[Above photo: Dr. Hnin Aye after her Friday morning clinic in Maubin, holding up a live chicken. Next they’ll pay us in shells! ]
29 September 2019
The European Film Festival is here for 10 days (3 in Mandalay), showing at the Nay Pyi Taw Cinema across Sule Pagoda Road from the Sule Shangri La Hotel in the downtown area and at the Goethe Institute with its charming café. I went with one of the Brits—a midwife who is doing antibiotic research, but cannot get the Review Board to approve it. It isn’t that her proposal is unethical, daring, or puts people at risk; people have lived under the gun for so long here that they are fearful of making any decisions, lest the latter return to bite them. So Faye has taken on other work. She’s enterprising, having worked in Latin America and Africa, as well.
There was a huge line for the theatre—admission is free— but happily she’d gotten there early and was almost at the ticket window when I arrived. The two seats in the nosebleed section—“peanut heaven” we used to say, which is probably very un-PC so I apologize, although I like peanuts—were in the last row, in a distant corner: a little couch, of sorts, for two, sheathed in vinyl so it could be wiped off. I’m sure it is just the sort of spot teen couples dream of getting when they go to the movies.
We saw Cold War, a terrific black and white contemporary Polish film set in the years after WW II. The ill-fated lovers, musicians both, were riveting, although I kept diagnosing the woman whose “father mistook me for my mother so I taught him a lesson with a knife”, clearly traumatized and with attachment issues. I’ve been immersed in this stuff a little too much, I think.
A friend of Linda’s family, whom I met in Hawaii, mentioned she had made a film about sex workers in the Myanmar-Thai border area in the 1990’s, smuggling the cameras and the two other personnel in on separate flights to different locations. Her distributor hasn’t been doing much with the film so she liberated it and it is now for free on YouTube. I watched it, as well, this week. The link is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkYGkZxu3y8 or you can type in Anonymously Yours Myanmar to find it. It’s very much cinema verité, with clandestine interviews with tearful young women. I found it very moving—I mean, these are our mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, friends. Men are such dogs, including the men who hog all the riches and keep the populace starving and desperate. The jade industry alone in this country is $30 billion/year. Then there is all the rest— gold, rubies, oil, and on and on. Opium. Also the men who start the wars, the men who rape women and children. Oh, I must be in a bad way here, but it is really clear why the world is so fucked up and it isn’t caused by the women. No surprise that educating girls in developing countries stabilizes the country and makes it more prosperous, as well as bringing down the birth rate.
I think I’ll go to bed as this is taking a bad turn, albeit accurate.
I went to another fabulous film at the Festival, Sami Blood. It is a Swedish entry about racism and the persecution of the Same (Lapp) people in the 1930’s. It was wonderfully done, especially the amazing righteous intensity and courage of the young girl, the focus of the film, who refused to tolerate being treated as less. I do admire survivors. She reminded me a little of Greta Thunberg. Maybe the kids will get us off of our lazy asses to do something about climate change.
Like many, I suspect, I frequently find myself humming a song whose lyrics echo precisely what I am wrestling with—-or just feeling. The title of this post, lines in a song by Billy Joel, really sum up my current dilemma, although Vienna has never been on my radar. I have a few good years left, hopefully. How do I want to spend them? It’s a battle between doing something good for others here and developing, and consolidating, friendships at home. The latter is currently winning out. I’m sorry to treat you to my obsessional ambivalence in post after post, but this blog is really a diary for me as much as entertainment for others. To that end I want to expose and record some of the currents of my mind, certainly not all of them.
We saw the 13yo boy who drank organophosphate pesticide over the weekend and again, after his discharge, on Thursday. Quite amazing! He was chatty, smiling, very bright and engaging. His parents had talked with his school and all the teachers and the headmaster came by his house to greet him. His father talked with his uncle and other adult males who had teased him, calling him “Gay” because he is tiny and doesn’t want to be injured in rough and tumble play with his male peers, so he plays with girls. The uncle and others apologized. And the child talked openly about being so small and fearful of being hurt. I think that my (our) thought that he may be gay or transsexual was not correct. He’s a smart heterosexual boy surrounding himself with cute girls! If he had been given an antidepressant medication, guess how we’d have understood his recovery.
One of my students, Hnin Aye, and her husband, Kyo Zaw, asked me if I’d like to drive to Maubin and spend the night. She is posted there and has a private clinic she runs on Thursday nights and Friday mornings. They asked another student, Kyi Min Tun, as well. We hopped the ferry to Dalat where Kyo, a merchant seaman home for 2 months between assignments, met us, having taken the less frequent car ferry. We drove for 2 hours through the top of the Ayeyerwady Delta, a vast flat area of innumerable rivers, canals, fish ponds, and rice paddies. And stilt houses. Maubin is a little town, a district center and home, curiously, to two small technical universities. It has a 200 bed government hospital where Hnin is the only psychiatrist. We had a terrific supper at a local outdoor restaurant and checked into the only hotel that is allowed to accept “foreigners”.
I, of course, was feeling so “of the country” that I forgot to bring my passport. I was going to have to sleep in the car until Kyi whipped out his laptop and produced a copy of my passport and my letter of invitation to Myanmar from the Ministry of Health and Sports. I like that they include Sports; it makes sense. Two weeks ago he made me a plane reservation for Thailand in October and I’d given him a copy of the passport. Whew!
The next morning we toured the town, especially the jetty and adjacent market. Many small boats from outlying communities had arrived at 5 or 6AM to bring in agricultural products and to take back staples, including petrol for the boat engines. Most fields here are still plowed by water buffalo, fertilizing as they go. The villagers were packing up and heading back by 11AM, beating the mid-day heat. It was a scene of incredible bustle and reminded me how close we are, in behavior, intelligence, and industry, to ants. They are stronger, more disciplined, and less self-indulgent. We dropped by Hnin’s clinic—a tiny single-room stand-alone building with lots of plastic chairs and people waiting. She clearly was very successful, as I’d expect. She is smart as a whip, practical, funny, and kind. Thinking selfishly for the good of Psychiatry in the country, I have repeatedly encouraged her to join the University of Medicine 1 faculty, as have several of the senior faculty. She isn’t interested, even though she knows she’s very clever and is a terrific teacher. “To move up, I’d have to get a PhD (true enough) and I don’t want to go through all that just for advancement.” I tell you, she’s smart! She clearly understands all the arcane politics, plots, and hoops in academia and wants no part of it, loving her work and her little town, Maubin. I so admire her clarity of purpose.
Seeing Maubin was like stepping into a time machine. I am determined to take the 5-6 hour boat or bus ride to Bogalay, at the extreme southern edge of the Delta before I leave. Just on the Andaman Sea is Myanmar’s most populous and varied bird sanctuary. But mostly I want to keep turning the time machine backwards. Not many foreigners go to Bogalay. I hope there is a hotel that will accept me.
Ah, the chickens are coming home to roost. It’s lovely to see. And the Head Chicken is crowing, “Unfair!”, “Fake!”, and “Perfect conversation!”, as the chefs are preparing to pluck and roast him. Hopefully, Ukraine is just the start of a feast. And a new beginning for our lovely country.
A Psychiatrist in Myanmar 