The mundane and the exotic

Today, the local Muslim community celebrates Mohammed’s birthday in front of my apartment and right in front of the Hindu temple.  There have been repeated parades with a drum band, followed by singers/hand drum players.  Earlier, a woman had to be calmed down by her relatives as her dancing had gone into overdrive.  Right now, there is a communal meal accompanied by a male singer and some speeches.  The open door to my balcony brings the proceedings into my living room.  Not that the a closed door would keep the festivities out.

The open back door to my apartment, as always, frames the Swedagon Pagoda.  The noise-scape there is dominated by the recorded and amplified goings-on in the nearby monastery.  Today the music has a wild gamelan-like tone.

The laundry machine in the kitchen and churns away within the ambit of the Buddha; the laundry lines on my balcony and front room are within the range of Mohammed’s birthday celebration.  I shuttle in between as if it is normal, like procession of mostly middle aged men who (re)enter a monastery or a row of nuns going out for ... what?

The Boat to Myeik

The Boat from Kawtaung to Myeik

There is a boat from Kawtaung, the very southern-most town in Myanmar to Myeik and from there on to Dawei.  The Lonely Planet says so.

 

Two fellow Cuso volunteers and I flew down to Kawtaung to travel on that boat.  The hotel in which we stayed there has a large poster showing the boat, but the lady behind the reception desk said: “no, no boat today.  Too much wind.”  The representative of the Myanmar Tourist Office confirmed that there is indeed a boat to Myeik.  The 03:00 hour sailing time is inconvenient, but the boat sails regularly.  But sorry, not today. “too much wind; maybe tomorrow.”

Asking around with hands and feet, smiles and pictures of boats at the ready, we heard that the boat sails regularly; that it hadn’t sailed in a month; that a man with a megaphone would go around town in the evening before it really sails; that it would sail tonight; that a bureaucrat somewhere decides daily if it sails or not, depending on the winds over 35 knots.  "Negative profit opportunity" said the man in the hardware store that sells tickets to the boat.

Kawtaung has reversed the typical Myanmar answer of “yes” even if “no” is the answer and no yes action will occur.  In Kawtaung, the answer is always “no,”

But the weather in Kawtaung was steady and glorious; never a storm cloud on the horizon.  There is a bit of a smuggling atmosphere there, amplified by billboards addressing human traficking and drugs.  We developed a sneaking suspicion that there are boats sailing between Kawtaung and Myeik, but that the authorities would rather not have foreigners on board.  What would we have found if we would have showed up on the jetty at 02:30 hours.

Flowering?

Flowering?

The 2008 constitution moves Myanmar away from the highly centralized politics and economics of the military period.  States and Regions came into being in 2010.  States and Regions are constitutionally the same:  States refers to areas defined by their ethnic makeup;  Regions are predominantly Burman, which is the largest ethnic grouping in Myanmar, but in 2014 it is far from clear how this decentralization is actually working.  It is not even clear if the current system is the endpoint or the start of the political change.

The Union constitution is, one would hope, an intermediate document.  There is the obvious oddity that the military appoints a quarter of all parliamentarians at the Union and State/Region level, combined with the stipulation that constitutional change needs a more than 75% majority.  There is the petty one that excludes people with a spouse or children who hold foreign passports from the presidency, thus barring the revered Daw Aung Suu Kyi, the leader of one of the key opposition parties, from the office.  But there are other, finer points, such as:

•  the Chief Minister of each State/Region is appointed by the President from the ranks of the elected and unelected members of the Region/State parliament;
•  the Chief Minister selects the civilian members as State/Region ministers, but it is the President who assigns the portfolios that they have;
• the State/Region minister for Border and Security Affairs is appointed by the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and always is a serving military officer.
• there is an emerging State/Region judiciary, but the appointments are made centrally.

The State/Region administrative layer is essentially missing.  The Union General Administration Department, which is part of the Ministry of Home Affairs, provides administrative support to the State/Region Ministries.  Interestingly, the Ministry of Home Affairs is constitutionally bound to have a serving military officer as its minister.  The jurisdiction of the State/Region ministries is limited and the lines between Union and State authority is often blurry.  Given the administrative and fiscal dominance of the Union, the States and Regions are very much in the shadows of the Union government. 

But still, Network Activities Group, the NGO that I support, is using the little bit of room that has been created to work towards change.  For example, small-scale fisheries have become a State/Region responsibility.  It is not a big economic sector but it accounts for a substantial part of income of poor households in Rahkine State, the delta and all along the Gulf of Motama.  These folk are economically vulnerable to the decline in fish stocks due to overfishing on and off shore, salinization of lands, and the periodic typhoon with attendant flooding.  NAG has facilitated the creation of village-based small scale fisher cooperatives that are then linked together at the District and finally at the State level, all with a view to provide these downtrodden a voice in the new State-level fisheries law and move it towards more of a co-management and resource conservation focus.  It is small stuff, except if you are a destitute fisher.  But this work has been made possible by the constitutional change in 2008, incomplete though it might be.

Mind-blowing for me wearing my Poli Sci hat is that the Centre for Economic and Social Development, a small local Think Tank, has to go and interview all kinds of people at the Union and State Region level in 2013 and 2014 to piece together a conceptual map of who is who and who does what.  

An unexpected aspect of under-development in Myanmar:  that machinery of politics is unknown. In Canada, that stuff is rote learning in the first week of Poli Sci 101.  Here it is a puzzle that, when put together, shows missing pieces and some pieces that are so fuzzy that you have to acknowledge that a part of the picture is still hidden.

Betel

Betel

The closest analog to betel chewing is snuff or chewing tobacco.  Almost entirely absent in the city now, it was ubiquitous in my early rural Alberta experience: the tell-tale round Copenhagen tin in a cowboy’s shirt pocket, the spitting in an empty cola can, the bulging lower lip where the user stashes his tobacco wad.

Betel stands are everywhere.  There is one near my front door, there are two down the street.  Betel sellers walk between cars waiting for green lights.  Betel is a green leaf that here in Myanmar forms the packaging for daub of lime and sometimes powdered nuts.  Chewing it leads to excessive production of red spit.  It is common to see a door of a car open up while standing before a stoplight, with the head of the driver leaning out to deliver a splat of red on the pavement.  Chewing it leads to staining of the teeth. 

  

It is an ugly addictive habit, like tobacco.  Men seem to chew it more than women, persons of lower more than persons of higher socio-economic standing.  Outside workers more than inside workers.   

Yesterday, a taxi driver had a particularly bad case of the spits.  He delivered it out of the driver’s side window while the car was in motion.  He did have a sense of aerodynamics in that he cupped his hand leeward of his mouth to give the spit some sideways momentum before the wind drag would whisk it backwards.  I moved over so as not to sit directly behind him.  My grasp of aerodynamics is weak, but the downside of betel spit coming back through the open back door window seemed substantial.

Dogs

 Dogs

These two dogs live on the auxiliary power plant of the mobile phone store next door.  Few people notice or interact with them, but nobody seems to harbor them ill will.  As with most dogs in my environs, they are ignored and, by and large, they ignore the people around them.  Somebody who knows as little as I do about Myanmar, suggested that the reincarnation thinking of Buddhism contributes to the easy co-existence of so many people and stray dogs in my busy little street.

The dogs of my street do have a social life amongst themselves.  It feels a bit like the jets and the sharks, each small pack controlling a couple of meters of Shan Kone street.  The packs become more active after the market shuts down and the street quiets down around 10 or 10:30 pm.  A sudden yelp in the night is common, as is the communal howling at whatever.

I would say that my street has some 15 or 20 stray dogs.  They all tend towards a single beiges brown appearance.  Different streets have marginally different colour schemes, reflecting, I would think, the dominant male’s genes.  You have to think that the lack of the watchful eye of the Myanmar Kennel Club, many of them are interrelated in complicated ways.  The females especially can look worse for wear after a continuous cycle of pregnancies and babies.

The dogs scrounge their food among the market stalls, they sleep on the street.  They are not petted nor do they particularly want your attention.  Two solitudes.  Imagine my surprise when I saw a women coming out of a grocery store with food she had obviously bought for some dogs.  They knew what was coming and were sitting in a row awaiting the treats.  She talk to them, scolded one, and then give them each a bag of chips.  What’s behind that?