30 June 2019
[Above photo: Dr. Thura Lin in front of a clever marketing approach, if your dream is to have “Singapore imported bedroom accessories.”]
I finally returned to the National Historical Museum Saturday after my massage. I’d visited floors 1 and 2 the first week I was here but never returned. I’d heard that the ethnic costumes on display on the top floor were wonderful so I walked up 4 flights to start there. They were amazing! The male and female garb was of colorful locally woven fabric and remarkably varied from village to village among the same group (Shan, Kachin, Kayin, Chin, Rakhine, and others). The Atha women looked like they’d be the most fun at a party—stunning outfits with colorful miniskirts and lovely woven gauntlets for their calves (Leg warmers? I don’t know this stuff.), and lots of metal adorning all. Girls just wanna have fun! There also is a glorious collection of ancient and traditional musical instruments: harps, stringed instruments and xylophones in the shapes of crocodiles, “banjos”, “violins”, and many types of flutes. One common type of flute had 15 pipes of different lengths, all bound together and played simultaneously by a man and a woman, reportedly to make both masculine and feminine sounds simultaneously. How they managed to share one flute, I have no idea but the Freudian implications are obvious to a beginner. The English on the displays was pretty bad—several carvings of a “Lion seizing”. I suppose they can have fits but who would memorialize it so?
Being on the top floor when a massive rain flooded down, it was impossible to hear anything else. After the rain slowed to a normal pour, I dashed across the parking lot through ankle-deep water to the museum café and had a burger and coffee. The sun then appeared and I walked home in the sparkling aftermath. It scrubs the air clean. Despite hours of pre- soaking in bleach and soap and diligent work with my nail brush, I cannot manage to clean my shirt collars as thoroughly.
When I was running errands yesterday—getting a large bottle of melatonin tablets for stock in the clinic, some bright stickers for the parents of unruly children to use on behavioral charts, and a bottle of cracked pepper and some Worcestershire sauce—I noticed, for the first time in the upscale supermarket checkout line, the cigarettes. Two types were available, Lucky Strikes from British-American Tobacco and another brand from a Chinese tobacco company. Each carton, and pack, of the Lucky Strikes had a large color photo of a dying man with a tracheostomy and a nasal oxygen cannula (not sure why the latter except for effect). The Chinese cigarettes had the same of a human tongue with a massive cancer on it. It seems you can effect some public health measures with an authoritarian government that we cannot.
Sidewalks here are interesting. They all have a 2 foot wide, 3-4 foot deep concrete storm water sluice running on the house side. Generally, they are covered by removable concrete pads; occasionally the latter fail and there is a hole to fall into but mostly they are intact. There appears to be little, if any, building code enforcement. If a person wants a large back-up generator for their house or apartment, they mount it in the middle of the sidewalk, permanently. If they want a guardhouse outside an embassy, a private residence, or a local police enclosure, it may span the sidewalk. Trees, also, are allowed to grow right through the sidewalk. All block your way, forcing you to walk in the street. You just wander along. People cross the road without respect to the traffic or the lights. The bus drivers with the new #37 yellow buses race each other in pairs. They are like teenagers with their first car, jerking along, accelerating and braking like crazy. We all hang on for dear life. Then you get one who slows a bit, opens the door, and suddenly speeds up. You have to time your exit perfectly. I’ve switched to #21, as they are old buses and just chug along steadily, completely stopping at each bus stand.
I went to the US Embassy 4th of July celebration. It was at the Lotte Hotel, which I discovered is new, massive, and elegant. It took an hour in a taxi to travel what is a 15 minute ride in normal traffic. En route we were passed by 3 shiny black Mercedes with national flags flying—I recognized the ones from India and Indonesia—so I guessed the celebration wasn’t going to be an intimate gathering. Traffic flow halted 3 blocks away so I paid the cabbie and walked the remainder. Lining the sidewalk to the door there must have been 50 Myanmar soldiers lounging about, no doubt to scare off a would-be bomber. Inside there were plentiful and very tasty hors d’ouvres and, wonder of wonders, Anchor Steam beer. It is my favorite, a San Francisco original. It was sold during the gold rush, no ice was used (or available) for its manufacture, and it was open-brewed on rooftops for the cooler air, hence the “steam” rising. I asked where I could buy it in Yangon. “You can’t. They flew it in for this.” Our tax dollars at work.
There were many more very elegantly dressed Myanmar couples than Americans. There were large banners proclaiming the “2019 US Embassy Independence Day Celebration”. An MC announced the formal parade of the Ambassador and his wife and their Honored Guest, the government Minister to the Counsellor of State (Daw Aung San Suu Kyi) and his wife up onto the stage. The wives looked bored, but perhaps I was projecting. Both men gave short speeches, but the level of conversation in the ballroom was so high that much was lost to me. I did get that the Ambassador chose rock ‘n roll as the very American theme for the evening. An honor guard of 4 US Marines, carrying flags of Myanmar and the US, marched in, ramrod straight. We heard the US and Myanmar national anthems. I hope we can ditch “the bombs bursting in air” some day soon for “Oh beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain”. The Marines did a few slick, well-synchronized moves to turn around and marched out. As they passed I wondered what those well-fed 20-something year olds thought, and understood, of the whole show. Then a local band played rock and roll covers.
I did meet another Fulbrighter, Hollie Hix-Small, who is here with her husband and son. She’s teaching Early Childhood Intervention. Hollie knows her way around and worked for George Soros for some years in unnamed former Soviet satellites. She’s a smart, modest, and lovely person and I like her husband and son, as well. She grew up in Grants Pass, Oregon, for those of you who know that little nidus of Trumpism on Interstate 5. But her mother was a school teacher, which I increasingly think of as the noblest profession. I also chatted with a terrific UK-trained psychologist who has moved to Myanmar with her husband to be near her family. Her mother is Irish, her father Myanmar. I had her visit my class so they could meet her and for her to talk about her work. Their reaction, after she left: “She’s very smart and she’s very beautiful.” Both true and happily married. I also met two women from US AID and hope to enlist their help to spend our tax dollars more fruitfully.
I asked if they would fund a nationwide conference with follow-up local meetings to develop and implement a plan addressing school bullying. Myanmar, it turns out, is the only country of 96 surveyed by WHO where all parameters of school violence and bullying have increased between 2007 and 2016. The causes are unclear. I wonder about the combination of an authoritarian government, a sense of powerlessness and hopelessness about economic betterment among most of the population, authoritarian parenting, and high rates of intimate partner violence and corporal punishment, the latter both at home and in schools. To be researched, I hope. Even when bullying doesn’t lead to suicide, which it does, it can cause serious and lasting damage to the victims. And if not identified and assisted, bullies often have sad lives, with antisocial behavior, substance abuse, failed intimate relationships, and incarceration at a significant rate. And there are many well-studied programs that can effectively reduce school bullying. It’s fun to have a project. Another project.
My modest paper on puerperal psychosis was finally published. Whew! It’s available at <mmj.mw>, the Malawi Medical Journal. I can see it would get easier with practice but it took about two years and a lot of effort and I had virtually no data collection and certainly no statistics with which to wrestle. I’m glad it is done and hope it spares a new mother or two, and their nursing newborns, from being put on antipsychotics.
The debates yielded galvanizing, I think, performances by the two women, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris. What a ticket that would be!! Is he trembling? The rapist? However would he deal with two smart, educated, and competent women? “Not my type.”
I saw an ad for “Absorbent Pads” on the side of a truck. It showed a white-haired couple in a big fluffy white bed with gleeful smiles as they looked at each other. Why are they smiling so? What would their thought bubbles say? “I’m wetting myself and I don’t care?” DT’s behavior is so heedless and infantile, the ad brings him to mind.
A Psychiatrist in Myanmar 