Laputta

View from a boat coming into shore (Merlin office visible centre-right)

Laputta is a small town, with 3 parallel roads and a market. At each end of the main road there are two Buddhist pagodas and a series of tea shops, with chairs so small and low when I squat down on them my knees touch my chin. There are no roads as such, just a few stones and an opportunity for the rain to make puddles so large you have to wade through up to your knees in the morning.

The office is beside the river, where all the boats are ready to travel to the many villages in the delta. Some of the villages are a 6 hour boat journey away, so you can imagine how remote they are and how difficult it is for them to access trade or healthcare. My desk overlooks the river, which means that I’ve upgraded seriously my office position from being behind a pillar. The river actually has a tide, so I wonder if it’s technically the sea, which would make it the Bay of Bengal, which in turn means that I have a desk overlooking the Bay of Bengal, which sounds a lot more romantic than it is.

If it’s raining, there's nothing to do in the town. If it’s not raining, there’s still nothing to do. But the local staff make the best of a quiet town by getting together and cooking, singing or watching films. Food choice is limited to rice and tofu, rice and chicken bones, rice and pig bones, oily noodles, rice on its own, rice and some green things, rice and crab shell, or there is a single shop which sells paratha. I’ve eaten a lot of noodles, and below is a picture of the sort of thing I have to eat. These noodles were kept in a bag in a fridge, the fat condensing on the bottom to emerge as what can only be described as a brain. The actual human brain wasn’t designed except by the chance outcomes of natural selection, but if it had been we now know that the designer was inspired by some frozen old noodles in a plastic bag. That’s a useful insight to have made 5000 miles from home.

Chilled monkey brain (aka chicken noodles)

On the weekends, the staff members (many of whom are from different parts of Myanmar) get together and cook the same sorts of food and eat with their fingers. I’ve not seen anyone yet who can eat rice with their fingers because it falls through the gaps in their hands and they have to scoop it up and throw it into their faces. That doesn’t stop me getting ridiculed for using a fork. Sometimes we play board games, and so far I’ve lost every single game of Pictionary and Scrabble I’ve played. Having said that, I may be the only person playing Insecure Scrabble.

Freudian slip?

The bathroom of our house is also the kitchen. I know that doesn’t make much sense, but it’s normal here. The shower and toilet are right beside the cooker, so during day-long cooking sessions for all the staff (every Sunday) one must also be very adept at not needing the toilet. And going for a shower means emerging half-naked to a table full of smiling faces. I don’t know if that’s a positive thing or not.

At night, when the kitchen is eventually free, there is still no peace. The frogs are out and loud, the mosquitos are biting any exposed flesh, and the lizards are running around every surface they can find. Occasionally a mouse might run through the kitchen in a blind panic, and I’ve been warned about rats coming through the toilet. Most mornings we have to wake up to a kitchen and lounge with strange poo pellets dropped across the tables and chairs, and I don’t know if these are from mice or from super-sized cockroaches. It’s not pleasant either way.

And still I’m aware this is nothing. I’m living in comparative luxury to many of my colleagues. “It’s like being in New York,” said one visiting staff member, so I hope I don’t sound like I’m complaining. Laputta is a special little town; it’s peaceful, happy, content and calm, which makes it one of the nicest places I’ve had the pleasure of staying. Fingers crossed the country opens up enough to let tourists come down and take tours along the river. Until then, I’m more than happy eating noodle brains.

Acronyms

Yet again this blog piece is nothing much to do with Myanmar; my apologies, I can’t seem to bring Myanmar to light except through my own head filter.

So today, as I’ve probably mentioned before, I need to talk about acronyms. They’re supposed to be beneficial and make life easier for people but recently, as I sit here trying to do a job in a remote town with few links to the outside world, I can’t see how they do anything more than breed confusion. And they do breed. During one of my first jobs, as an order picker at a clothes factory in Rutland, England, we discussed shortening the word ‘warehouse’, because we used it so often.

Let’s just call it the ‘ware’, someone suggested.

Or the ‘house’

We should just call it the ‘W’

’W’ has 3 syllables in it, I said. Warehouse only has 2; it’s easier to just call it ‘warehouse’

Oh yeah

The suggestions of either ‘ware’ or ‘house’ were preferable in the context of the discussion, but only to save one lonely syllable. Generally, word or term shortening is pointless. The letter ‘W’ should (almost) never be in an acronym; if it is hidden in an acronym, it’s probably wasting time. It’s the equivalent of a late substitution in a football game. Only the WI can barely get away with it, because ‘institute’ is such an annoying word. I suppose it would be technically simpler to call it the ‘Women’s I’, but that doesn’t come across very well. Nobody wants to hear you discuss women’s ‘i’s.

WHO is another. That’s double ‘u’, aich, oh. It’s a 5 syllable brain teaser to say three letters. We’re all better off calling it the World Health O, and then we can all save ourselves 2 syllables each time. Over a lifetime that’s probably enough syllables saved to feed a starving family for a year. A syllable saved is a syllable earned. Imagine all the times you’ve said ‘www’ and didn’t save time by saying ‘world wide web’ instead. Even George Bush cut it down by a third.

Acronyms are not needed for single syllable words and are only required for multiple syllable words at a push. Yesterday, I was looking for the meaning of the acronym ‘PSF’ in the context of sanitation activities Merlin recently finished, so I googled it and discovered more than 20 alternative interpretations. These included: Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, Prolate Spheroidal wave Functions, Palestinian Popular Struggle Front, and Price per Square Foot. It took me more than 15 minutes to eventually find what I was after (we have very slow internet here), but somebody could have just saved me all that time-wasting by writing down ‘Pond Sand Filter’. It was a 4 syllable term, which had been conveniently shortened to a 3 syllable term.

I can understand their use in text-speak, because text messages take a while to write out and they are, in most cases, widely known, such as LOL and LMAO. LOL has even become a single-syllable word in itself and has yet retained its meaning, which I like. That’s language evolving and being useful. If people in the aid world called the WHO the ‘hoo’ it would be both funny and useful, but they don’t; they make it, literally, 5 times more difficult to say.

And as a favour to you all, I’m going to acronymise (new word?) that last sentence - IPITAWCTWTHIWBBFAUBTDTMILFTMDTS. Look that up on google.