Impressions from Burma
Out of the plane I can hear “Geee-cko-Geee-cko” coming from the main building. This is Rangoon International Airport. It is quite and darkish.
French raiders in the hotel bar discuss the ‘great opportunities’ of Burmese antiques under the ‘current circumstances’.
My local contact secretly squirrels away gems for an escape abroad. He looks at the stacks of local bills and says: ‘This no good’.
Our lapidary keeps the doors open. No security is needed. Burma is safe, as long as you don’t mess with the generals.
First time visitors shed tears at the Shwedagon Paya.
A sign at the muddy river: ‘No foreigners beyond this point’. There is no brigde.
Hollywood-stile villas and new SUVs proof that economic sanctions don’t work for the upper 1000.
My taxi has wooden seats and a plastic bucket taped to the floor. It is half full with red slime. Many Burmese still chew betel-nuts, but they are not allowed to spit on the streets anymore.
Strings hang from upper apartments replacing electric bells.
Grand colonial buildings are occupied by the military. Specky shirts hang to dry from broken windows. Nobody is allowed on the sidewalk. They are serious: I get yelled at.
A local garage makes ‘new’ cars; by hand; one by one; out of scrap metal and an engine. They produce three per month at $1.5k
Drunken monks fight over cigarettes. Religion can be anything.
Burmese food is delicious, not just numbing hot or sweet, but individually cooked, untouched by industrial standards.
Nobody dances at a pop festival. VIP kids sit behind security and fences.
No ATMs, no mobile phones and no computers proof that economic sanctions do work for the lower 35.000.000.
A grainy TV show features stone-faced farmers dancing in shabby costumes. A subtitle reads: ‘Here they still live happily without foreigners’. So very thin they are.
For good and bad, Burma is past caged in a country and its people.
2 comments July 16, 2009
The Rule of Law
Terminal I in Bangkok
I used to despise overregulated western bureaucracies, Nile-long incomprehensive official papers, and I cursed when I needed a notarized birth certificate to get married.
Well, I thought it over! Our airport is shut down by mob, people drive unlit bikes in the dark on the wrong side of the road, the dead cow in the canal competes with the stench from the uncollected garbage, my neighbor runs a brothel, and I would appreciate a bit of the rule of law.
Make no mistake: overflowing sewers, poisoned rivers and spoiled food were once standard fair in London too. The city stank and killed. People were worth only the money they had. Peasants, untouchables, children and animals, all were slaves to others and their little food.
We have come a long way from marauding nomads. Many still have a long way to go, be it on a personal level or as a people. Even if the devil’s advocate claims the last century to have been “truly his” - that is not correct. Genocide is a new word but an old habit. We only started to see evil for what it is.
Bad stuff happens all the time but we are working on it. So, when you fill out the next form, remind yourself, that it is the price you have to pay to live in a better world.
2 comments November 29, 2008
No money for GM or Citi
Give them anything: cold water, a beating, unpaid holiday in Siberia but no cash. They will pay each other more retainers, boni and retirement funds; and go home at 5.30.
Help the people who really got in trouble, pay workers, scrap or reduce VAT for December, pay health services, cut farm subsidies, allow more qualified immigration, invest in small companies, anything, but do not let the fat cats sleep one minute longer. Wake them up. It is market judgment day.
The Citibank sold my grandma a real estate fund as safe investment for her age. Now they froze the fund and ask her for new money.
Simple truth is they didn’t do their job. Out of greed and/or stupidity they ignored a basic universal law: Risk and profit are partners.
Let them suffer!
2 comments November 22, 2008
Don’t buy all that stuff!
Many people suffer three problems:
1. They have to work very hard to earn money.
2. Then they have to endure ignorant (cheap) or arrogant (expensive) sales people to drag stuff home and decipher maddening manuals.
3. Finally they get a headache from all the broken or unfashionable belongings in their garage and backyard.
That makes live hard work only: A garage full of old handbags, shoes, toasters and TVs, cupboards, tools and toys, tea sets, pans and pots, jackets and pants.
Mark that no good gem or jewelry will ever end there!
Don’t buy all that stuff.
It is only trouble.
2 comments November 17, 2008
Single mothers and fathers
Respect and awe! How do you it?
These little fellows are such a handful that even a parent with no other responsibility sinks whining into the sofa every night; until the baby phone goes off.
To take care of a household, run errands, let alone earn money at the same time seems a Herculean task beyond human strength.
And yet, they do it every day.
Respect and awe.
Add comment November 17, 2008
Bali Healer
A long while ago I was terribly sick with a slipped disk or lumbago or very bad back-pain. I suffered for months, got myself hooked on painkillers in booze, and then I lost my job and my friends too. Cause & Effect merged. Things can get so bad; you don’t know where to start repairing your life.
After some inner and outer travel I came to suffer in Bali. A friend recommended a famous local healer. OK, whatever, I’ll try it.
I don’t know about famous but the healer certainly was local, very local. At noon he was in underwear, fresh out of bed. His reception teamed with chicken and the office was an open-air carpet.
Children cried “Foreigner! Foreigner!” and gathered to watch. I was suffering my usual bad day, so I sat down in the mess and surrendered.
The old man studied and squeezed me, and poked my ears and eyes, all the while mumbling stuff in Balinese. He might have called the healing ghosts or just cursed the interruption of his nap I didn’t know, but the birds, children and chickens were dead silent. That made me kind of anxious.
To escape from anything spiritual and because it is common in western medicine, I started complaining about my body, how bad I felt and so on, but he cut me short: “Shush!”
As suddenly as he had begun voodoing he stopped, got up and plucked some leaves from a bush and started to chew them. I thought he was finished, but, oh boy, he just got started.
For appetizers he added some white powder to the chewed leaves, munched them a bit more and then spat the whole slimy mud into my face and on my chest.
The stuff burned on the skin, but I was kept busy with a much stronger sensation: Do you know the point on your elbow that gives you these electricity-like pangs? It turns out you got these points all over the body and when you push them real hard with a stick or something you get electric pangs that last minutes. You squirm and howl. Tears make the chewed leaves in your face burn even more.
Each of these, say, energy points becomes the center of your little universe until the current slowly subsides and that point becomes just a normal point on your body. Gone, no more pain there, good, next point. You squirm and howl and so on.
An hour later he had worked himself from elbows to heels, left to right. I was soaked in sweat, tears and chewed leaves.
Finally he said: “Finished”.
That was the first thing he said to me. The birds, children and chicken started to chatter again. I felt finished too. I could hardly stand.
We did have a long talk thereafter, and he explained to me that in his view the nerve system stores pain in those energy points, and that he “opened” them to release my old pain, like cleaning a hard-drive of old files, old memory of pain. He said I was breathing too shallow and holding my breath too often. That my body was dried up (true, I had only beer and coffee for years), that I needed quietness and massages, air and above all water, water and more water.
Was I healed? No, but I sure felt I had a clean place to start repairing. Which I did.
P.S. When I went again years later he send me away: “No sick. You go home.” No charge.
3 comments October 29, 2008
Sick on CNN
Unless I have a very good day, watching the news makes me sick. I had a friend; she lived on a beach in Brazil. Every evening she would double-lock herself inside the house and watch the world go crazy on CNN.
She was a very paranoid creature. Her world was a terrifying, hostile place and she was always in trouble. She’d call me with news like “They found Glukomoxamil in lemons!” or “The north pole shrank 5%!” or “Barbaristan has attacked Autistan!”
Those days on the beach in Brazil, I ignored all news. I read no papers and had no TV. And you know what? The world was doing just fine as far as I could see. I knew of no problems for months. The sun shone, the waves crashed, people did what they always did and I simply didn’t know. The stuff they mentioned on CNN was not visible on that beach.
One day my friend called me and said: “They fly airplanes into the world trade center.”
I laughed: ”Ja, ja, sure” and hung up. Paranoid stuff.
Add comment October 7, 2008
Sharks
Well, well, now we know for sure. The masters of the universe are in fact no masters. They don’t have a clue either. Not on their street and not in their own companies.
For years they have allowed local banks, homeowners and real estate agents to dream up house prices, give loans based on those dreams and then pay each other fat fees and bonuses.
The homeowner, most innocent of the gang but not free of guilt, closed both eyes and enjoyed the banks generosity. People, not only in the US, got themselves annual loans to buy some whatever (“Our house went up 20% last year!”); or financed a bigger even more overvalued place with a debt on the old house (one may call this a ”self-enhancing feed-back cycle”).
And as sure as physics the cycle defaulted. The long financial food-chain awoke from dreaming up asset values. With that awakening crashed a good deal of world economy, paying for the damage not only in taxes but in trust and confidence. Failing masters are scary.
Add comment September 16, 2008
