Prayers of a Fifteen Year Old

Forgive the glitches in blogging. My posts from May til October will remain absent til I leave the country again. I imagine them rather like letters that have been lost in the post on the way to the people that I write this blog for. Give it a few more months and the post-man will come.

It is a Sunday morning in Yangon and the rain feels as though it will never stop. It has pounded our world all night and this morning in the early haze of dawn, when I kissed a friend goodbye, it rose to new crescendos.

Monsoon season ended three weeks ago and so the storms of this season are all of the thunder and lightening variety.

"Oh no - this is not rainy season rain !" people exclaim, "this is second summer,"

And it is - subtly different from the grim ceaseless rain of Buddhist lent.

I feel rusty at writing a blog - it's been so long and I cannot quite remember how one begins. But I want to communicate outside of this little world so much. And I want to stop watching my back over what I write - to be silent is to have allowed the powers that be to have won. So I am in an undisclosed internet spot, on a computer that cannot trace who I am - working through a proxy that allows me to access this site.

Life is a circle here. It follows spirals of anger and relief, loneliness, frustration and utter wonder and the benign sense of being home.

In the early mornings I ride a taxi to work amidst the glaring sun, my head thrown out of the window so far that my entire upper body leans into the wind of passing cars. Often I stop by a serviced apartment - I sneak in and pretend to be a guest. The waiters know my name and I go swim in an outdoor pool that looks onto a glorious golden Pagoda, or sit over coffee while finishing writing an article.

Throughout the day I tramp to various offices around town - UN agencies and INGO's and just normal everyday people - the flurry of stories that run around my head are condensed and held down and hammered out. Occasionally they are creative and thought-out but for the most part they are mundane - stories of the relief effort for the most part. Almost every story becomes political - almost every story cannot help but touch on the abject poverty of this place. It feels like I am being given a crash course in emergency relief - and my teachers are the people I interview and the reading material they give me: workshops on psychosocial care, disaster risk reduction, afternoons with water and sanitation experts, hours with child protection people and in between a constant desire to understand it better - what is really going on? What is the truth about this relief effort? Have we sacrificed too much for access? Will the government turn around and throw out this international presence?

Work is interrupted by occassional power cuts, or teashop breaks - where we sit beneath a tree on the side of the pot-holed pavement, eat rice that gives us the shits and drink tea that is so sweetened our teeth bite.

The expat lifestyle increasingly expands to fill up my weekends and weekdays. My compatriants here are aid workers for the most part. Many brought in in droves for the Cyclone relief, some here for long-term development and all working on a deadline. The temporariness of everyone's contracts glimmers on the horizon of all interactions. And often the people I have been interviewing all day spill into the social hours of my nights.

It's been a culture shock to watch an emergency play out its course. To watch the mistakes. To meet the people that ride from the adrenaline high of earthquakes to the intellectual and physical strain of complex conflicts. Far-flung corners of the world seem closer: Afghanistan, Darfur, Somalia, Chechnya, Iraq. People are looking for a break in Burma - a bit of "me-time" before they head to somewhere bloodier. But the bloodiness here is buried deeper. And often times I'll look up from the colonial restaurant or beautiful bar in which we sit drinking expensive cocktails or eating fabulous dinners and wonder where our money is going. We all wallow a little in guilt. And the question of "Are we doing more harm than good" seems to apply as much to newspapers as it does to aid work.

Every Saturday night the stark reality of where we live hits me - and some of the bloodiness of it all soaks into my day-to-day life. It leaves me numb and angry. It is the night when they censor the paper. And each week the wound is opened up again, inflamed by by continual proding. For hours we sit and absorb the undoing of the work of the week. We adjust the layout to cover the gaps - great searing gaps where the news should be.

I think it is in the story of Rupelstilskin that a princess spends her nights unpicking the sewing that she has done each day - so as to ensure she never finishes her task.

The Press Scrutiny Board unpicks the threads we have woven for the week. The ten pages I edit and layout are sliced by a third, along with the articles I have written for the week. The articles I carefully choose on how press freedom is being threatened in Vietnam, or how North Korea is on the edge of starvation or how sex workers in India are finally getting the chance to have bank accounts or how the world food crisis is threatening rice prices or how the financial crisis is affecting Asia are routinely cut. Through the censors red pen one gets a sense of this government - the randomness of censorship, but also the completeness - it is not only the critique of government or the promotion of human rights that must be censored, they make moral decisions -- they are creating a vision of Myanmar - an ivory tower of a place, where drugs, HIV and disease fail to penetrate. In their world women do not experience domestic violence, monks are never anything but good and the world is not full of economic and physical threats - unless you are in America or Europe - bad news from which is glorified daily in the state paper - "The New Light of Myanmar".

One would think it would get easier to work in a censored paper - one would imagine one would become immune - lose one's spirit and just get on with it. Learn stoicism. As it is, the opposite seems to be true; It's as though you take the bubbling anger of last week and it becomes a part of the following week's anger - piling up until you are overwhelmed. One mass of anger that is exacerbated by the stories you hear; the friend who spent ten years in jail for leading a demonstration in 1988, the forced labor amongst the Karen who survived the Cyclone, the terror friends feel if you go and visit their homes, the law that means doctors cannot treat a rape victim if she does not report the case to the police, the voices that listen in to your phone conversations and put programs on your computer to record everything you type.

Throughout the whole month of September I was angry. Consumed by anger. Anger that ripped through into other corners of my head and left me wondering whether I could really say I was doing less harm than good. Despite the luxurious hotels and "safe" streets this is an unhappy and cruel place. Or at least it felt that way in September. The ghosts of the revolution of last year were maybe walking the streets at that time.

When I was fifteen I drew a mural on my bedroom wall. Interspersed with a teenagers doodles I wrote quotes and poems that I liked. It is still there, ten years on. One of the quotes is a prayer, it prays for "anger at injustice."

I had always believed it was a blessing to feel angry at injustice. Not only a blessing, but an obligation. What other response could one possibly have to blatant injustice?
But to be angry at injustice in this country - risks being consumed and set
aflame by the emotion. It risks being eaten up.

In September I beginning wondering if I was a fool to have ever prayed for anger at injustice. Because five months of anger felt like more than I could quite tolerate.

So I have been trying to understand how the Burmese manage. I looked around and I spoke to friends here and although there is a lot of anger, there is also a lot of acceptance, understanding and calm here. It is a cliche to talk too much about Buddhism in Burma. And yet it seems fundamental to understanding how people are not consumed entirely in anger - how people's good naturedness spills out into the world around them - in spite of the oppression, the poverty and the neglect. Perhaps this is really at the heart of why people here are so good at covering up their anger -- they have learnt the destructive nature of the emotion - so that when Buddhism calls for understanding in the face of anger it is a form of empowerment - a means of releasing oneself from a lifetime of anger - it is a way of making peace with oneself. It doesn't create change - but it does create stillness and calm.

I wondered throughout September if I should we be wishing for calm in the face of injustice - and how understanding might lead not just to passivity, but to action. Anger can and does breed action - but can it also lead to destruction - of oneself? I wondered if I would have to change that quote on my wall next time I am home.

In that funny habit of life - I started reading a book on the Buddhism that is practiced in this country -- and I found the question that has dominated my time here asked:

"Can't there be wholesome cravings and aversions - for example hating injustice, desiring freedom, fearing physical harm?

And the reply came:

"Aversions and cravings can never be wholesome. They will always make you tense and unhappy. If you act with craving or aversion in the mind, you may have a worthwhile goal, but you use an unhealthy means to reach it. Of course you have to act to protect yourself from danger. You can do it overpowered by fear, but by doing so you develop a fear complex which will harm you in the long run. Or with hatred in the mind, you may be successful in fighting injustice, but that hatred will become a harmful mental complex. You must fight injustice, you must protect yourself from danger, but you can do so with a balanced mind, without tension. And in a balanced way you can work to achieve something good, out of love for others. balance of mind is always helpful and will give the best results."

Don't worry I have not become a Buddhist just yet. And come next Saturday night I will once again fume and talk about the punching bag I need to buy and I will still feel close to tears when I hear about the imprisonment of more political prisoners and the continued wealth that pours into the military coffers, while children work for 75 US cents a day. But perhaps it's the beginning of an answer to the prayers of a fifteen year old.

And with that this mammoth blog entry is at an end. Love to all of you who read it.