Nay Pyi Taw

10 February 2019

[Above photo: A fresh-water shrimp fisherman emptying and baiting his trap. I don’t know why WordPress flipped the image but I think it looks pretty neat so I’ll leave it that way.]

I arose at 2:45AM, shaved, ate half a mango, drank a cup of tea, and walked 75 steps to the end of my block. Then I awaited my ride, Dr. Kyi, to drive me to the capitol 4 hours north. A steady stream of taxi’s honked their question so insistently that I was forced to repeatedly wave, “No.”. At 3:35 AM Dr. Kyi pulled up. After some driving around Yangon’s suburbs, already quite busy with street merchants transporting their wares, we changed cars and 4 of us headed up the pike. The wholesale flower market was bustling at that hour.

We drove at 140Km up the safe but bumpy divided highway, stopping once for tea and once for breakfast (good mohinga!), finally arriving at Nay Pyi Taw’s hotel zone. My kind of road trip, plenty of refreshment stops. The conference, a country-wide meeting on substance abuse surveillance and treatment programs, was in a very modern, attractive hotel and functioned identically to any of ours, except it was conducterd largely in Myanmar. Often slides and handouts were in English. It was astonishing to learn that, as of last year, being a drug addict was no longer illegal in Myanmar.  Addicts are to be treated, not punished. I’m not quite sure how it works because it is still illegal if you are caught in possession. Hm.

The US has more people in jail than any country in the world and our incarceration rate is the highest, as well. And we think about China as being a police state and the US as “the land of the free”!  Almost a quarter of our inmates are drug offenders, excluding dealers. If someone feels hopeless about their ability to improve their lot in life, or is stupid enough to try an addictive substance a few times for fun, or has gotten hooked as a result of treatment for chronic pain, punishment doesn’t seem like the right approach. Perhaps they need to be in a treatment facility where they don’t have access to drugs but do to yoga, vocational training, education, and supportive psychotherapy services, as well as exercise and healthy eating. Looking at our recidivism rates, it’s clear that punitive approaches don’t work.  We know the “War on Drugs” has made some people very rich and drugs are cheaper, more potent, and more plentiful on our streets than they have ever been. Certainly, a Wall will make the builders a profit but do nothing to slow the flow.

I’m lying in bed at a resort outside of town now, in a very pretty room. It was an elegant teak stilt house, moved here and refurbished with a gorgeous teak interior.  It is set on a lake created by a dam 30 years ago so the vegetation around it is mature. It is so perfect and pretty, it feels at moments like the Truman Show, illusory. Yet it is genuinely lovely.

After an elegant mohinga for breakfast—There is a competition between the soup base and the garnishes to be the best!—and a cup of Myanmar tea, we jumped in a boat and headed up the lake to Elephant Camp. The motor was a 4 cycle gas affair, 13 hp, with a long-tail shaft and propeller, mounted on a swivel on a short deck at the rear of the boat, costs about $350 new and moves the boat, with 4 people, nicely.  Compared to our new $9000 outboard on the Island—well, they aren’t comparable but this arrangement is very clever and very inexpensive. Couldn’t tow a water skier, though.  We passed a very slender man in a small dugout canoe emptying fresh water shrimp from tiny reed traps. The traps were ingenious, similar in principle to lobster and crab pots.  The shrimp are salted and dried and used for garnish in, for example, tea leaf salad.

We arrived at Elephant Camp and walked up a hill through clumps of bamboo and trees  scattered with picnic tables. Since it was Chinese New Year, families were coming to enjoy the forest and the elephants. For a small sum we got a couple of plates of corn cobs and sugar cane and fed the elephants by hand.  There are allegedly 50,000 muscles (a suspect number) in an elephant’s trunk and it takes them a few years to learn to use it well.  They are remarkably delicate with them (It’s tempting to say, “Dextrous”, but that’s not quite right). Then we climbed a platform and settled into a padded pack saddle (howdah) on the back of an elephant and the mahout, sitting on the elephant’s head, took us for a ride on jungle paths. It was amazingly fun. The mahout jiggles his left foot constantly, gently scratching the elephant’s ear.  If he stops, the elephants stops instantly. I’ve been reading Elephant Bill by Lt.-Col. J. H. Williams, OBE. He worked for the British Forestry Department for many years, extracting teak from the forests of Upper Burma, before, during, and after WW2. He became an expert on the care, training, and use of elephants. It’s a very colonial-era book, unsurprisingly, but a fascinating look into that time in Myanmar. It’s on Kindle. He talks at length about the intelligence and memory of elephants, which is prodigious. It always is conflictual, domesticating animals, like elephants, for our ends. At least we aren’t eating them!  And, really, it shouldn’t matter that they are intelligent. Would we want out developmentally delayed child to be treated badly by virtue of low cognition? Mother Nature is impassive and lets us do what we want without moralizing, which can allow us some pretty depraved practices. I remember in the old film, Mondo Cane (A Dog’s World), seeing geese in Alsace confined to crates where they were force-fed corn via a grinder and funnel to fatten their livers for pate de fois gras.

Nay Pyi Taw is described as “soulless” in the Lonely Planet Guide and “a bizarre monument to the megalomania and bombast of the country’s ruling generals” in the Insight Guides. I found it otherwise, perhaps not a PC position. In fact, if the government were still occupying the Secretariat, the massively elegant seat of the British government here in Yangon, I’d find that sad. The Secretariat was built by the British with forced Burmese labor. And as Myanmar becomes more democratic, as it is gradually, and the lovely plantings around Nay Pyi Taw mature, I think it will be a stunning place, if lacking that colonial twist we seem to love to see in former colonies. Again, it is complicated, like everything everywhere. But I think the Myanmar people can be proud of their grand capitol without snide travel writers—dare I say with a post-colonial mentality—dismissing it. There!

The meetings were lively and informative, even if a lot of the information slipped through my language filter. They have many methadone treatment programs around the country and methamphetamine is making a big entry into the heroin scene. We had a wonderful dinner at our lakeside resort with about 20 of the senior psychiatrists and lots of good talk. I sat next to a man who has been flying to Bangkok for several years to take an EMDR course. He’s now completing supervisor training so he’ll be able to teach it here. Nine of the academic psychiatrists are going to an international conference in Sidney soon. I am very impressed with the commitment and leadership of psychiatry here.  And the openness and generosity of everyone. The psychiatrists I’ve met seem to lack the competitive, in- or out-group mentality, so common to middle schools in the US, that infests American academia.  They are smart and informed without that.

Which leads me to another topic that depresses me. Strong and pushy seem to prevail in many, if not most, arenas, a form of natural selection. Sociopaths have an advantage since they can easily do things the rest of us cannot.  It means that kindness, attention to feelings and to process, not achievement, often lose.  General happiness and community well-being rarely are the outcome. More likely, the strong and greedy succeed in domination, control, and accumulation. As I see, and hear, how much China is acquiring all over SE Asia and recalling how they have done the same in Africa, I am impressed with their long-term planning, not so impressed with ours, and appalled by both. It is a repeat, on a mightier scale, of the colonial takeover of the “third world”, as it used to be called.

Might makes right and, if wedded to long-term goals, is going to leave our country, and our democratic institutions and ideals, however imperfect they are, in the dust, especially if we support an illiterate, racist, misogynist chief who impulsively leads from his “gut”, not from any reasoned thought process that recognizes historical precedent and human needs.  2020 is increasingly looking like a watershed election, as were the mid-terms. It feels like the future holds a rapidly increasing number of “watershed” moments.

Unfortunately or not, the Virginia 3 must exit, since appearance is so crucial in politics. I do believe in redemption, but not inside of public office. Public office should be reserved for those who don’t carry the burden of past racist behaviors (certainly as adults) or are not credibly accused of sexual assault, like Justice Kavanaugh. Why is it always men?!! Always.