Seasons of Stillness and Storm
We are sharing a series of journal entries that the author, JH, contributed following an invitation from Insight Myanmar for publication on our website. She includes the following message: The following entries from my journal along the Burma-Thai border were first shared more than 18 years ago. On the advice of a respected teacher, they were distributed only on paper, so as to protect involved parties while raising awareness. Later, when the Internet became available, many of us still hoped in our hearts that these descriptions would soon become obsolete. Finally, I offer these words here in realizing that certain details remain far too accurate. May they bring benefit. Please forgive my youthful ignorance and arrogance. Errors are my own.
“There are seasons of getting to know how things work; just when you think you understand, the weather changes. Feedback is delivered quite differently here.”
Burma Border Journals #5:
When the rains come here they don’t mess around. It’s sort of like standing in the shower with clothes on. Some friends, as in those who socialize around the guesthouse table in the evenings, chose to visit a certain waterfall yesterday. Access to their destination like most else in this geographical region is seasonal. Three seasons subdivide the span that in North America we partition into quarters; the dry (and hot) season, the hot season (which is hotter), and the rainy season (still hot). This evening I walked the few kilometers back to the guesthouse from the clinic under such rains and recognized firsthand the driving force behind the consistent presence of storm drains and gutters amongst storefronts and homes in which all else appears utterly haphazard. Small rivers hugged the cement street where one hour previously there was only dust. My skirt and shirt clung to the body like giant adhesive bandages. Later on, a breeze blew and, whereas it had been too hot to smell anything, now the air was temporarily temperate enough for me to detect the scents it swept and carried, of sewers, of jasmine, spices, and laundry soap, of both live and crispy skewered chickens, wet pets, and people cleansed and relieved of the heat.
Girls in pigtails stand dripping gaily under the overhangs and alcoves afforded them by shopkeepers. An old man grins under the umbrella. The unexpected pause is not the exception but the norm. People stop to giggle, to chat, to notice the arising and passing away of each drop out of and into silence. In my room, I stripped and peeled the layers from my skin and laid my increasingly floppy, wide brimmed sunhat flat upon a chair. Fleetingly dry and re-clothed, I emerged to a chance meeting with a colleague who offered updates on the mother with hemoglobin of 2.5, four transfusion reactions later.
We also discussed a woman with beautiful friendly eyes, round face, and shaved head. Her baldness looks like that of a nun, but she’s at the clinic with a man who appears to be her partner. Before the full female monastic lineage in Buddhism died out in these parts, nuns took three hundred eleven precepts, considered varieties of restraint that lead to greater happiness; the monks took only two hundred twenty-seven such vows. That is to say although these people are really culturally devoted to massaging injuries, if she were a nun, she’d probably be in robes first of all, and as for the two males rubbing her wasting bilateral lower extremities they might be a little less, well, engaged. On the other hand it is true that family members do much of the feeding and bathing of patients at this clinic, chores that we in developed nations defer to nursing staff. Or maybe she’s not a nun at all and just has a recent history of head lice. Ah, the speculations that arise in the absence of verbal communication. I will find out what she speaks, Burmese, one of the main types of Karen, Chin, Rakhine, Shan, Mon, Kachin, at least one hundred others, so as to ask her of her position.
We wondered about this woman’s case because she presented like the patient with spinal TB, also called Pott’s Disease, in the bed behind her. She differs in that she can actually wiggle her toes a little bit, and rather than the absence of sensation she just indicates pain everywhere a provider touches her legs. I say “provider” as it doesn’t seem to hurt when the two male helpers do their local best for her calves. Maybe they have ‘the touch.’ She certainly did fall and really has been not walking for the one year she describes. How to make sense of the poor effort and intermittent glassy gaze of dissociation. I suspect a post-traumatic stress component. I shy away from voicing such an intuitive assessment because language and culture gaps can be so subtle. Plus, who am I to enter this refugee-staffed fully functioning clinic for one week in each department announcing that her medics have missed something? Maybe they already thought of this.
Hesitation is actually crucial here until layer upon layer of new social norms have been penetrated and gradually integrated into clinical dialogue. There are seasons of getting to know how things work; just when you think you understand, the weather changes. Feedback is delivered quite differently here. Directly given it severs the relationship with silence and causes the recipient to lose face; this type of indignity is seriously affrontive to the entire community. I’ve seen foreign physicians come in with good intentions and turn things upside down with plenty of money, ideas, perfectionist goals. Then they leave. The social fabric and confidence of membership has been shaken, hopes and expectations altered, but that provider having unwittingly cultivated a palpable lack of receptivity never returns. This is not the Western world; it is its own reality. You have to sit back and watch for a long time. One doctor put it to me this way: You tell them to fence the pigs. No action. You build the fence. Unmaintained it falls down. When three neighbor children die, the people come to you asking how to protect the remaining siblings. You honor their inquiry about pigs carrying disease. The most beautiful and solidly crafted fence appears, along with a relationship that lasts decades protecting many future children from disease. Another doctor says “You have to commit for five years, and you have to show up for an extended period of time at least twice each year. We are here by their permission.” It’s true. If they don’t do it themselves, the fancy supply donations don’t benefit anyone but the giver’s sense of self-satisfaction. In fact, we can do harm. If we want to make ourselves useful we maneuver our role deftly along the spectrum from obstacle to offering. Wisdom here is inversely proportional to the amount of talk and to the rate at which one prescribes change.
I return to my room to find that a man has carefully folded a bath towel to place between his bottom and the chair upon which my wet hat rests, and he now sits. Confused, I ask if he has seen a hat under his bottom. Yes, last time he looked there was a hat. We look underneath and find that not only does the brim now approximate its original shape but a two- or three-inch fray of water has been pressed out of the hat into the grain of the wooden chair slats and wetting the towel considerably. Nonplussed and friendly, he doesn’t seem to think anything unusual has transpired in sitting on a stranger’s hat. I thank him and choose not to subscribe to suspicions either. Anyway, the three seasons and the rain, next week is the last weekend that my friends could have possibly traversed the 25 km road to the waterfall by hired truck. It was already nearly impassable due to mud. For the remainder of the rainy season, the spot will only be reached via alternate route, a three-day trek on foot. Those who haven’t seen the land in each season wouldn’t know; they go on trust or they get stuck. The farmers switch their crops and attention to paddy rice as the monks enter into vassa, the rains retreat. Despite the thick warm air, I turn off the fan; fat wet droplets touch the tin and wooden roof. Time is viscous like the climate. Natural histories of place like the whirring of the frogs are amplified here. I imagine this whole scene in a fishbowl and drift into the vivid dreams that have begun to occupy sleeping life.
May this writing heighten awareness about the plight and great beauty of the people from all parts once called Burma. May it bring benefit to all who are described herein and to all who read it. May you be truly happy.