Meeting

In any given meeting it’s almost guaranteed there will be some individuals who say very little or perhaps even nothing at all. They will sit there and observe the others, smiling occasionally, watching for cues of interaction, marvelling at the speed with which some people appear to vocalise their thoughts.

Today, I attended a ‘village health committee’ meeting in a relatively isolated village, and I observed exactly this phenomenon again. The committee was made up of twelve elected members, each of whom represent the village’s health affairs and, essentially, coordinate the health affairs of their village, with support from our organisation. I was fortunate to be a guest of honour in the meeting and I sat next to the village administrator, delivering a set of questions about the formation of the committee, the village health needs, and their future aspirations. In this regard, despite the meeting being held entirely in the Myanmar language, I was able to participate and in a sense direct the course of the meeting’s topic.

Of the twelve attendees, however, I soon noticed that only three people were regularly talking, almost jumping over each other to offer one of their gems of wisdom. This included the facilitator of the meeting and two other men. The others were mostly nodding, watching the speakers closely, smiling enthusiastically, and laughing at all the right moments. It got me reflecting about the nature of meetings and also the assumptions we make about personalities in social situations. It was very easy amongst the group to defer decisions and insights to the talkative ones, as though their fast-hitting ideas were good by virtue of the speaker’s quickness and verbal fluency. But there was no reason to think they were particularly insightful or as important as anyone else’s would have been (at least, I don’t have the evidence otherwise) it’s just that talkative people often seem more impressive. I soon realised the participation of only a quarter of the people was not getting the most out of everybody. It was the equivalent of playing a football match and only letting the goalkeeper and two defenders touch the ball (mathematically almost correct, arguably, because the goal keeper isn’t an out-field player).

Because this meeting phenomenon is so common (and because I understand that roughly 30-50% of all people in the world are introverted, more or less, depending on where you live[1]), this sort of thing should be expected. So something clearly needs to change – and it sure shouldn’t be the personality types of introverts any more than it should be extroverts. Smaller groups and an understanding facilitator would be a start, I suppose. Using the principle of consultation is a key factor too. I personally get frustrated when agendas aren’t stuck to, because this allows some people to talk about whatever pops into their heads, a bit like children chasing bubbles. I tried saying whatever popped into my head once and ended up talking about one-eared dogs in space; but it still probably seemed impressive to people listening.

Until quietness is recognised and accounted for, I worry that the other half in the corner will remain quiet and their equally important and intelligent ideas, arguments and choices will remain unnoticed. And your football team will continue to be merely a trio of average players.

---

[1] Referenced from Susan Cain’s book Quiet.

Boat

The last time I went on a boat on choppy waters I ended up being sick over the edge, just before my friends jumped in to go swimming. I didn’t tell them until we’d got back to land they probably had bits of last night’s rice in their hair, mixed with orange juice and stomach juices. Needless to say, we’re no longer in contact with those friends and I’m sure that’s one of many reasons.

I got to go another boat today, only this time I wasn’t sick. Nor did anyone go swimming, because I was warned there were snakes doing their own snorkeling in the rivers, and we wouldn’t very much want to join them.

Riverside homes

The boat, a barge-sized thing with oodles of cheap 3-in-1 coffee on-board, took us along the Delta’s river network for about an hour, and dropped us off at a community health centre where midwives and health workers were being trained. There they told me that, sadly, one of the midwives had been killed the previous night by a snake. Apparently, she had been awoken at midnight by what she thought was a cat scratching her elbow, but fifteen minutes later she was struggling to breath. When she then woke up her fellow health workers in a panic she didn’t realise she only had ten more minutes to live, and not enough time to get help.

She was not a Merlin staff member, but it was still a terrible thing to hear. I’m not so sure how everyone else in the room felt about it; I had to remind myself most people living here had experienced a loss of life and community unlike anything I had experienced myself. Laputta, the town where I am now working, had been massively hit by a series of calamities throughout the past decade including the 2004 tsunami, the 2008 cyclone Nargis, and the 2010 cyclone Giri. Cyclone Nargis alone killed 198,000 people in Myanmar and hit this town the worst (80,000 people were killed in Laputta, where there are now only 47,000 residents – the number of deaths here is roughly the same as were killed by the atomic bomb in Nagasaki) and the village I saw had been completely leveled by the storm and now rebuilt, save for the Buddhist temple which holds its own relic of the disaster.

A temple's fallen spire, still unmoved after 5 years

Laputta is a small town, quiet and slow-moving, and, along with its surrounding villages, rightly proud of its community spirit and sense of connectedness. The village I visited was delighted to share the story of how, during last week’s cyclone near-miss, they had sheltered hundreds of people from surrounding sites and used new technologies to warn people of the impending potential disaster. In some parts of Myanmar this warning ended up with its own disasters, but here in Laputta it was a sign of strengthening capacity and greater forethought amongst its leaders.

When our boat returned to dock in Laputta’s main town, the storms for this season had just started. Now there are two months of heavy rains to look forward to, and even choppier waters ahead.

Live shot from a scooter, speeding (sort of) along the main street

 

Lonely house, as viewed from the boat

Train

I didn’t get to leave Yangon after all, that’ll take a bit longer than I thought. Getting authorisation to travel around the country is getting more and more difficult as the country welcomes more foreigners (such as me) and yet remains struggling with the same resources as before.

So, to pass the time in Yangon I decided to catch a train, as you do.

Much like the circle line on London’s underground network, Yangon’s own circle line goes round the edge of the city and back to the beginning, stopping off at various places but, unlike London, it provides a view of the city, some pleasant and others not so. The fact that it’s the only train going round in a circle makes it easy to gesture what train you want to the guards at the station without speaking Myanmar (draw a circle in the air with your index finger). No small talk necessary.

The station itself is, from the outside, a very attractive piece of architecture and on the inside is your usual train station. Except that passengers wander willy-nilly from platform to platform in front of moving trains and mothers watch unconcerned as their young children climb onto the tracks.

A Woman In Black moment...

One man tried to convince us to cross platforms with him. I couldn’t tell if this was from genuine concern that we were about to catch the slow train to Mandalay, or whether he was trying to kidnap us, like an alternative train-spotter. He was quite charming and shook our hands, but we stayed firm and thanked him. I still can’t imagine what he wanted from us and he only came back to try kidnapping us again twice.

When we finally got on the train, my colleague and I sat on a wooden bench next to a young family, whose father was cradling his baby to sleep. But a man in a uniform tapped me on the shoulder and moved us both behind a roped-off section, where the train police sat. The benefit of this was that we got a seat to ourselves the whole time, opposite 2 very polite, knife-wielding men, but the downside was that we became like 2 pandas in a zoo, and the subject of many stares. To be fair, we were also staring back at everyone else and as the journey got underway I saw a number of people coming and going, some of whom smiled and waved at us, and others who probably held the same disdain for us as a Londoner would of people standing on the left of escalators. Thankfully, I was reassured this wasn’t London when I heard Celine Dion blaring from a teenager’s mobile phone.

 

A man bravely performs a Stand By Me homage

For the whole journey, the train moved at a snail’s pace and I had it in my head the train was being pulled by a contender in Myanmar’s equivalent of the world’s strongest man competition, edging the carriages along one inch at a time. It took 3 hours to get round the city in the end. Along the way I saw people throwing tables through windows, children selling cups of water for about 4p, a few people openly defecating beside the tracks, and people drinking from river water contaminated with piles of waste. The open defecation thing is a real concern across many parts of the country and has largely to do with the lack of education about how such habits can cause health problems, and I can’t say drinking contaminated river water is any better.

Homes caught between the railway and a dirty lake

When I wasn’t noticing those things, the relaxed atmosphere of the train meant I could stick my head out the window any time I wanted, or even hang precariously from the place where the door should have been, and not even the police would stop me. The train was moving far too slow for me to get my head lobbed off by another passing train.

Street food

Workers up to their waists in water

By the time the journey was over, and the various groups of foreigners got off (who must, by the way, seem extraordinarily daft to the locals, getting on and off at the same stop and not doing anything), we made a dash for the side exit, not wanting to run into the kidnapping train-spotter again.

Back at the station with Percy

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