Quarter Year

First off, in May 2008 Cyclone Nagaris swept through and killed 138,000 people in region. (pause for effect). The government wouldn’t let relief in before it was far too late, and disease spread in ways we haven’t ever seen before (except during the 2005 tsunami aftermath) or since (except during the 2010 Haitian earthquake aftermath).

The second reason the city feels small is that in 2005 the dictatorial government started construction on a new capital city and relocated all employees, and necessary services, by force. So all of a sudden, 925,000 people were removed from their lives and told to start over in a development that looks sickeningly like the Issaquah Highlands. Our bus drove smack through the middle of this manicured new capital – about 4 hours north of Yangon – so I can report on it firsthand, through a bus window.

There are perfectly manicured roads for homes that don’t exist. The homes themselves look like suburban American homes. At dusk one night, hundreds of people were walking miles from one construction site back to somewhere, wherever the hell they lived, because there are almost no cars in the country (more on that later). As these people walked, they didn’t walk past any food stalls or stores, just curbs. Most importantly, the new city feels STERILE. In order to understand why this is so different to an unluckily relocated Myanmar resident, you need to compare three ways of life:

First, a picture of the streets of Yangon. Take this in:

Life lived on the streets as in most major urban areas. Next, a picture of village life (this one from Bagan):

Immediately an hour outside of Yangon the living situation goes from urban poor to rural. I’m not talking about American rural where people wear ugly jeans and live in quiet but clean homes, but ancient rural like using a caravan of oxen to pull your carts up a river. Huts made of whatever natural materials (palm fronds, etc) are around. Farming for your food. I can’t imagine the people in these small villages have much commerce because they don’t seem to have many possessions. The above photo is taken from the center of a very large village in a tourist town, so even this area is more developed.

Anyway, point is that these are two of the common ways of life for a Myanmar person: Yangon urban living and ancient rural. Which brings me to the new capitol. Here is a picture of the Issaquah Highlands which, I swear to god, is exactly how the streets of the new capitol look:

(photo courtesy of Jeff Youngstrom’s Flickr page)

It makes me hyperventilate.

I guess what I’m trying to show with these pictures is the cruelty of the government not only in moving so many people without their permission, but moving them from a rich civic space to a bleached suburban space. In Yangon’s urban center, people don’t seem to buy their food in grocery stores, they buy them from ladies selling produce on the sidewalks. If you can afford to eat out, the food vendors are on every street corner and up and down the side walks. Kids play in the streets, people chat on the sidewalks, that’s where life is lived. The streets of the newly constructed capitol were manicured, clean and deserted.

Finally, in an effort to clean up the city center, the government forcibly relocated 15% of the urban population, all squatters to a township outside the city center, I guess. I don’t know much about this.

Anyway, the reason that it feels like Yangon’s population doesn’t fill its urban space is that it can’t – people have been moved by force. In this way, it feels post-apocalyptic in the urban center, with most buildings falling into disrepair as the tropical climate starts to take them back.

I LOVED this feeling: life is being sucked out of the buildings and back onto the streets. I can only hope that’s how our apocalypse goes.