2 August 2020
[Above photo: Yangon in monsoon season, before a deluge.]
I have only 3 more months with this group of students. We’ve now been together for 5 ½ months. They have learned a lot but more is needed before they are turned loose. Thankfully, we were approved for another month because we started the clinic so late due to Covid.
My students and I went to City Mall St. John, which is a short walk from the University of Medicine, on Thursday. I suggested I take them out to lunch but they would not allow it and took me. We had a pretty good biriani with mango lassis. One of the students said, “When I was a 28 yo doctor and my husband [a newly-minted veterinarian] was courting me, we went on our first date. He bought one bowl of chicken soup and asked for another bowl so he could divide it between us. I burst into tears, thinking that I was going to be well cared-for and suddenly he was being so cheap. Plus, it was embarrassing to have him do that in public. He asked me, ‘Why are you crying?’ I told him why and he said, ‘Oh, we need to be careful with our money and save it.’ He came from a very poor family in a village and is still very careful with money. I like to spend it sometimes. Then he scolds me. But I love him and he is very good with the children.”
One of my students from last year came to town. She wanted to get together and she, two others from that class, and I had brunch at Feel Myanmar. It is a very typical and tasty traditional Myanmar roadside restaurant. It was fun to see them all and we talked a little shop, although all the students have instructed me that it is forbidden to talk about work during a meal. The one who is visiting brought me an amber pendant with an insect and some wood inside it—so incredibly sweet. She is single and from Lashio, far into Shan State near the border with China. The government has posted her in sweltering Pyay, an hour from here and not much of a town. She is lonely but a very resourceful woman. She works 5 days/week from 9AM-12PM in the hospital and then is free to….go back to her un-airconditioned room. She crochets small animals that are very cute. She has managed to save enough money to build a two story house on a piece of land in Lashio but cannot live there because the government keeps posting her elsewhere. She returns by bus—-an hour to Yangon, then 15 hours to Lashio—every 3 weeks to supervise the construction of her home, to see her mom, and to run her private clinic. It is really pretty crazy how dislocated people’s lives are, especially those who are married with children. If they work for the government, or their spouse does, they must move every 3-5 years and there is no coordination to keep families together. So, for example, a doctor married to a soldier may live apart from their respective spouse for many years.
I walked down my block to the foot of Sint Oh Tan, crossed busy Strand Road, and followed a group of women through a break in a fence and along a tiny wet market to the side-street that services the piers. It was a scene of great activity. There were 4 or 5 piers with large boats filling up with passengers and freight, preparing to depart for ports in the Delta or even, I guess, up the Ayeyarwady River. And there were dozens of 25-30 foot open boats with unmuffled diesels ferrying passengers and freight across the Yangon River and back. I’ll return with my camera sometime as it is filled with color and lines and people. When the new bridge across the Yangon River is completed in a few years, I wonder if everyone will just take the bus and the small boats will become a memory only? Every time I think of moving to a leafier, less congested part of Yangon (and into a cheaper apartment), I think about how much I love watching the river traffic from my current place. I’ve asked my brother, who has a thriving business (penobscotstudio.com) creating landscape paintings from photos, to capture the view from my window with acrylics.
Culinary Adventures– Two weeks ago I found a jar of tahini in an upscale Marketplace—near the US Ambassador’s home, wouldn’t you know. There are many grand houses in that area with lots of Europeans in them, I suspect. Today I had a lust for hummus; since other lusts seemed less likely to be gratified, I hoofed it back to City Mart St. John. The Ocean Supermarket there has lots of electric appliances and I bought an Otto blender for $16 on sale. It comes with a coffee grinder attachment, as well. It is much better than the incredibly dangerous (very) used one we bought from a PC volunteer in Lilongwe; every time Linda used it I would cringe, not knowing a more helpful response to her nearly getting electrocuted and losing a finger, simultaneously. When home, I washed the machine and started to make the hummus. I had bought a lemon for some reason a few days ago—-generally we use limes which are cheap and plentiful in the wet markets—and squeezed it into the blender, along with garlic cloves, salt, tahini, half a teaspoon of cumin—whoa! That wasn’t the cumin. That was the chili. Wash it all out and start over, now using limes since I had no more lemons. It cavitated until I added enough olive oil and a bit of cold water. It took some work but the product is wonderful on the end of carrot and cucumber sticks. I’ll make several small batches and freeze it, minimizing the clean-up. Now I can make smoothies, as well.
I want to get a really good photo of the Shwedagon Pagoda, Myanmar’s most holy and famous Buddhist site, to open my presentation for the AACAP Annual Meeting. The Shwedagon has been closed for several months for Covid so I must shoot it from afar. The bars on top of the Alpha or Atlas hotels have good views. Then I must select the remainder of the photos I want to use to garnish my talk.
I’m orchestrating a rehearsal presentation, by Zoom of course, to occur within the next week or two. I want to make sure we, the 5 of us, get our timing and message right. The presentation is entitled, “The Dawn of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in Myanmar” and will feature my professor, Tin Oo, a student from each of the two classes, and Dr. James Harris, a professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins who played a role here before I came. Jim is more academic than I am; I want to capture the grit, excitement, and challenges of my personal experience. I have encouraged the student (Dr. Le Le Khaing) and former student (Dr. Htun Sandar Linn) to talk about how the course has altered their approach to patients and to include a case description to illustrate that. Out of the 5-6000 child psychiatrists attending the Annual Meeting, I’ll assume some will be interested, although there will be many simultaneous presentations. The appeal of the meeting may be diminished by being virtual. DSM-V 734.2, Party-Giver’s Jitters.
Yesterday morning I received an e-mail from a friend in Berkeley, wondering how I was. I called immediately and caught Tu, Marasita, Hans, and Patricia all celebrating a birthday—-I think Patricia’s but the sound was poor.—-, having supper in the yard of Tu and Marasita’s home. It was so good to have a little contact with them and so remarkable to be able to see and hear them all instantly at such a distance. Thomas Edison, Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi [the first Marquis of Marconi], and others, we owe you. The call reminded me how fortunate we are here with 320 cases in the country and 6 deaths and, by contrast, how careful people in the US must continue to be.
Our sick monster, a Shakespearean combination of King Lear and Caliban, is just the tip of the iceberg, although a particularly “nasty” tip. There are now several carefully written accounts of how the Republican party has been co-opted for decades by a core of bitter, hate-filled, grasping white people with little care for or understanding of the suffering of others, who also are bigoted, racist, xenophobic, and opposed to helping others on principle. Imagine the depravity of thinking $600/week will discourage most people from returning to work. Most would jump at the chance to escape cabin fever, spousal friction, and demanding children in order to resume normal life and be paid for it! Wanting to do away with financial benefits and health care for the elderly. What an incredibly pinched view of the world. I’ve got mine—it may not be much—but I have a seat on this train and I’m not going to squeeze over and let another share it. It’s mine. I earned it. Their [disability, age, stage of gestation, frailty, need, color, comfort] be damned.
It just seems strange to me, a huge projection that everyone else wants a free ride when, actually, it’s me that wants a free ride but I am ashamed to own it so I’ll assume everyone else is a chiseler. I hope this election and what follows kills that Beast, the hate-filled, divisive husk of a Republican party. Let a new party of genuine fiscal and social conservatives arise, minus the hatred and bigotry; it will be healthy for our country. Tucker Carlson can spew his venom, suck his thumb, and damn the world!
[Thanks to Ed Levin’s quick eye and feedback, I realized I inadvertently posted this to my old Malawi site on 2 August.]
A Psychiatrist in Myanmar 