To Hawaii

14 April 2019

[Above photo:  Satan himself dumping hot coals, in case people were chilly, onto a group of naked women. Hard to miss the censure of sexuality.]

Looking over the balcony of our beachfront condo in Napili toward the sea is like viewing a massive TV screen.  The natural sound system reproduces perfectly the waves breaking over the reef, 75 feet from shore. This morning the sea is peaceful with a light breeze ruffling the surface.

The first three days of the week were passed in teaching in the heat and moving slowly. Lunches, as always, are spent at the medical student cafeteria with my students. As I sit with my meal, purchased for $1 and including soup and condiments, many pairs of chopsticks dropped choice bits of fish or meat and tasty vegetable dishes like lemon or watercress salad and rosalie on my plate. The latter is a leafy plant with purple stems. It is steamed or sautéed with onions, fish paste, and several other ingredients into a wonderful, pungent dish. The students’ generosity appears so natural and effortless.

We had a supper with the Mental Health Society of Yangon, most of whose senior members I’ve met before. This time they invited all the students. The women dressed to the nines and it was such fun to watch them interact with their former professors. The food at the Golden Duck was memorable and plentiful; the duck didn’t disappoint.

The upshot of the meal was I decided to wear a longyi for teaching every day. It is cooler than trousers and increases my sense of assimilation, as well as my anxiety of a wardrobe malfunction. It was funny as I was lecturing and one of the women in class pointed out that my longyi was coming unwrapped. I turned my back to the class and one of the male students raced to the front, hands on, showing me how tightly I must tie it. A bit like those ladies of yore being laced into their whalebone corsets. A female student also came forward to give advice at a distance. Laughter and good humor all around.

I cannot adequately express how much I love them all. Each one has, in his or her way, been through hell in this country of dictatorship, repression, informants, economic hardship, frequent job tansfers, and poor health care, not to mention all the ordinary trials of life. Each student is so distinct from the other, yet all are kind and thoughtful. Even “Rambo”, as she was nicknamed earlier in her worklife, is a savvy, thoughtful, lovely woman. I worried how well she’d get on with children, having earned that moniker. She is direct but able to listen and observe. I keep pinching myself, it is so perfect. I’ll give them a mid-term in three weeks and we’ll see how much they are assimilating.

I see tests as a method of learning more than as an assessment of knowledge, except for the rare ones who either don’t or cannot do the work. It is strange, as Linda and I were talking, how many book-smart people have social skills limited by their need to control others or who lack any common sense. There are so many types of intelligence, it seems to me. There is emotional, of course, and SAT abilities, but many others. Some people have a capacity to recall many details with no application or relation to their life yet cannot risk expressing their emotions. Or don’t know how to comfort someone who is hurting. So this test is more for them to see how much they are getting of the basics of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. And for me to see how effective a teacher I am. They can use it toward their final grade—Pass/Fail—or not, as they wish, as I can use it to adjust course if needed.

I’ll miss Burmese New Year or Thingyan celebrations this week. It is known as the Water Festival, and water is thrown by everyone at passersby for several days. Coming as it does during the hottest, driest month of the year, it seems like levity and relief. I was assured that after a day of getting soaked walking down the street, it gets old. Still, I doubt I’ll intentionally return in the hottest season so I’ll likely never experience Thingyan.

My flight(s), all 4 of them, went off without a hitch. CheapoAir provided the least expensive fare from Yangon to Maui, by far. It did, however, mean a different carrier at each stop (Hanoi, Seoul, Honolulu), which meant that I had to get my boarding passes at each airport. The layovers weren’t excessive yet I didn’t have to sprint for any planes. I talked with each of my seatmates and they were all interesting, on holiday, travelling for work, etc.  Vietnam is a huge tourist destination now. Trying to imagine that in 1968 when I refused military service during the war would have been a stretch. How stupidly reactive and fickle we are as humans, mortal enemies then, friendly allies and partners now. I always wondered how our government repeatedly made the mistake of siding with tyrants; it isn’t a mistake.  We support those who will do our bidding. To hell with the citizens of the country.

How easily good people can be recruited into supporting bad people. One bright PhD on the plane is doing research for a vaping company; she is a kind, decent mother and yet didn’t seem to grasp the evil of addicting high school kids to nicotine. I’d met a young Chinese engineer in a restaurant in Yangon who was working for a large and multifaceted Chinese government company that is building a liquified natural gas port near Yangon, one small part of the Chinese takeover  of the globe that appears to be very successful in SE Asia and Africa.  Our blustering foreign policy, excepting the Peace Corps which is probably our most effective, seems impulsive and childish compared with the long-horizon strategy of the Chinese.

As I emerged into the bright Hawaiian sun from the Kahului airport on Maui, Linda slipped to the curb in a blue VW convertible. This was not the capable but primitive blue VW we bought new for $1700 in 1958 to carry Chas and I to college and back 3x/year, 36 horsepower, 1192 cc displacement.  This is a sleek, fast, comfortable little car with a spoiler on the trunk and a single button that lowers the windows and the top.

We chose to meet in Maui because her nephew, Alex, is marrying here. We spent the first night with friends of Linda from Samoa, when she and her husband and children spent two years there in 1990-92. Linda delivered their last child. Tom arranges trainings for linemen at power companies all over the Pacific islands so they don’t fry themselves. Nancy is the administrator of a group of National Marine Sanctuaries, especially for humpback whales, around the islands here. We’ll do a hike with them later in the week.

The next day we met Richard, her brother, and his wife, Laurie and another nephew, Nathan, and hiked up the Lahaina Pali trail, used in ancient days by missionaries and farmers. The views of the coastline were lovely and it is so glorious to see clouds again, after seeing none since my arrival in Yangon. Sitting for long periods (24 hours getting here) on planes and in airports makes me want to hike and climb endlessly.

We’ll walk and swim and eat and get to know each other again. And go to the wedding celebrations. Linda made me an amazing little book of her miniature paintings on tea bags documenting each day of our Namibia/Botswana/Zambia trip last summer. I’d already forgotten some of the less-memorable place names. Pretty charmed lives we’ve created.