In Yangon With A Lithotripter
In early 1995 I flew into Yangon. Although the military rulers had ‘opened’ Myanmar to tourism in 1992, it was not yet a popular destination because of the Junta’s rule and its treatment of Aung San Suu Kyi. In addition, visas required patience and imaginative form-filling to acquire.
I got lucky. A German friend of mine — also based in Singapore at the time — worked for a medical equipment manufacturer and knew where to get hold of a second-hand lithotripter. Myanmar, like its neighbours, has a problem with kidney stones and, thanks to relations with the outside world, had a problem getting hold of medical equipment. Lithotripters are machines that use an acoustic pulse to break down kidney stones into small pieces that can be passed in the urine, which saves on invasive surgery.
My friend also wanted to see Myanmar and thought that using the lithotripter as bait might see him more easily get a visa and possibly win him some favourable treatment while there. He made some inquiries and was proved correct. He invited me to join him on the trip.
We were now such welcome guests that a driver was arranged for us. He met us at the airport and, after we had changed fifty US Dollars at a one to one exchange rate into local Kyat (the rate on the black market at the time, as we discovered later, was closer to 30 Kyat to the Dollar), he drove us to our small hotel between Pyay Road and the river.
Driving to the hotel was interesting. Myanmar had recently changed — by decree — the side of the road on which they drove. Like most of Asia with a British link, it had always driven on the left. No more. The Junta had decided that Myanmar would now drive on the right. This was problematic for all sorts of reasons; the road markings and signals were all laid out for left hand driving and most of the vehicles imported mainly from Japan had the steering wheels on the right. Our driver made as much sense of the road as he could coming in from the airport but it was quite disconcerting to stop at a junction with the white markings in the adjacent lane and traffic lights aiming at empty space.
On the second morning, our driver took us first to his apartment where we met his wife and parents and his children. This he considered an honour for him. We felt it was an honour for us. His eldest son had been a student but was now left at home because the university was closed. It was closed after violent protests greeted the Junta stealing the most recent election from the National League for Democracy. He had taken part in the protests and was briefly imprisoned. Unlike his father, his English was not good.
As we sat on the floor and ate dried goat’s meat and rice, his father looked towards his son and told us how ashamed he felt. That he and his wife felt great shame. I assumed at first that he meant he was ashamed that his son had been in jail and that this had brought dishonour on the family. I wasn’t sympathetic. But he made me feel an idiot immediately when he continued what he was saying.
“ We were ashamed that we were too scared to join my son at the protests. Many parents feel this way.”
On the way to a first meeting with senior hospital staff, our driver took us past the house where Aung San Suu Kyi was imprisoned. (She was freed from house arrest some months later but that was not the end of her suffering.)
We spent five days in Yangon and we met doctors and we met military leaders but the lithotripter never made it to Yangon. I don’t think there was ever much chance of that: we were not really geared up to be sanctions busters. To be honest, we didn’t even know whether second-hand medical equipment was even covered by sanctions. We had wanted to see Yangon and, especially, the Shwedagon Pagoda. The opportunity arose to travel to a country I had been fascinated with since young — Burma — so I took it. But the words of our driver made it all feel suddenly like an adolescent prank. We had popped in on misery because we wanted another stamp on our passports and we could leave when we wanted.
On the last night, he took us to a rooftop bar and restaurant. He gave me the 5 Kyat note in the picture at the top of this page. “You eat pork?” he asked. I said I did and received a bowl of pig part soup, which I did little more than sip at. What I got down, however, was enough to give me such a case of food poisoning that I was already suffering by the time the plane landed back in Singapore early next morning. I spent quite a few weeks very ill and needed to be on electrolytes because of the fluid I was losing.
I like to think of that as payback of sorts for my naive incursion into Myanmar.
