YANGON & SOUTHERN SHAN STATE, MYANMAR
In March of 2017, I had the good fortune to travel to Myanmar as part of a capstone project for my Master's degree. It is only after said Master's degree is now complete that I find the time to finally write about the trip and sift through photos.
In March of 2017, I had the good fortune to travel to Myanmar as part of a capstone project for my Master's degree. It is only after said Master's degree is now complete that I find the time to finally write about the trip and sift through photos.
The morning we landed in Yangon
was cool but sticky, the air lightly scented with jasmine and bougainvillea.
Feeling woozy from back-to-back night flights without much day in between, I
winced at the bright morning sun and fished out my sunglasses while I waited
for our driver to appear. Tall, lanky, and slightly hunched, Tan Saw appeared
wearing a faded t-shirt and plastic sandals, and a green plaid longyi (the
traditional wrap worn by both women and men in Myanmar). He had an enormous
smile and impeccable though accented English and I didn’t protest when he slid
the backpack from my shoulders. From the back seat of the air-conditioned and
heavily jasmine-scented sedan, I watched the city slowly waking up. Most of the
colorful wooden shops were still shuttered from the night before, but a handful
of shopkeepers were out sweeping the sidewalks with the short-handled straw
brooms. A few women in brightly-colored longyis waited at bus stops. My travel
companion commented on the unexpected greenness of the city, huge trees lining
the streets and reaching up over the rooftops, sprouting in courtyards and
alleys. The streets seemed comparatively quiet and orderly for Southeast Asia
which we attributed to the city-wide ban on motorbikes.
By the time we reached our hotel,
the air was noticeably warmer, the mercury rising with every passing minute. We
checked into the hotel, but fearful that travel exhaustion and jet lag would
turn a nap into an all-day affair, I set off with two companions in search of
food. Around the corner, flower stalls spilled into the streets, and a nearby
noodle stand was crowded with families. We found an empty table and settled in
on the green plastic stools. An overly optimistic young waitress greeted us in Burmese
fully expecting that we’d understand at least the essence of what she said. We
smiled and greeted her in English, and she called for reinforcements. Two more
women came over, their cheeks shimmering slightly in the bright morning sun
thanks to the circles of Thanakha, a type of bark pounded into a fine powder
and used as both a moisturizer and sunscreen. One produced a menu with the
swirling characters of Burmese lettering but a few tiny faded pictures. After
some pointing and nodding and awkward laughter, three bowls of noodles arrived,
sprinkled with peanuts, lemongrass, chiles, and a dollop of a clear gelatinous
substance whose origins were best left unknown. A young girl came over and
poured steaming golden tea from a plastic thermos into tiny porcelain tea cups.
While I sat slurping noodles, watching street dogs sniff around the gutters for
any morsel of sustenance, I thought how happy I was to be back in Southeast
Asia.
That bowl of noodles was but the
first of many such breakfasts over the coming weeks, as I traveled around the
southern part of Shan State. We were there as part of a capstone project, to
conduct field research on social inclusion in the Value Chains for Rural
Development (VC-RD) project funded by USAID/Burma and implemented by Winrock International. We had the privilege of visiting tiny farming villages that most
foreigners have little access to, and in each, farmers and their families
invited us into their homes, poured bottomless cups of tea and graciously
answered our questions about their livelihoods, their successes and
challenges. In one village, young women bubbled over with optimism, having
learned business skills from the project that they hoped would lead to bold new
career opportunities and the possibility of a financially secure future for
their family. In another valley, as the shadows grew long with the sinking sun,
women hoed at hard clumps of soil between rows of bright green soybean plants.
They spoke honestly of their frustrations around farming soy, and of feeling
trapped, and I felt pangs of guilt that at the end of our conversation I would
get up and leave, and ultimately return home where the possibilities for my
future felt wide open.
We spent our days furiously
scribbling notes on every conversation and every observation, interviewing
dozens of farmers and leaders, and conducting focus groups with a hundred
others. Between villages, as we bounced over dirt roads, we talked about the
recent political changes in both Myanmar and the U.S., and about nationalism and
ethnic tensions in our respective countries. We talked about our education and
our travels, our childhoods and our future aspirations. Every night we landed
in a new place, collapsing in bed after a curry dinner. The fieldwork added an
intensity to the trip, the compulsion to not only observe the intricacies and
eccentricities of this foreign place, but also to burn the images and
conversations into my memory and my dog-eared notebook. While perhaps an
exhausting way to travel, it was also one of the richer travel experiences I’ve
had thanks to the constant companionship of a local staff member who tirelessly
answered our endless questions about not only the project and agriculture in
general, but also culture and history and food and politics and religion.
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