Construction

Yangon builds its new buildings in concrete.   Some are a mixture of concrete floors and pillars with the spaces in between bricked in and then covered with stucco.  It is a building technology that is quickly looks like shit, unless it is painted over frequently.  The effect of rain and mildew on concrete is not a pretty sight.

 

The technology displayed at the different building sites ranges from heavy piling machinery to wicker baskets to move dirt.  The balance lies towards the bamboo baskets.  I have seen one concrete mixer and many instances of concrete mixed on bag of cement at a time, using a shovel, some sand and gravel, and a bucket of water.   The excavation of a storm sewer in my street was entirely done by pickaxe and shovel, the heavy red silt loaded using wicker baskets, and the mortar for the brick wall and the concrete cover mixed by hand.  No machine was used, except a truck to haul away the dirt.  Nearby is a relatively big job to restore the decayed walls of a small canal.  It too is an entirely electrical and internal combustion engine free work site.

Old teak wooden houses are still interspersed between these blocks of concrete in many areas.  In Yangon, few are maintained well; many feel like redevelopment sites waiting for an investor.  Teak houses are still the norm in several provincial towns in Mon state.  The dominant built form in the countryside is hut of woven bamboo(?) walls and an assortment of tarps, corrugated steel and palm leaf roofs.

The Acoustical Landscape

The acoustical landscape in Myanmar is very public.

No fundraiser for a local monastery will think twice of mounting a sound system on a truck to spread the word.  This morning there was one of those through my little Shan Kone Street at 8 am.   

No lottery seller will venture out without a looped and amplified message on his battery-driven stereo.  The celebration for Mohammed’s birthday included a concert that was still going full blast at 3:30 am.  I checked from my balcony.  There were three persons in the audience and four musicians playing.  A rough estimate of the number of people who were in earshot at that hour:  800.

Many a pagoda has fantastic speakers wired up, broadcasting, in the original sense of the work, live or recorded prayer services. The main pagoda in Thaton is so convinced of its message that it reaches all within at least a kilometer of its golden dome 24/7.  Just south of the Pagoda and well within its acoustical reach is a mostly Muslim neighbourhood, judging by the predominance of hijab-wearing women.

A sharp contrast to the acoustical landscape of Edmonton, which is dominated by the drone of traffic interspersed by sirens of emergency response vehicles.

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.