Shan State, Myanmar
January 2009
Little novice monks in dirty saffron robes dart between people’s legs in the bustling decrepit market. Their heads are scarred from dull razor shaves; their bare feet are hard and dirty. One of them sees me and they swarm the plastic-stool café where I’m having a breakfast of chai tea and fried Chinese bread. Buddha’s children raise their battered alms bowls and look up at me with hungry imploring eyes. I surrender the bag of mandarins I just bought and they dart back into the ragged morning bustle.
The man who shares my table smiles, his face and teeth the same yellow-brown. He takes out a little notebook that’s filled with testimonials from his former customers.
“My friend see you get off bus and call me,” he says in his halting English. “Very easy to find white man here.”
He wants to take me trekking to the surrounding hill tribe villages. Past adventurers finding themselves in this sleepy little town attest that he can take you anywhere.
“Last week I take two Russia man to Mogok,” he says.
“I thought foreigners can’t go there.”
“We take motorbike. I know back road with no army stop. They go to buy gemstone. Paid two thousand dollar for big ruby! Crazy Russian. They have big bag with glasses to look and make test. No buy fake gemstone.” Two thousand dollars, I think. The average person in Burma makes less than a dollar a day.
I randomly flip open his notebook and read a Canadian couple’s testimonial: “We had to hide from the army in the jungle. Please don’t ask him to take you to the opium fields. If we would have been caught, he would have been killed.”
“I hate government,” the guide says proudly. “My family is Shan. We fight always government. In nineteen nineties we make peace and give our guns because they promise election and freedom. But almost twenty year and no freedom: they still kill us. They say, ‘Later, later. Election later.’ But no election. I have video of army burning village, killing women. I hide guns in jungle. We wait for twenty-ten election, and if fake, we fight.”
Myanmar staged its sham election in November of last year. I read about the protests in Yangon that followed the military junta’s overwhelming victory. No news, however, came out of the northern states, and all I could think about was my Shan insurgent guide, armed with his wide smile and a rusted World War Two carbine, firing single shots into the massed forces of Myanmar’s Chinese-equipped soldiers.
Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Shawn Otis
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