Preparation

The Burmese New Year is approaching fast. Everybody I know is preparing to escape the madness of Yangon and do something sensible like see their families or go on holiday. The water festival, as it’s known to us foreigners, is so-called because everybody throws water at each other all day, without respite. If you’re rich enough, it’s advised to carry a double-barrel, back-mounted, hyper-pressurised super-soaker and to wear water-proof clothing. That’s why I’ve bought a mini plastic pistol from the corner shop, which is too small to get my fingers into, just as a backup for when I’m hiding behind my sofa in my pyjamas.

As a Myanmar noob I’ve decided to stay in my flat and bring deep, discouraging isolation upon myself until I can safely emerge into the sunlight after 5 days of this intense partying. There’s good reason for this – apparently going outside is fun and novel for the first 20 minutes, then gradually less exciting, until half an hour later your only wish is to be a real boy again. Not that I’m looking forward to the exercise of staying in the flat alone either. There are plenty of instances of people going mad in isolation – Norman Bates; that guy Jack from The Shining. I don’t think any of them ended well.

I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve to counter the inevitable monstrosities that my mind will conspire against me. There’s exercise, eating, listening to music, sleeping, rocking back and forth in a corner and looking out the window. I’ve also got heaps of TV shows and films to watch, books to read and games to play, just as long as the electricity holds out. The electricity will, inevitably, cut out at some point, leaving me without the option to do any of these things. Even today, as I got into the lift in my apartment block, the electricity cut out just as the doors were closing; I only just escaped, and narrowly avoided getting stuck between floors 3 and 4.

I do plan to run the gauntlet of downtown at least once, carrying my pocket pistol in my belt and a camera in my right hand, in the desperate hope of catching a picture of what I’m assured is the year’s biggest party, to share sometime during in the week.

But don’t blame me if, instead, you get the painful soliloquy of a man stuck behind the sofa in his pyjamas, endlessly typing “all work and no play make mike a dull boy” into a broken computer.

Ceiling

I’m 5500 miles from my home in London, where my family and friends are. I don’t have access to a telephone or internet except when I wander down to the local coffee shop. So an email that’s guaranteed to shock me has the subject: “The living room ceiling has fallen in!”

Alas, this is what I came across yesterday morning. And it brings to light the utter powerlessness of being so far away from home. Thankfully, in this case there were no injuries, except for a bit of shock at having to call the fire brigade at 5am. And it turns out things were not as bad as all that, there was just a small hole in the ceiling and some water dripping through.

But for about 3 hours all I knew was that, in my absence, there must have been one hell of a party at our flat. Talk about bringing the house down.

I spoke with a colleague today about this and there was a look of familiarity in her eyes.

“Yes, this always happens.”

“Really? Ceilings collapsing when you go away?”

“No, having stuff happen back home over which you’re completely powerless.”

“Sod’s law, I suppose,” I suggested miserably.

Of course, that’s exactly what it is. There was a crack in the ceiling for some time, since we moved in 5 years ago. That crack has been smiling down at us throughout a whole 1/6 of my existence on this planet. And then, 3 weeks after I leave, it finally breaks open. It’s a bit like waiting for a Royal Mail delivery at home, but you really need the toilet so you hold it in in case you miss the delivery. Then, finally, you give in – you really really need the toilet – and BAM! The door-bell goes just as you start. And of course you miss the delivery.

I say I feel powerless being so far away, but truthfully I should have known it would happen. So many times I’ve been told what can go wrong will go wrong, but how little I’ve sat back and considered the many assumptions I hold about my life. One of them was “the ceiling will not collapse”.  It’s not a coincidence the ceiling incident happened when it did, it’s actually statistics – bloody statistics – happening in real time. A quick trawl through a generic search engine tells me some clever people created this formula: ((U+C+I) x (10-S))/20 x A x 1/(1-sin(F/10)), where the letters represent, respectively: Urgency, Complexity, Importance, Skill, and Frequency, which basically means “what can go wrong will go wrong, and it will go wrong at the most annoying time”. If something is going to happen between 2 given points of time along an x axis, as we move along that x axis, the likelihood of that something happening increases as we approach the final time because, eventually, it has to happen (unless you are waiting for a Royal Mail delivery, in which case it will arrive two days later).

So, the longer a period of time left for something to happen, the more likely it is that it will occur. Pretty obvious stuff. This is apparently why hesitating at the pedestrian traffic lights will always means cars are more likely to start moving just as you walk across, and why ceilings are more likely to break open just as you leave the country.

And it leads me to reiterate this oft-heard cry:

Sod it.

Identity

Congratulations to me, I’ve been given an email address for the new office, but I can’t help but notice the username asstpc just reads wrongly. Maybe it’s just me. It’s taken this long to get my own email address because my identity has been up for discussion and, up until now, I’ve been “from the London office”, rather than a Yangon employee. I am still the only person on the internal messaging system with the label London HQ next to my name. This is a problem because, historically, there is not a great deal of love between the Myanmar and London offices even though, ultimately, there is not much difference between them.

As an example, in London’s office the position of authority is strongly correlated with how close you sit to the window. For each desk, the boss sits at the end, looking out over a grand view of London. Anyone closer to the middle of the room is less important, along a spectrum of power. This probably explains why, for me, I was sat on the most distant desk, farthest from the window, behind a pillar.

In my new office, I am sat almost exactly in the middle and, once again, farthest from the windows. The shape of the office is different, but the principle remains the same, namely that all the important people are sat around the edges with views either across the office or to the outside world. So my identity has not changed at all in this transition.

The new office

There are small differences. Nowadays there is a lady who delivers me coffee twice a day, which on the face of it sounds great but to a coffee drinker is an eyebrow raiser. Only two cups? Previously I had to make my own coffee, but at least I could have one every hour. And with fresh milk. There is still the overuse of acronyms and people saying vis-à-vis, but it’s by far not as predominant in everyday talk as it was in London. If I could, I would entirely ban the use of vis-à-vis (I thought The Office had ridiculed it out of use…I was wrong) and I would restrict the use of acronyms to maybe only one per sentence, which is quite generous. A typical sentence, for instance “DG-ECHO funds the PC and PHC to manage the CHWs, AMWs and VHCs, who administer EmOAC, ANC and BHS in PHCs” takes about two years to decipher unless you are well-integrated or carry around the book of acronyms, which has more than 2000 entries, contains some acronyms of acronyms, and is not yet complete.

Plain English would be so much more inclusive, but saying stuff people don’t understand means people are less likely to argue with you and more likely to think you are clever. The route to that seat near the window is laced with NGO-speak, so I’d better get used to speaking it, vis-à-vis my career development. And that goes for whether I’m in London or Yangon.

Yours, asstpc

Enemies

John shoots the bad guys

Given my knowledge of Myanmar before I arrived 3 weeks ago came from the movie John Rambo, I don’t consider myself an expert of the Burmese political situation.  The movie wasn’t even filmed in Myanmar, so authenticity is not its strong point, and generally I don’t base my political knowledge on Sylvester Stallone movies, unless it’s called Demolition Man (in which case it portrays a nuanced understanding of elite-led oppression against the impoverished underclass).

But Sly did get one thing right in Rambo by highlighting the violence that can sometimes flare up in the midst of an otherwise peaceful society. In the past week, there have been a number of incidents affecting the minority Muslim community up and down Burma, and the issue shows signs of escalating even further.

Unease between the Muslim and Buddhist communities has existed for some time, stemming from years of British rule, and continuing into independent rule. The ethnic divisions the British imposed (a gift we gave to many countries) isolated many of the smaller groups by politicising their ethnicities and creating some wealthy, privileged groups and some poor ones. Religious tensions like those in Myanmar are most often (if not always) political constructs, enforced by some political will.

But for this to escalate into violence is another matter. Enemy-making tactics have been employed in Iran against the Baha’is, in Sri Lanka against the Tamils, in 1950s United States, in Rwanda, by the Nazis pre-WW2, and no doubt in various other instances across history. It is clear much the same is happening in Myanmar to the Muslim community, and the historical social divisions created by years of political reforms are now manifesting in dreadful ways, particularly in Rakhine State.

For each of these cases:

1) there is a minority group small enough to be powerless, but large enough to be visible;

2) this minority is perceived as heaving wealth or power;

2) the context within which the minority lives is politically unstable;

3) the minority is largely physically indistinguishable from other groups (which is why religion, or political persuasion, is so often used as the tool of enemy-making) and;

4) it is politically advantageous for an existing group to build the illusion that this minority is the “enemy” because their political and economic interests are at risk from the instability. Often, violence flares up in transient political states, during elections, or during economic stagnation, because there is so much power to lose or gain at these times.

This week in Myanmar, riots have flared up in various towns between Mandalay and Yangon, and it is likely many more are to come. In the past week alone, around 40 Muslims have been killed and more than 13,000 displaced from their homes, forced to live in makeshift camps in surrounding areas. As we travel headlong into the general election of 2015, Myanmar society is treading on delicate ice and the propaganda machine against the small Muslim community here is growing. A new extremist group called “969” has begun distributing leaflets and videos in an attempt to bolster more riots across the country. The authorities are proactively adopting curfews and raising the number of soldiers to protect the Muslim communities from the possible emergence of this spreading violent behaviour, which some people fear could eventually spill into Yangon.

 

Teza Hlaing's photo of burning buildings in Meikhtila last week

Most people are keeping a close eye on the situation and hoping for 2 things; that there is no further escalation of violence anywhere in the country, and that the internally displaced minorities are prepared and supported for the upcoming rainy season, which will no doubt spread water-borne disease and cause a massive loss of life.

Not sure what John Rambo could do about that, even with his bow and arrow.