the relative safety of the yellow double line, then took a minute to gauge on my right and said to myself, “how lucky. No one is coming” as I stepped out into the lane.   And then, a motorbike hit my left shin and grazed by left wrist, wobbled for a moment and sped away.  (This hit and run manuveur is completely matter of course here, regretfully.)

Cutting across lanes in opposing traffic
to merge is a common practice here.

There was no blood.  Only the rich promise of a bruise, swelling already with the bluish heated rush of blood vessels bursting.   I was stunned. The parking attendant across the street rushed to help me and walked me to the Toto coffee shop, filled with prim flowery upholstery and white wrought iron chairs.  The staff fussed over me and understood that I wanted a bag of ice.  The manager gave me her jar of Tiger balm.   I RICE’d, wrote in my journal, and let the weeping flow and ebb. I remembered Beth, a woman I knew in college, who stunned me one afternoon at the cafeteria when she showed up with a golf-ball sized goose egg extending out from her forehead resulting from an epileptic seizure she'd just had. To this day, I remember it's angry prominence.   I told her to go the clinic but I did not take her there myself. I regretted that I hadn't. Small gestures of kindness are so powerful.

As I’m lying here with a rapidly thawing bag of beans in banana syrup (a sorry excuse for frozen peas),  I’m recollecting the joy of my Sunday morning.   I was up early and decided to explore the group meditation at Wat Lanka not far from the house.  On my way home, Norodom Boulevard was completely closed to traffic.  I pedaled my way around Independence Monument. My bike, short and bright red, hummed with the unfettered and clean flow of the only two wheels in sight.  I was filled with serendipitous glow myself, taking in my lucky voyage into this unprecedented  spirit of  Phnom Penh.  Then I saw the approaching pack of bike racers.  Sleek, spinning and predominately clothed in bright green lycra, they whizzed by.   I clunkered by clusters of Cambodians lining the street and some of them cheered me on as I pantomimed my participation in the race, all of us laughing at the silliness of it all.  It was bright, precious and rare.  

CAMBODIA. Phnom Penh. 6/01/2013:
 First bicycle race in the city of Phnom Penh.
©John Vink/ Magnum Photos

At that moment, I was filled with a spirit of gratitude for all the unknowns that lie before me. I felt lucky and strong, rich and attractive, resilient and optimistic.  And later,  I did some research looking for a photo of the race.  Blogger John Fink found out about the race the night before.   He says that Sunday’s  race  was the first time a bike race had been held in Phnom Penh since 1979.  Called Liberation Day, January 6 is the anniversary of the day that Viet Nam invaded and the Khmer Rouge retreated to the hills in the north, effectively ending their murderous regime. Others call it Invasion Day, and therein lies the complexity of life here. So much depends on perspective and recognizing the duality of life.   The accident was a reminder to keep my eyes open around all forms of intersections, not to take short cuts and to recognize and perpetuate the small kindnesses that bond us together as humans.  Oh, and ask for help. With a few errands to do around town today, I'll call Bonar for a ride.

Field Notes

I chuckled to myself (as those who hang out with me know that I do fairly often) when I climbed into the front seat of the Landcruiser in the dawn hours with my briefcase in hand to engage in my first international consulting gig.   I was retained to write a booklet highlighting the success stories of a donor’s grantees, who had developed pilot projects to address climate change. This entailed ten days of driving around the back roads of rural Cambodia with a chauffeurand a program officer/ translator.  Here are some of the lessons I learned. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

One of the tireless grassroots organizers with a local NGO,
 teaching farmers about new methods.
Polin, the program officer, is in the background.

 Fresh rice smells delicate with a hint of floral and redolent with the promise of sustenance and an economic future.   After coming out of the thresher, the grains are smooth and silky and run through my hand like water.  The farmer smiles with pride and giggles at me as I bend over to stick my head into the 50 pound bag and inhale deeply.

Rural Rice 101.
Stand out in rice field bending over, cutting stalks with a scythe.
Load stalks on ox cart. Deliver to homestead.
Thresh stalks to separate the straw from the husks.
 Dry husks in sun. Use a wooden pounding tool or a machine to remove husks.
Store rice for home or for market.

When a person was “so thin… like a ghost” as a child and lost half of their family to the Khmer Rouge, they  hunch over their lunch and eat it faster than anyone I've ever witnessed.

A bio-digester set up.
This device composts manure to create
methane gas for cooking and lights.

If you say that you believe that the Lord Jesus Christ is your personal savior, that you might get a fancy new water catchment system installed at your house.

A farmer sowing the product of water saving planting
he learned through the program.

When the white person shows up to hear what you think, you might wear a nice outfit and read your prepared remarks.  Or crack a joke and flirt a little. Or you might look at her with a blank expression when she asks a question that doesn't translate well.

If you try to make some notes as the car as the driver honks and passes an overloaded minibus, that you will put pen markings all over your skirt.

A trio of really poor children. They begged me to take their picture
then asked me for money. Note the plastic "ski boots" used by the girl
 on the right to slide down a gravel hill.
The girl (?) on the left looks like she took a header on the same hill.

That when you buy a piece of clothing that says “Made in Cambodia”,  the girls who made it wear wearing brightly colored matching head scarfs and load, standing close together,  into the back of a cattle truck to return to the village where they live. It can take them an hour each way.

The sight of magenta lotus flowers growing in a wetland on either side of the road in early morning light is a great way to start your day. Especially when just down the road,  its followed by a sculpted deep pink and gold tinged archway that marks the entrance to a temple.

Despite all of our efforts to build community resilience, the forces of greed and opportunity will bear heavy pressure.   I was riding down a swath of cleared land and heavy machinery in Northeast Cambodia.   Old growth palms and trees tossed to the side like toothpicks, amidst Chinese bulldozers driven by Chinese workers.  Cambodia secured a loan from China to build the road to Vietnam, and the loan terms stipulated Chinese contractors.  The red dust billowed out from behind each vehicle and coated the vegetation with powder.   Locals drove their motorbikes with the korma wrapped all around their heads.  Children playing by the side of the road coughed.

Brave bicyclists.

The scene that the bicyclists were headed into.

  

You can put four piglets in a long, cylindrical bamboo cage that straps across the back of your motorbike.  Or that you can hang about 15 dead chickens by their feet around the periphery around your back seat.

A typical transportation scene. Yes, there is a man on top.

 Grasshoppers can bounce off your hair when you have dinner next to a wetland, eating great num ta leng sap (savory Khmer pancakes).

Kampon Phluk on the Tonle Sap lake in dry season.
The lake rises 4 meters in the monsoon season,
causing the Tonle Sap river to change direction.

Houses on the Tonle Sap lake.
I conducted a field interview on a front porch of a house like this.

When a red dragonfly alights on the top of a wooden pole located just across your sightline during community interviews and stays there for a long time, that feel validated in this work.  That maybe you are doing exactly what the Universe intended for you.  

The Roads in Myanmar

After a long day of fording rivers, jouncing along dirt roads and winding our way into the mountains, we reached the chilly alpine town of Mindat just before nightfall.  A trio of girls and one boy scuttled ahead of the minivan to wait on the ledge of a small stone bridge, watching with interest as we disembarked and our guide walked up to the government office to register our presence with the authorities.    I took a few steps forward to say hello.  

These government signs are all
over the country, but most have
a more practiced paint job.

The lacquered bamboo baskets on their backs were suspended from a single woven band across their foreheads and filled with branches of autumnal foliage.   I held the plant to my lips and questioned its edibility.  Four heads shook side to side.  I used it as a broom and they shook their heads again.  As I was trying to figure out my next move, one girl clasped her hands in the Buddhist prayer gesture and all became clear.   The children, all under ten, had gathered the branches of the plant to sell door to door for the Buddhist  altars in the homes of this large village perched on the top of the serrated forest-covered mountains in the Chin State in Northwest Myanmar.  This is an area closed to the casual visitor; our guide had to secure permits well in advance.

Development aid in action. This system wasn't functioning,
but other taps dispensed water that was cleaner
than what came out from the taps
in urban hotel rooms. Gwen's UV light
water  purifier/magic wand said so.

We were away from the “Big 4” towns (Mandalay, Bagan, Inle Lake and Yangon) to  trek in the hills where people have lived for generations, farming the land, trading and living without electricity and running water.  The Chin people are some of the poorest in Myanmar. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) estimates that 73% live below the poverty line in a country where the average median income is about $380 a year.   After years of foreign sanctions and an obstinate regime that refused aid to the victims of Cyclone Nargis in 2008,  the budding emergence of what seems to be a more tolerant military government has generated  evidence of foreign aid reaching communities that were a day’s trek between Mindat and Kampalet.  There were Save the Children educational posters with images of hand washing and reading, a new water system with UNDP and the Danish Aid organization’s logos on the community faucets and UNICEF bookbags carried to school in the mornings. 

The first time the van got stuck.
Nice view stretching out for miles.

I was still struck by the images illustrating both a lack of outside influence and tremendous internal fortitude.  A bamboo school house on stilts with forty students and two teachers just down the road from the transfer station where the hand pumpers filled oil drums that were loaded onto cargo trucks (300 a week) and sold to the refinery. 

   Down a steep and narrow dirt road off just south of the summit of Mount Victoria, everyone wore grimy, faded and well-worn western clothes.  One pantless toddler had the telltale distended belly of kwashiorkor.  His mother ground the corn from the hillside fields in wooden mortar, thumping the five foot high wooden pestle in an up and down crushing motion.  There was little foreigner traffic in this area.

At the summit trailhead. Our guide Saw is
reviewing a hand drawn map with the local people.
His fancy pants are a real contrast to the
 bamboo gathering basket/knife and old rifle
 used for protection against big cats that the local people are carrying.

 After the van got stuck on the rough roads for the second time, Gwen and I walked through the upland forests of the Nat Ma Taung National Park, a “sky island” that maintains an ecosystem more typical of the Himalayan forests of the north.  When our guides Saw and Ion caught up to us, the tow rope was tied to the front rear view mirror. Saw laughingly (in a giddy relief kind of way) mentioned the village men had helped pull them out from the front when pushing from the rear wasn’t generating action. 

Bagan landscape... not my photo.

The mountains were a welcome relief from the dusty crowded streets of Bagan, were we’d spent the previous day touring the stunning  pagodas and ancient brick chedis. 

The tour buses discharged their large groups of gray haired charges at these sites; Gwen and I followed  at a reasonable distance to glean the interpretive highlights.   I found myself fending off persistent children that approached us to sell postcards in a laminated flip out cascade. Some of the more entrepreneurial had created their own designs.   One small boy recited his desperate, rapid fire English pitch while a more practiced older girl prepped me for the hard sell at her sister’s  gift shop.   Just outside the door of the lacquerware factory shop, I was surrounded by eight youngsters between five and ten years old who were bemused by my intentionally comical obstinacy about purchasing,  but happy for the attention to review the colors of their clothing and share some English adjectives.  Toward the end of the day, we grew tired of temples.

No cameras allowed at the
National Museum in Bagan,
 so I drew "field notes."

In the cavernous exhibition halls, gleaming marble floors and towering peaked roof of the National Museum in Bagan,  I sensed the  undercurrent presence of the military’s 40 year regime in the country.  The displays featured large paintings, grimy dioramas and sentinels of Buddha statues that showed the power of Myanmar’s ancient history, the social life of the surrounding early people and royal hairstyles of elaborate braided projectiles that extended far beyond the scalp. 

 The history we saw was just one facet of the story.  What isn’t told is the repeated battering that the people of Myanmar have sustained for over 150 years.  When the British determined it was strategic, they sailed up the Irrawaddy River to claim the royal capital of Mandalay, deposing the seated King to India and later setting fire to centuries of archival records in the royal library.   After a very brief period of independence and democratic rule, a military fueled coup occurred in the year I was born.  The military began their rule with promoting a disastrous foray into socialism that created starvation in a economy that had been the largest exporter of rice in the world.  In various forms since, the generals continued their suppression and truth re-telling by quashing resistance, developing new initiatives to control and building their internal coffers.   Like Bagan’s nearly 3,000 ancient chedis that were systematically rebuilt (not renovated) over the years, the military authorities have created their own truth of Myanmar’s past history and current reality.

Ancient statues inside a chedi in Bagan.

Whether to call this country Burma or Myanmar is just one facet of the story.   From my research, Burma is a British interpretation of the name of the Bama people, the largest and most powerful ethnic group in the country.

   Without any input from the people, the Generals who led the State Law and Order Restoration Council changed the name to Myanmar in 1989.  Renowned  Yangon author Ma Thanege says that there is an ancient tablet in the Museum of Bagan, datable as 1235 CE, that provided the earliest mention of Myanmar.   Thant Myint U mentions that strong horseman people, after surviving numerous campaigns of empires in both China and Tibet in the 800’s, relocated south to the fertile rice fields near present day Mandalay and called themselves “the Myanma.”    Daw Aun San Suu Ki prefers Burma, but everyone we talked to used Myanmar to describe the language, culture and themselves.  In this country, everything is nuanced with a context that, as foreigners, we can’t understand.

Hotels have to be registered by the
government to accommodate foreigners. We completed a form each time we registered. With over a million tourists
expected in 2013, there's a shortage of hotel rooms.
 We heard more than one story of tourists sleeping in
Pagodas, storage closets and the
hotel lobbies in Inle Lake during the balloon festival.

 What I do know is that my skin color and physical stature (Burmese people are very small) presents an opportunity and an obstacle.  On our last leg of the trip, we climbed from the shores of Inle Lake to the hill town of Taunggyi, which hosts an annual Ta Suang Tine balloon festival.  Our car pulled up and we were promptly charged $6 to sit in the special “Foreigner Booth”, located just in front of the Burmese equivalent of porta-potties.

Thousands of people from across Myanmar attend to see the paper balloons, go shopping at the booths and ride the rides.  The ceremony is similar to many Asian fire festivals that occur in November and reach full force on the night of the full moon, when Gwen and I had arranged to go.   We made our way through the teeming crowds, past the charcoal fires that fueled the woks filled with boiling oil and drunken boys dancing in a line with their hands on their friend’s shoulders, to watch the scene at one of the brightly-colored neon ferris wheels.

The young male carnies move the wheel around through sheer body weight, quickly scaling the wooden scaffolding to the arc, and moving their way to the perimeter to launch the momentum.  The wheel picks up speed and they move to hang from the swinging seats for a few seconds, then reach a perfect  position to land a few feet off the ground and duck out of the way of the falling chairs.  Stunning in its risk and poetry, the action captivated a crowd of young Burmese onlookers.  Out of the corner of my eye, I see movement on the ground.  A five year old darts out to pick up an a stray coke can, stashing it in his large rice bag of recyclables before disappearing back into the crowd.

We move to the large staging area, watching one version of a ritual that occurs through the evening.  The crowds amassed around the trucks holding the paper balloons and carefully offloading and unfold it.  Men holding towering batons of gas soaked torches appear to climb under the balloon and light the fires that inflate the structures.  Moment by moment, the warm air begins to define the shape; some balloons are decorated with elaborate lights and others with paintings.  As the balloon reaches the full height, the team attaches a basket of fireworks, lights a few charges and sets the inflatable alight. In a perfect process, the fireworks begin to eject their explosions as the balloon soars above the crowd and continues the unusual show high into the sky.  I’m so used to see fireworks come up from the ground that it’s magical to watch them shooting downward from above.

At nearly midnight, while we were on the ground watching, a balloon advertising a construction firm appears to have trouble. The team fastens the firework basket and sets it off anyway.   It halfheartedly drifts across the thronged stadium, scattering crowds in its path as it litters the ground with shooting colored flame throwers, before reaching a now deserted viewing platform.  Gwen has a group of boys who are using her height and her camera lens to see the balloon crash into the side and exploding into a fireball punctuated by rockets and projectile globs of flaming fuel.  The fire trucks race to the scene, which appears to be well-rehearsed, and there is no evidence of surprise in the crowd around us.     It is a singularly spectacular way to end an evening.  We had an early morning flight back to the biggest city that is not the capital. 

My travel companion Gwen standing next to
the absolute biggest gong I have ever seen.
The Shwegadon Pagoda is a very special place.

The next day, our taxi driver picked us up at the Yangon airport for our final preparations.  We went back to see the magical, sacred Shwedagon Pagoda at sunset, taking care to ascend the steps, barefoot,  to the top as Barack, Hillary and the Secret Service did on their recent visit. 

Over yet another noodle dinner on the street side café across from the hotel, Gwen and I chatted about our “themes” for the trip.   I began to take small steps back into the internet and sift through my thoughts and my notes.

We waited in traffic on departure day.  Our driver passed back the Burmese paper and launched an atypically emotional tirade about the horrifying photos on the front page of the newspaper.  Monks, who were severely burned in a military-led skirmish while protesting a copper mine in Monywa in the northwestern part of the country, led to an angry outburst in heavily accented English.  He criticized the government for their force and their relationship with China, scorned Tony Za, Myanmar’s richest man, about his cronyism with the powers that be and held reluctance about any real change as long as the military was in power.  When I asked him about how he felt for the immediate future, he mentioned Japan’s move to pay off Myanmar’s  significant national debt, the increase in international aid money and the 2015 elections that are a chance to restore democratic process and remove the vestiges of the military’s power.  Then we stopped at the National League for Democracy headquarters for some shopping.

As we reached the airport, I remembered our early morning flight to Bagan on our first day in the country.  In the pre-dawn hours, a boy selling flower garlands approached and gave me a remnant of fragrant yellow flowers and a long white thread.  I thanked him profusely and bustled for the check-in, tucking the flowers into the back of my notebook to press them.   Children work hard in this country; Gwen and I found them waiting on our tables, carrying their infant siblings with fabric strapped across their back, helping their parents at the market,  gathering firewood for their families, scavenging for recyclables and dressed in the traditional longyi on their way to school.   In hindsight, I wished I’d sat down next to the boy selling flowers.  I wished that I learned his name, told him that there was hope for his future and bought all his garlands to distribute at random in the terminal.

Just before leaving Cambodia a couple weeks ago, I completed research on the extent and strategies of development assistance currently being proffered to Myanmar.  In 2013, many countries are doubling and tripling their commitments and I estimated that at least $350 million would be invested between 2013-2015.  Policy pundits fear the “fire hose” affect, which could create a chaos of duplicative projects, increased pressure for housing and office space and a drain on Myanmar’s English-speaking professionals away from their work serving the people.   Foreign investors are lining up to access Myanmar’s ample natural resources of oil, gems and old growth hardwoods.  Tourists are streaming in on large motor coaches that belch next to horse-drawn carriages, oxcarts and sunburned Caucasians teetering on ill-fitting bicycles.   Taxi drivers can speak their mind.

Daw Aun San Suu Ki’s charismatic political presence, continuing the legacy of her father,  represents one facet of change for this country.  But that fact is that the Prime Minister is a former General and the military still retains absolute power in the constitution.  There is still ongoing violence. In the Rahkine state,  thousands of muslim  ethnic minorities are starving, homeless and living in squalid refugee camps in the western part of the country.

The currently inflating balloon could sail up high into the sky or crash to the ground.   The ground crew of the  Burmese people will do their best to stand by as the momentum builds for their flight.  The Burmese people have long suffered, patiently persisted and rebelled through virulent word of mouth and overt protest. They will continue to hope for a better future where human rights are respected, freedoms and expected and a time where no child has to sell garlands at 4:30 am.  As for me, I'll be standing on the ground waving them off on their journey, like the dozens of people we passed on our road travels through Myanmar.

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Death, Debate and a Doughnut

When you live less than a block from the Royal Palace, the death of a Royal person really has an impact on daily life.  In the first days of King Father Norodom Sihanouk's  death and the heightened protection of the Palace, the streets were blocked within a large periphery surrounding  the towering cream-colored cement walls. 

The phoenix carrying the
King Father's body as it passes
by Independence Monument. Telegraph UK photo

  Determined Cambodians on motorbikes found ways around and through, with police officers doing their best enforce with increasing frustration as the initial days passed. Then the cops fiqured out the rope system.  The rope stays up for anyone without a worthy excuse and the rope comes down for residents and bicyclists to pass over.  

This photo taken from a high spot near my
office on the day of the King
Father's procession. Khmerization.blogspot.com

On my way home from work on Tuesday, the log jam of tuk tuks and cars made it impossible to make my way home on the streets.   I lifted my bike up and over the ten inch curb to make my way through the park surrounding the Vietnamese Friendship Monument.   Hordes of white-shirted people were making their way to the royal palace.

Masses of boys and girls, women and men, vendors selling mylar balloons, popcorn, and snacks and lotus flowers.    I was struck by the number of older women walking slowly, wearing the traditional white cotton shirt with discreet lace, ankle length black skirts and a white silk sash draped across their shoulder and down to their waist.  My Khymer colleagues say this is a ballayai (a bad transliteration).  Solina, the young intern in our office, tells me that you get to learn how to drape it when you reach a significant milestone in life.  I also learn that women are the spirit keepers of the Buddhist faith, often after being widowed.  As I reached my neighborhood, I  was compelled to join in. 

The Royal Palace after
 dark. LTO blog.

 Lines of motorbikes and cars were nestled within the parking lot of the supermarket/restaurant next door.  Part of a human a river gaining flow, I felt carried into the ceremony, buoyed by the sense of ritual and tradition.   For Cambodians, the King Father was the one constant through over 50 years of colonization, war, genocide, more war, a UN transitional team and independent governance.  He was revered for his role as a Royal, yet criticized for his shifting allegiances and life-long philandering.  The ceremony and gatherings have been in progress since his death in China on October 15th.  Thousands turned out for his repatriation procession through the streets of Phnom Penh a few days earlier. Tonight was the Buddhist ceremony to mark the seventh day since he died. 

As I reached the corner of the Palace facing the Tonle Sap River, an older woman reached for my hand and encouraged me to join her and her daughter.  There was no reason for me to disagree, so we wound our way through the crowds together.   It helped that the “Auntie” was tiny and determined, her hand a warm sense of concrete caring in a sea of humanity intent on paying homage.    We were given a bottle of water and sticks of incense and made our way to the closest edge of the offering site.  Crowds were perched on the edge, squatting in a prayer to mélange of carnations, candles, water bottles and incense sticks, some propped up the open bottles and others scattered around like pick-up sticks. Small fires caught from the combination of all the material.  Auntie had her time, squatting in that deep way that Asians do so effortlessly and raising her palms together to her forehead in the traditional Buddhist prayer.  As her daughter and I stood back, I took in the experience.  The smoke from the incense billowed into the sky; thick and rich with poignancy and passage.  When she was done, we moved away and I bid my guides goodbye.  Auntie spoke to her daughter in Khmer, who translated to me, “Have you ever been to Sihnaoukville?”  “Not yet,”   I say, “But I will look for you there when I go.”

cbsnews.com

The following night, I attended a taped version of the US Presidential Debate that focused on foreign policy.  While I was waiting for the show to start, a white woman carrying three tote bags plopped down in the seat next to me.

 Lois introduced herself.  Her hair was bedraggled, her face sun-ravaged and wearing a very unusual ensemble of black leather mini-boots, lots of hanging jewelry, a scarf and a soiled white vest.  She ordered a Jim Beam on the rocks.  Her business card was in gold leaf print and read "Political Philanthropy", with four phone numbers reflecting area codes from Cambodia, Thailand and California.  I was wary of getting too far into conversation.  I felt a bit subconscious about hanging out with her.  I'd come with the goal of meeting some local democrats.   I felt an unfortunate moment of anxiety (what will people think?)  when I lost my curiosity about her own, special reality.

You never get a second chance to make a good first impression.  The US, when King Father Norodom made his first diplomatic visit to Washington in 1953, he was dismissed.  He later made his way to China where he was greeted with much fanfare and respect, likely paving the way for enhanced relations with North Vietnam and the ensuing, covert US-led “carpet bombing” of eastern Cambodia.  This action resulted in the deaths of over 500,000 people and likely contributed to the continuation of the Vietnam war.  Lois looked like she’s spent more than a few nights arguing about this in a variety of bars.  The debate came on and we settled in to watch the show.  After it was over, there were invitations to fundraisers, a call to vote and everyone left to their own devices.  It was somewhat unsatisfying. The theater and drama seemed trite after the previous night.

Monks gather for seven
day prayers. Cambodia Daily.

On the night before, I’d taken a few minutes after Auntie and her daughter left to walk around on my own.  The legions of monks that had gathered for prayers slowly proceeded down the Sisowath Quay that runs alongside of the river. 

Vendors were selling photos of the waxing Gibbous moon with the King Father’s face on it, validating rumors that locals had seen a lunar sign when the clouds cleared on nights following the King Father’s death.   A grumble of thunder and a flash of lighting were in the distance.  I’m conscious of the crowds that are packed shoulder to shoulder in the area.  There’s an underlying awareness of the power of the crowd converging around the Palace. One action could set off a whole series of other reactions.  Not only does Cambodia have one of the highest rates of - PTSD,  a tragic consequence of panic  ensued at the Water Festival in 2010, where hundreds died in a stampede.

It was time to move on.  I took the long way around and joined more of the crowds on their way back to the main streets.   A woman walked next to me carrying over a dozen donuts, each in a small plastic bag with handles.   In the mere moments after I’d glanced at the bags and thought about why she was selling donuts, she came up behind me. She  presented me with a doughnut, using two hands in the traditional way.  “This is for you.  It’s a gift.”

I made my way to the gate in front of the apartment building and large raindrops splattered the sidewalk.   Moments later, the skies opened in the typical torrential rain of South Asia. In the comfort of my apartment,  I took a moment to savor this perfect donut, golden brown on the outside with a hint of granular sugar, perfectly leavened from the oil frying, stretchy and tender.  It was a gentle reassurance in a tumultuous week of witness, grief, political analysis and eulogizing. Her gesture of kindness and ceremony was far more than just a gift.  It made me realize the power of being in this country as a single person, and of the importance of stepping out to reach across culture and share a human experience. 

Mourners, The King Father and the Moon. Phnom Penh Post.