Covid-19

[Above photo: A 13th century temple complex at Sukhothai, Thailand.]

15 March 2020

Kelly and I had supper last night at a little ethnic restaurant, Mu Ai Kachin, in Hledan District. There was no decrease in population density compared with Chinatown; Hledan was packed. There are a large number of street barbeques, especially of delicious-looking fish. Kelly, true to form, brought some Anchor Steam Beer because the place doesn’t sell beer but doesn’t mind if you BYO. We had our usual wide-ranging conversation, including his amazing tales from Malawi where he worked for 5 years in the 1990s. He lived in a former convent on the Shire River in Liwonde. Among other notable achievements, he met and courted his future wife, then doing public health work in the area.

Kelly and a friend designed and built a houseboat, 18’ long with two stories and propelled by a 10hp 4-stroke engine he brought as extra luggage from the US. The pontoons were 55 gallon drums welded together. They would cruise up and down the Shire after work. Wanting more speed, they built a skiff which the outboard would move right along. So rapidly, in fact, that the plentiful hippos didn’t have a chance to rise and signal their presence as they heard the approach of the boat. They were both once flipped out of the boat by a submerged hippo who rose rapidly as the boat passed over him/her. Kelly had the presence of mind to push the tiller to the side so the boat circled back and they popped in quickly, as the large and plentiful crocodiles gathered for a snack. Many fishermen are lost to crocodiles on that part of the Shire, although hippos kill more humans in Africa than crocs, cats, and venomous snakes combined.

My nose was running a bit at supper and my throat was scratchy. In addition, I’d had diarrhea for 3 days which was unusual as I am very careful about food. After returning home at about 9, I headed for bed as I was fatigued. The night was punctuated by an increasingly sore throat, congestion, a fair bit of sweating, and possibly a low-grade fever. At 6:30AM I called off my class for today; I don’t want to infect everyone. I hate to do it as we have momentum and I’d prepared well.

My conclusion is—-inconclusive. These are compatible with the symptoms of early Covid-19 but they also seem like a summer cold, except for the diarrhea (4% of Covid-19 cases have this, puzzlingly.). I’ll rest and shelter in place. Fulbright recently sent out a letter requesting all Fulbrighters to head back to the US ASAP. Since I have only 2 weeks left on my fellowship and since this is now my home, I decided not to comply, letting them know politely. I just cannot duck out of my two classes and feel OK about it. Plus, now I wouldn’t be able to board a plane. And why would I return to the US where Mike Pence and Jared Kushner are in charge of my health and safety? A religious zealot fearful of his sexuality paired with a narcissist whose estimation of his abilities far outstrips them [Witness his ME peace plan.]  As an aside, it’s not surprising that Ivanka married the latter, familiarity here breeding attraction, not contempt. Don’t be fooled by the fact that he is svelte, not portly, like his burger-chomping father-in-law.

I supervise two of the physicians in my Sunday Interpersonal Therapy training group an additional 2 hours every two weeks, since they are the leaders of the group and have each had more training and experience than the others. One mentioned that several of the group members didn’t seem to have been taught basic counseling skills. I thought I should remedy that and realized that I never was taught basic counseling skills. I read books and papers about many aspects of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, had many seminars examining the metaphysics of angels fitting onto the head of a pin, and had many, many hours of mostly excellent case supervision in the course of my training. As a result, I searched my experience, extracted ideas from various publications, and folded them into a brief training. It’s a start, as all of this is.

One of the boys who they presented to me in supervision was a 14yo from a very rural area. He was sent to the monastery 2 years ago. He never really knew his father, who worked away from home and died shortly after the boy came to the monastery.  His mother remarried and, as seems to be common here (in Malawi, as well), the new husband wanted nothing to do with his new wife’s children so the boy has had no contact with his mother. His older sister died for reasons he doesn’t know 5 years ago. He gets angry easily, teases others, and fights often. He is somewhat withdrawn and chooses to have friends only in school, not in the monastery where he lives and eats. He wants to be a soldier, which would provide both an outlet for his aggression and a ready-made family for life.

The other child presented in supervision is also 14yo from a rural village. After his parents divorced when he was 7yo, his mother left all 4 children and remarried. She has had no contact with any of her children since she left. His father and eldest brother do keep in regular, if infrequent, touch with him. His second eldest brother left home shortly after the mother and hasn’t been heard from since. His sister “disappeared” 3 years ago, at 16yo and her whereabouts is unknown. He seems very intelligent and well-adjusted. He has lots of friends from school and the monastery, has a close friend to whom he can “tell all my feelings.”, and wants to be an engineer.

I don’t know what destroys the family ties in Myanmar. I have seen many children whose parents send them away and never contact them, which is not an economic matter here in the land of ubiquitous cell phones and cheap service.  Maternal-child bonding is instinctual. Is it from grinding poverty? The economic hopelessness of life in rural Myanmar leading to chronic depression? Something in the desirable detachment of Buddhism? What I’ve seen hasn’t involved substance abuse, as we saw so often in broken inner-city families in California.  Clearly the second child’s father, who calls him every 2-3 weeks, and older brother who sees him occasionally, provide him with a feeling of being loved, which contributes to his success in school and close attachments to peers

Every night as I open my bedroom window I look across and down to a floodlit area with several garbage cans. I enjoy watching the rats, often through my binoculars, trundle around in search of food and sex. Freud’s drive theory.  Maybe adventure. Maybe inspiration. They are part of the landscape of every large city, adaptable and ingenious. And prolific. A flattened, desiccated rat corpse was on the sidewalk as I headed to work one day. I planned to see how many days it would remain in the general area; it was gone the next day. A crow? Another rat? A garbage collector, most likely. Yangon appears to function amazingly well, given its size and ancient infrastructure, especially if you overlook the frequent electrical fires. Rats like to eat the insulation off of wires, for some reason. Let’s put some cayenne in it.

My brain is fading as I sneeze more and this thing progresses. Time to stop.