Yangon Again and Interview With a Myanmar – Yangon, Myanmar

Yangon Again and Interview With a Myanmar
Yangon, Myanmar

I stockpiled an unfathomable thirteen blissful hours of sleep the night I returned to Yangon and the comforts of Motherland Inn II. I never thought I would sleep like that again after the sleep deprivation torment I had put myself through during the previous nine days.

Souvenir girls Back at the house, Dave and I got into the nitty-gritty. The gist was that no one had any hopes of anything changing or improving while the current leaders were in charge. I brought up the article I had read in the Myanmar Times where the leadership had actually acknowledged their problems and pledged to make efforts to change, but Dave informed me that these empty promises are a routine ploy. The government has become legendary for declaring that changes were coming and then doing nothing.

Dave was surprised and very encouraged to learn that Aung San Suu Kyi, the current head of the National League for Democracy still under house arrest in Yangon and, if you want to believe silly elections, the rightful leader of Myanmar, is well known by the world at large and that her efforts are roundly lauded. Winning the Nobel Peace Prize is a pretty big deal, after all. Like many Myanmars, Dave quietly believes that Aung San Suu Kyi is Myanmar’s greatest hope and though his pessimism ran deep, he prayed that she would be released one day and be allowed to resume her work in transforming the country into a democratic state.

Strangely, other than the widespread dread of being busted for discussing politics with a foreigner, Dave reports that there is very little reason to be fearful of the government in the daily life of a typical Myanmar, though it’s safe to say that this sentiment doesn’t extend to the people currently engaged in forced labor or the people who are grabbed, beaten, raped and killed for no other reason other than they happen to live in regions that are known to be hotspots for rebel ethnic groups.

The subject of the government’s obsession with fortifying their military at the expense of virtually every other aspect of the country’s needs didn’t get very far. I made the point that Myanmar has no serious civil unrest (ceasefires with rebel groups are tenuous but holding), there are no significant crime/violence problems in Myanmar - I didn’t see anyone even raise their voice while I was in Myanmar much less fight, probably because everyone knows that punishments are arbitrary and severe - and other than a trivial border dispute with China, Myanmar has no international disputes that could conceivably require military action. Knowing this, I rhetorically asked why the government couldn’t shift even a little of that cash to help the people? Well, of course the only answer is ‘pure, dang nasty evil.’ Though in all fairness I don’t know why my own U.S. is sanctioning Myanmar, when both governments are virtually of the same disposition in so many ways, sporting self-serving, profiteering, election fixing, everyone-else-be-damned mindsets. Whoops! Get that soapbox out of here!

It was getting late by this point and I reluctantly left Dave with some of my questions answered, but a whole host of new ones that didn’t seem to have answers, frustrating me to no end. Furthermore, though they would have probably upset me, I would have liked to hear more first-person anecdotes about life in Myanmar. The upshot was that I’d managed to befriend a wonderful family, who insisted that the next time that I came to Myanmar, I was to stay in their home and Dave would drop everything and act as my tour guide. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that with my current lifestyle and immediate travel goals, in addition to the supposed possibility that the government will put me on the visa blacklist once enough Internet search engines pick up this web page, it was very unlikely that I would ever be able to return to Myanmar. Though on second thought, having a group of people with almost nothing, generously welcoming someone into their small home who must seem like a tycoon in their eyes is so rousing and heart warming that I might just have to give it a try.