18 August 2019
[Above photo: The National Botanical Gardens at Pyin Oo Lwin.]
Picking up the thread, I left our poker game last Sunday at midnight, walked a few blocks in the dark and caught a cab home. It is lovely to feel so safe here. Moreover, I was disciplined and a bit thoughtful at the game and lost only 1200kyat (80cents) over the evening, not much for a newbie having an evening of fun with much laughter. New to the game was a young woman doing an internship with an NGO here. She’s grown up in both Brazil and the US. Her brother was a professional poker player, but she hasn’t played before, surprisingly. She was, she told us, voted the “most aggressive” on her college varsity basketball team. It was interesting to watch her struggle to hold back and when she did press forward with 4 kings (In Night Baseball, 9’s and 3’s are wild, leading to ridiculously high hands.), someone else had the equivalent of 4 aces (one ace showing, three wild cards buried.) Her aggression and physical prowess on the court didn’t count for much here and she was unhappy: “I don’t think I like this game.”
Today I set out at 1:30PM to have lunch, purchase 6 plastic chairs for our new clinic, and buy a portable screen or white sheet on which to show PowerPoints there. I ate at a tiny, new (to me) Japanese restaurant which was empty of people and the food very tasty. Like taxis, there are so many restaurants and most seem empty; I’m not sure how they survive. When I go in the upscale malls, there are fancy, branded stores—Gucci, Shiseido, l’Occitane en Provence, Burberry—and I see plenty of young, pretty salesgirls but never a customer. What’s the point? And what an incredibly boring job, standing around all day trying not to fall asleep upright. Are they franchises to launder drug money?
Back to my day, the rain began to pour so I drank tea, stayed dry, and read more of “Beloved” by Toni Morrison. It is powerful and painful to read, the more so given the racist blather blanketing much of our country. The value to me is that it shines a light into corners of history that we all, I think, prefer to ignore, as shameful and hideous as they were. And those images illuminate the present atrocities, which I also find difficult to stay fully aware of. It makes me think about the epigenetics of rape, lynching, flaying, and having your children sold off so you’ll never see them again. How that gets into our inheritance and bones by more than oral history and memory.
When the shower lightened, I walked and inquired and walked some more, eventually finding a store that had a wall-mounted projector screen. It was a bit heavy but I carried it 2 kilometers home on my shoulder, earning some stares. I then cruised down Sint O Tan to Tea Black and bought a red bean smoothie with pearls, those little black chewy tapioca tadpoles. I’m just now home and the heavens have opened again; for once my timing was excellent. Most of my students love the rain, because it brings the temperature down. I suppose people living in climate extremes talk a lot about the weather; I do here and in Maine. I rarely thought much about it in Berkeley, except for the drought and fires.
I’m attempting to leave things so the next training can go smoothly. I’ll donate my printer, my portable PP projector, the screen, etc. in support of it. Fulbright gives us an allowance for this sort of thing and I don’t think I’ve exhausted it buying books, of which I sent a large box by diplomatic pouch. I feel a little badly, teaching this course and then decamping. I did when I left Malawi, as well. You care about people, especially those you have taught or have cared for, and can anticipate some of what they will encounter. I’d like to help them with their futures. My own child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship was two years with a lot of supervised psychotherapy and I felt green as grass when I graduated, so I can imagine what they might feel after only 7 ½ months.
But my thoughts are turning ever homeward, looking at property and houses in Maine on Zillow and finding much that is very inexpensive and appealing. For example, 3 acres on the ocean with a 2-3 bedroom house cum garage/workshop. I think, as much fun as planning a new house would be, it is quicker and much less expensive to buy one already built, if carefully inspected. I need a car, as well. Jeez, all the appurtenances of the American Dream. If I do buy on the shore, it will be at least 50 feet above high tide line, given climate change and DT’s wish to buy and plunder Greenland. He’d probably use the gas deposits to melt the icecap so he could mine and drill underneath. If the Danes ever dared, I’d stop eating cheese Danish and probably Aebleflæsk, as well, in protest.
The Israeli-Palestinian issue is so fraught. When I reflect how there was almost a two-state solution with the Oslo Accords and how far we are from that now, it descends to tragedy. Afterwards it seemed that Yasir Arafat sabotaged it; I recall sentiments suggesting he was a conflict junkie and didn’t feel he’d have a power base if there was peace, but I’m actually not sure where the will for it flagged. I do think it was crap of DT to move our embassy to Jerusalem. And I do think the settlers, as righteous and ordained as they may feel in their orthodox faith, should be pulled back. They are probably to the Israelis as the Palestinians are to the Arab world: unruly, explosive, determined, and felt to be better used as pawns in the front lines of the chronic antipathy than to be embraced.
The Nagar Glass Factory was founded in the 1950’s by a tea merchant who was an amateur herbalist and wanted airtight glass containers in which to store herbs. He brought in technicians from surrounding countries and developed the first glass factory in Myanmar. They’d drive a truck to the beach near Meik in Lower Burma to get very pure sand. They had big gas-powered brick ovens, crucibles, and all that is needed for handmade glass. They made elegant glasses for high-end restaurants and customers, jugs, chess sets, and shrewd inventions. Like a two-part piece for shrimp cocktail, with ice in the lower goblet. And a fabulous jug for white wine with an attached, invaginated globe in which ice was kept. Anyway, there were a number of setbacks, including the military government demanding to know where they got their sand and then expropriating that area to supply their own glass factory. Then there was an arbitrary increase in the price of natural gas, 500x overnight. Finally, Cyclone Nargis in 2008 toppled over all the sheds and ended their glass manufacturing.
However, left with many, many piles of glass objects scattered about the woods, all of which had been in the storage sheds before their collapse, one of the owner’s sons now ekes a living out of letting people “mine” their own and then charging them for the pieces they want. I bought 5 glasses, lovely, for a little under $3 apiece. Robbery in Myanmar but certainly worth it to me. I’ll return for a longer visit wearing boots (for the glass underfoot), long pants and a long-sleeved shirt, and repellent (for the mosquitoes). I do not want to get dengue or chikungunya and their vectors were in abundance.
I’ve had some discussions with the students about confidentiality. Physicians in Myanmar will describe a puzzling case on Facebook to get suggestions from other docs. I questioned the practice, mentioning the use of closed list-serve groups that we employ for similar purposes, limiting the audience to vetted professionals. Then I began to think about describing cases in my blog and I wonder if I am violating my own precepts. Part of me thinks that I am, although no one who reads this will ever know any of the children I describe. I suppose I do it to make the blog interesting and to convey with more meaning what the work and life here is like. The ultimate test would be to obtain signed permission from each patient; I doubt most would agree, since this isn’t a private, professional audience. It isn’t as though I have a massive following. I know I’ve felt critical of Irv Yalom for writing extensively about patients, as have others (Robert Lindner The Jet-propelled Couch and Other Stories come to mind). Disguise may work most of the time but not always. I’ll think about it.
There was a huge mudslide near Mawlamyine, the site of Kipling’s “old Moulmein pagoda”, which covered a line of cars waiting to cross a flooded bridge. 52 killed, buried in mud, and more missing. The mudslide is felt to be due to careless logging and mining activities in the hills above the road, denuding and unsettling the land. With bribes you can do most anything here.
There were coordinated attacks on a number of police and military sites, including the Military Technological University, in the Pyin Oo Lwin-Hsipaw-Naung Cho area where I was a few weeks ago. Several armed groups [the Arakan Army (AA), the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA), the Northern Alliance (NA), and the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA)] coordinated the attacks. I support their desires for more autonomy and to be free from oppression and exploitation by the government, but I seriously doubt that these attacks will do other than harden the government’s resolve and displace many civilians caught in the crossfire, as they have over the past 60 years. Also, it will certainly squash tourism, which brings much-needed business to many.
In 1962 then-Burma was the most prosperous country in SE Asia. Many government missteps, regional conflicts, and natural disasters later, it is currently #127 in world ranking, below all its neighbors except Cambodia. Of course, Malawi is #182, 4th from the bottom. Lest you think that chaos, corruption, and conflict are incidental to prosperity, the Democratic Republic of Congo, probably the most abundantly natural-resourced country in the world, is #183. And Malawi has beauty alone, with no drillable/mineable natural resources. The irony is that the US has a thriving economy when we are at war in someone else’s country, at least for the first several years of the conflict.
This all makes it more difficult for me to leave since I want to help in tough times. One of my students was walking with me in my neighborhood, on her way to buy some porridge for supper from a vendor she likes on 19th Street. She said, “Professor, you should stay here for 2 or 3 more years. You could really help us a lot with Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.” It is flattering but not tempting. I miss home.
A Psychiatrist in Myanmar 