In December we wrote a piece about the incredible odds of becoming a professional cricket player in India. With tens of thousands of cricket academies in India, the number of kids gunning to play runs in the millions.The resultant statistics make getting into the NBA, NFL, or MBA in the United States seem easy by comparison.
The piece was recently selected as the cover story of Little India’s April magazine. Go check it out on their website!
Author’s Note: We cycled through Burma for five weeks. The following 10 part series is our account of how recent political changes in this historically isolated country are affecting the lives of its everyday citizens.
Master Tai Wen
Master Tai Wen is a Senior Assistant Teacher of English in Kalemyo, High School #2. We met him at a tea shop in Kalewa, 25 miles west of the city, where he used to work before he beat the odds and got the transfer two years ago to the metropolis. Now he has a chance to really make a living. It has been a slow march up. 12 years ago, he was teaching in a farming village, raising his family of six children on the thin wages of the government, making ends meet by farming the land for peanuts and rice with his wife.
In a stroke of fortune, the central government education bureau in Mandalay moved him to Kalewa, a river shipping port of 10,000, where goods from the cities are traded for the produce of the lush northern farming lands. He took it eagerly, even though he had to leave his family. Wages were not enough to support the whole clan in town.
It wasn’t that the salary from the government school changed. That has always been the same everywhere: 64,000 kyat ($75) a month, until two years ago, when Thein Sein’s government bumped it to 92,000 ($106) a month. It’s that in the towns you can make money as a private school tutor, and in the cities you can make even more. The wages from the private schools, which teach the kids how to beat the government tests and get into the best government universities, far outstrip the wages of the public high school. Some teachers augment their salaries by 300,000 kyat a month with the work, though Tai Wen is still far from those heights.
A burmese classroom in Yenanguan
The private schools are a critical service in an overburdened education system. Master Tai Wen’s classes at the public school have at least 70 students to one teacher. His largest class has 83. Besides, the education system boils down to a single key metric: your grades in the last two years of high school. Those numbers decide who gets to go to which university, who obtains the vaunted positions at the Universities of Rangoon and Mandalay. Those grades, in turn, are decided by three tests a year, in six subjects, and those tests are the same for every student in Myanmar. They are written by the central government. The teacher’s job is only to instruct and to grade. It is after school, at the private schools, that the kids learn how to beat the test.
Master Tai Wen provides those services happily, as an opportunity to bring his family together again. His wife is still in the village, farming rice and peanuts, as he left her twelve years ago. He visits her less than once a month, because the voyage is a day-long each way, and it requires him to take leave from school. When he can’t go, he sends her 70,000 kyat a month in an envelope with his friends on the river shipping boats. His family has dispersed while he was away, his children trying to find their own living. The eldest daughter has married and moved to the south of Myanmar. Three others work along the Chintu river, trading goods they bought wholesale from Monywa in the villages along the banks. When the profits aren’t enough, they pan for gold in the river’s silt. It has been many years since Tai Wen has seen them all together, because the cost of petrol is so high.
Soon though, the parting may end. Tai Wen is starting to earn enough money to bring his wife and two school aged daughters to live with him in Kalemyo. “I hope it will be two years,” he said. It depends on how many after school lessons he can find.
Author’s Note: We cycled through Burma for five weeks. The following 10 part series is our account of how recent political changes in this historically isolated country are affecting the lives of its everyday citizens.
Sunrise over some small temples in Bagan
Bagan is a valley with 2500 temples strewn across it, most ancient, some new, a vast complex of Buddha statues and enormous shining shrines and crumbling brick pagodas, a few well preserved, most not big enough to earn government repair money. The town adjacent, Nuang Oo, is a chief destination for any foreign visitor, and is quickly becoming a staple of those on the South East Asian backpacking circuit. It is a place tourists come from all over the world to watch the sun cross the horizon.
Every day, one hour before sunset and sunrise, all the tour buses start their engines in unison, and the hotels empty out to fill them and head out to the twice daily show. The most popular place to watch is the Shwe San Daw Phaya temple, where you can sit higher than any other. It is also has a bus parking lot. Thirty minutes before showtime, the temple’s three Western (or Eastern) balconies are packed with tourists, who perch shoulder to shoulder like crows with DSLR lens beaks, each jostling for the best position to take a photo hundreds of others took yesterday, and the day before, and could easily be downloaded from Google images. The hundreds of temples below, being photographed, stand mostly empty, but for a few adventurous souls who walked. When the sun sets, the place clears out. The beer stations back in Nuang Oo are full before it’s completely dark.
The rhythm of Bagan is indicative of how tourism has changed Myanmar since the trickle broke into a flood after the country opened up. We tourists are clearly overwhelming the infrastructure. In major stops like Yangon and Bagan, the hotels are booked full almost every night. Tales abound of travelers who were left stranded because there was a not a single room in town. The government has not helped the situation: getting a license to host foreigners is a lengthy bit of bureaucracy that normally involves remodeling and high taxes, and few owners have that kind of capital. The shortage is evident in the rooms’ skyrocketing prices. We paid an average of over twenty dollars a night for our hotel rooms, over twice what it costs in neighbors Thailand and India.
But just as the tourists of Bagan stuck to the same temples, they seem to stick to a fairly standard itinerary. Almost everyone we talked to was going to the same places, “the big four”: Yangon, Mandalay, Bagan, and Inle Lake, with the fifth option being to visit some of the Western beach resorts. It seemed as if most who visited Myanmar were still meek to set out and explore the places where Lonely Planet had not yet reached. Thirty kilometers south of Nagpali Beach, one of the largest of the resort towns, we were among the first foreigners to visit a small fishing village on the coast.
Crowds of tourists await sunset on one of the more popular temples.
There is some good reason for this. Internet in Myanmar continues to be as reliable as congressional campaign promises, and feeble English in rural communities makes communication difficult. Furthermore, the roads away from ‘the big four’ are atrocious, and travel difficult. Even short journeys tend to involve sleepless nights on buses that try and distract passengers from the jostling with bad Burmese soap operas. The visa is also short, just 28 days, and few really want to test the Burmese government’s policy of allowing overstays with a fee of 3 dollars a day. Finally, the police questioning is as omnipresent as the free glass of orange juice at hotel check in—while there are always smiles, the intimidation of a uniform is often enough to keep people on the safe routes.
Mostly though, people just don’t know where to go, or feel that the big four are good enough. Tourism is new enough in Myanmar that even the most trod-upon destinations keep their exotic flair; they still feel like Burmese towns that are being visited rather than foreign colonies. Even in Bagan, you can follow the locals to the best restaurants in the center of town, and pay the same thing they do.
This will change quickly. Not just because Myanmar will become better documented, and the tourists will blaze more trails outside the big four. The rest of Myanmar, with its forgotten pagodas and ancient ruins and untouched beaches, will not be able to ignore the call of so lucrative a business.
Author’s Note: We cycled through Burma for five weeks. The following 10 part series is our account of how recent political changes in this historically isolated country are affecting the lives of its everyday citizens.
Teens play Chinlon, Burma's national sport. It's like volleyball, but done with a hollow ball of straw that cannot be touched with the hands
We met Win at his family’s autoparts dealership, a small storefront cluttered with hanging metal clamps, brackets, and bungee cords that obscured deep rows of semi-organized shelves. I was trying to find a replacement bracket for the luggage rack on my bike, as the original one had snapped, and Win stepped out to help me as the only English speaker. His English struck me for his quality and colloquialism– good speakers of the language are difficult to find in Myanmar. We immediately invited him to dinner, hungry for some insight on the country and his story.
He told it over mutton curry and huge piles of white rice at a local eatery, across a table as loaded with Canon DSLRs, smartphones, and his Ipad as delicious food. His electronics had been brought back from his days studying engineering and working in a semi-conductor factory in Singapore, where much of Burma’s elite goes to get educated. He came back to help run his family business, but he brought back more than fancy gadgets. In Singapore he had developed a passion for filmmaking.
When he’s not at the autoshop, Win sits in his room right on top of it, putting together a rough cut of his first feature length documentary. He’s been teaching himself how to make movies on the internet since 2005, when he was one of the city’s only users of a dial up connection. The process has gotten a lot easier in the last year, when the price of an internet connection dropped 15 fold– to 50,000 Kyat ($60)—and he could get one installed in his home.
Win’s film is about a giant Buddha statue in Pyay, and the efforts that go into taking its relics around every street of the city once a year so that those who cannot go to the temple can pray from their homes. When he’s done with the project, Win wants to move on to directing scripted films. Myanmar’s first film festivals are happening in Mandalay this year, and he wants to be among his country’s first well known film makers. As he proudly flipped through a collection of his photography on his iPad, he also talked about his dream of attending film school, to which he is applying. The prospects, however, look tough; his chances for a scholarship are slim. The best option seems to be Art School in Singapore. It’s his choice of last resort. He thinks the strict rules of the city state make it a horrible place to be a creative.
There’s another drawback on his dream. His family desperately needs him at the spare auto parts business. The number of cars in Burma has exploded in recent years, as has their variety and complexity. Win is the only one who really understands what it takes to fix computerized engines, and how to control a digital inventory of parts. It’s his job to train the business’ seven employees—four of which are brand new—in how to handle the new engines and source the parts.
We asked Win whether the increase in cars had grown his business, he replied “I guess the increase in cars is better, but the cars also last a lot longer. Burmese cars break constantly.”
Win and Chris chat over dinner
The business looks as if it is here to stay. Win thinks getting major car dealerships in Pyay is still more than a decade away. “Nobody would be able to afford the new cars right now,” he said.
Likewise, Win cannot afford the tuitions of the American and Austrialian film schools he so wants to attend, or the time it would take for the Burmese film industry to grow. Caught between the demands of his families and his dreams, he is in a catch-22. He does not believe that staying in Myanmar gives him the chance of a promising career as a young creative, but he cannot leave without endangering his family’s business. If his scholarship applications come through, it may be time to have a serious talk with his parents. Until then, he’ll have to keep fixing imported products rather than leaving the country to produce them.
Author’s Note: We cycled through Burma for five weeks. The following 10 part series is our account of how recent political changes in this historically isolated country are affecting the lives of its everyday citizens.
We left Yangon through its industrial zone, on a smoothly paved two lane highway. We were cycling West, to reach the Southern pass over the Arakan Mountains. Our plan was to meet up with the coast and cycle until we reached Nagpali Beach, a resort area where we intended to lie on some white sand and buy a drink with an umbrella in it.
The net distance was 380 kilometers. We thought we’d get it done in four days. It ended up taking us seven, the result of roads so atrocious that we both longed for the mountain bikes we’d left in California. The coast we found, sheltered from the rest of the country by the rugged mountains, was a world apart from the more developed Irrawaddy Valley we passed to get there. Making it over the mountains felt like stepping back in time. The trumpeted change sweeping Burma has come only to those communities with the roads to transport it.
Our journey over the pass made it evident why. We began this cycling trip a year ago in Paris, and have logged over 13,000 kilometers of riding since. None have been as challenging as the 58 we rode from one side of the Arrakan mountains to the other, and things did not improve much along the coast.
We started our crossing from where we camped, on a small hill at the base of the range. The road quality had started to deteriorate about 100km out of Yangon, alternating between roughly paved and an asphalt variety of swiss cheese. The first hills were paved, but steep. It felt like the engineers had decided switchbacks were too expensive, and so just sent the road barreling up at 8 percent grades. It was steep enough we couldn’t sit in our saddles, and we had to put our navels on our handlebars and fight for each push on the pedals.
As the road continued, it got more and more worn down. Often there was almost no asphalt left, just potholes and a layer of huge rocks that had been used to lay the foundations of the road. It was brutal on our stiff bikes, which had no shocks and weighed 50 kilos with all the baggage on them. On the downhills, the rocks and potholes got so bad we descended at the same speed we climbed. Anyone could have beat us at a trot. At some points, the roads became pure sand, and more than once we dismounted to push our bikes up the grades of silt.
It wasn’t that the roads were neglected. Anything but. Road crews were everywhere, working every ten kilometers or so to repave a stretch of road. Their methods were labor intensive and slow, reflective of a country where manpower is still far cheaper than machines. Along the sides of the roads were piles of rocks of various sizes. The youngest and fittest men on the crew broke the big rocks into slightly smaller ones with sledgehammers, and then another group of men and women broke those into even smaller ones with the same instrument. A bed of large rocks was laid, topped off with layers of progressively smaller ones. Tar was manufactured on the side of the road in gutted oil barrels, where old motorcycle tires were melted down over wooden fires, and the tar would be hand poured over the rock piles. Then the steamroller would come over, the only part of the process that was mechanized, and the tar and asphalt would be applied.
The result was roads that were so unevenly paved even the new ones felt bumpy. More importantly, they were roads that washed away in a few years of rain and abuse by trucks, leaving only the rocky foundation underneath. By the time the crews had finished a road, they needed to start over again.
The 58 kilometers over the Arakan mountains took us 8 hours. The roads shredded a back tire, broke off a rack, and so abused our wheels we had to stop to true them.
In the valley, close to Yangon, we had noodles in stands by paved roads, where the cooks applauded Barack Obama’s recent visit. On the other side, we were brought breakfast by a man who did not know who Thein Sein was.
Chris pushes his bike past a work crew in the Arakan mountains
