Flotsom

[Above photo: A takin or gnu goat, a large ungulate found in the Eastern Himalayas, looking depressed in the National Kandawgyi Botanical Gardens.]

1 September 2019

I vowed to myself not to mention the wetness-that-falls-from-the-sky in this post.  I also do not want to call attention to the personal meaning of today’s date. Nor to the Wrecking Ball in the White House. Irony, ha!

This was a week like many others, and yet, of course, entirely different. There was no drama and I discovered no new niches in Yangon.

I am amazed at how often, even with very intellectually-disabled or autistic or depressed or simply (whatever that means) behaviorally dysregulated children, things can improve very rapidly. It seems to me much more frequently here than in the US. I don’t think all the parents are just eager to please us and distort their experience in reporting at a follow-up appointment a week or two after their last clinic visit.  Perhaps I’m mistaken, but I have a feeling that there is something culturally, even in what would seem to be a very dysfunctional family, that tends toward health in Myanmar. Magical, wishful thinking, I guess, on my part. But the turnarounds are striking. Perhaps it’s that people are so used to being crushed and thwarted here that they recognize tiny flickers of light in their darkness, whereas in the US we expect miracles, instant stadium floodlights. Or are they just very compliant with our suggestions?

I have wanted to discuss several matters with Professor Tin Oo, my Chief of Psychiatry. He’s a very busy man, running the Department, seeing patients at the massive Yangon Mental Hospital and in the clinic at Yangon General Hospital, travelling to various states to teach, meeting with the country leadership in Naypyitaw, and maintaining his private practice in Mandalay where he returns each weekend. I caught up with him at the airport, on the fly so to speak, on Friday, 2 hours before he took the puddle jumper from here to there. The airport, on a bad traffic day, is a 1 ½-2 hour taxi ride from downtown, and costs 10,000-12,000kyat ($6.50-$8).

BTW, almost all the taxis in Yangon are Toyota Proboxes or Passos. Toyota has a lock on the market here, as in Malawi. A rare Suzuki or Nissan. The luxury cars tend to be Toyota Crowns, similar to Lexus. No Camaros, Mustangs, Malibus. Being of my age and gender, this interest, however shallow, is hard-wired. Probably best explained by epigenetics. Now there’s a field for a bright young person…

I’ve seen an “Airport” bus moving up Pyay Road from time to time and thought I’d try it. 500kyat (33 cents) in a comfortable, new, air-con vehicle.  I discovered online that the starting point for this airport odyssey was the main Yangon Railroad Station. So I hiked there to find masses of buses parked. I boarded a likely one, whereupon the driver pointed excitedly at an “Airport” bus driving by us. He motioned me around the corner. I quickly decamped and trotted after the moving bus.  In two blocks I found it stopped in the middle of the street at no official location. The ride took 50 minutes only, depositing me directly in front of the domestic terminal.

Arriving an hour early for our meeting, I found a restaurant and had a non-memorable lunch, reading further in John and Julie Gottman’s book about failing marriages. Boy, we had the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse in spades in ours.  Not Conquest, War, Famine and Death from the New Testament but as defined by the Gottmans: Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness, and Stonewalling.  And Withdrawal. The book, based on (especially) his research over the years, is a great read, especially to assess one’s own capacity for a successful relationship. The students want me to teach them about Couples Therapy, so I’m teaching myself first. I’ve done some in my practice but it was more informed by my training in Family Therapy and Psychoanalysis than anything specific to a dyad. My friend Hans enthusiastically teaches a different variety, travelling from Berkeley to Seattle and LA to carry the message. Like a preacher in the Old West, except on a 737 instead of a pony.

At the appointed hour, Professor Tin Oo and his protégé, Dr. Kyi Min Tun who is also one of my students, arrived and we had tea and talked. There is a really exciting ferment here—-a new National Mental Health Act is being finalized, there is energy to address the lack of Child and Adolescent MH services, Child Protection is being examined and expanded, and more. A big part of me thinks it is an opportunity I should seize; I can possibly have a significant effect on the direction of its momentum.  I also have done most of the heavy lifting, having assembled the curriculum and all of the teaching materials for the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry training.

The alternative, in a work-sense, is to be at home in Maine and to focus on the genuine pleasures of domesticity, establishing a lovely home on the water and making friends. I fear I’ll not feel as vital, as alive, as I do here.  My purpose there seems like it would be very small and self-contained whereas here it is of a larger scope. If I were assured of good health and vigor and keeping my marbles….   But, then, we never are really assured of that. Witness the late-April 2008 shock of my lung cancer: “The size of a Valencia orange, wrapped around your right subclavian vein.” my surgeon said after its removal.

I long for the serene and familiar beauty of Maine. But, somehow, it feels like a resignation to old age to turn down this opportunity. If I stay here, it would have to be with a three month holiday next summer to visit family and friends in the US and to watch the sun rise and set on Penobscot Bay from the porch of my cabin, with a cup of 44 North “Sumatra” in my hand.

I suppose it boils down to the definite pleasures of self-indulgence, home, and family versus the excitement of novelty and good works or the meditative absorption of building a rowing skiff in my workshed and watching my garden grow contrasting with watching my students grow and spread a gospel in which I believe: “Thou shalt listen and attempt to understand the children (and their parents).”

Complicating all this is that I have met some very lively people here who are doing exciting things. A new Fulbright scholar is spending a night in my spare bedroom, respite from her hotel; she’ll be working on national environmental policy. We had a bite with some people she just met. One runs a plastic film (bags) recycling plant here; the other woman and her husband have been here 15 years, starting their own architecture firm. While all are half, or less, my age, we find lots to discuss. It must be akin to what the early settlers in the American West felt at realizing the vast opportunity. But we are working to strengthen, not exploit and crush the indigenes.  Maybe it will come down to funding: Can I find any?

I think I’ll cast my net widely, keeping my options open and seeing what fish I may catch.