A Postcard from Burma

February 11, 2025 Sophie Garnier

Despite being in daily contact with our team in Yangon, I never quite know what to expect when I land in Burma. Burmese resilience warps your understanding of what’s going on: their ability to keep calm and carry on gives you a false sense of security. Sometimes they go quiet for a few days, which in any other context might be construed as being out to lunch, literally or figuratively, but when it’s in Yangon you know it’s because something has come up. A family member conscripted, the new daily 4-hour window of electricity not coinciding with UK hours, whole days taken out rectifying something lost in translation with a bunch of stock. So visiting every few months is crucial to read the situation on the ground and see beyond the laptop screens of the team.

This time I found nothing specifically new, but so many reminders about why Kalinko exists. I’ve often spoken of the ever-present conflict in Yangon. And I don’t mean the literal conflict; that rumbles on and will do for some time. I mean the conflict of joy and sadness, of beauty and filth, of hope and despair. You rarely have one without the other. This time, we drove west out of Yangon to visit some of the rattan weavers deep in the Irrawaddy delta. We left at 5:30am in the pitch black - pitch black because there’s no electricity, so no street lights, no lights in windows, no light pollution at all, but with Bon Jovi’s Blaze of Glory blasting from the radio. Quite an intense choice for 5:30, thought to myself, but whatever the driver needs to get him through the 8-hour drive.

We careered past miles and miles of powerless power lines, coursing our path like biro scribbles against the thick, moody fog of the dawn. We stopped every 20 minutes at a military checkpoint where a soldier with an AK-47 over his shoulder studied our passports, grilled the team as to where we were going and why they had foreigners with them, assessing whether we were in any way a risk to their cause or a potential source of a few dollars. Each time you drive away, you’re aware of how relieved you are, and of how the team have to live with this fear all the time, with a constant hum of angst.

As we got further from town, the fog lifted along with the tension. The traffic eased and the sun burnt through, welcomed on both sides of the road by field after field of beaming sunflowers as we surfed the pot holes between mile after mile of radiant yellow rape hedges.

The hours pass quickly with so much to look at. It’s bean harvest, so we pass groups of pickers in wide-brimmed hats squatting close to the ground gathering the beans by hand, and big expanses of blue tarpaulin, beans being raked across them to dry in the sun. We pass children running in front of their bamboo shacks, their mother gracefully walking behind with a water pot on her head. Bamboo shacks which are extremely basic, but made from thoughtfully woven bamboo panels, chosen by their inhabitants in the same way that we would choose paint colour or curtain fabric. Men taking their cows to water. Smoke raising from the open fires in the houses in the absence of electricity or a gas hob. People washing in the river. A road being built one shallow basket of stones at a time, a human loop moving tons of gravel, 5 kilograms at a time. It’s no surprise that they have made little progress since Yadanar, our manager, passed the same stretch of road a year ago. These are all scenes which have remained unchanged for thousands of years. It’s amazing to see - particularly accompanied by childish hoots of joy or the cackle of a grandmother - but also desperate to consider the reality of life like this, and the brutality of surviving the relentless monsoon rains which will arrive in May.

The time we spend with the weavers is a treat. They explain how they work in teams, one person responsible for hammering down the lateral pole of a basket, before passing it to a weaver to wind the peel around it, binding it into shape. They suffer our endless questions very graciously, let us coo over their babies who are necessarily by their sides, indulge my extremely rudimentary Burmese, and insist that we eat more of the jaggery and caramelised crab apples presented with our green tea. Once we’ve been there long enough to no longer be a novelty, they settle into chit chat, some humming to themselves, but mostly peacefully weaving away, the whooshing sound of the strand being pulled between the poles and light hammering of nails into frames mixing with the ever-present squark of the crows and fluttering breeze through the vines that shield the workshop from the dusty track.

We continue to the coast to allow the team to escape the cooker-pressure of Yangon for 36 hours. It is deserted. Where there were once hundreds of revellers, weekenders from the capital, office off-sites racing to make the “longest line” with their clothes and bodies (a classic Burmese team-building game), clusters of quad bikes selling joy rides, and fruit sellers doing a meaningful trade between the sun beds, this time there was us, one man selling a lone sea urchin, and crows, vainly pecking at the sand for the tourist leftovers which in years gone by would have been abundant.

We eat at Table 5, an old favourite-haunt one evening. We called at lunch time to check if they’d be open: “la geh leh” they say, “please come”. We do, are the only guests, and question whether the few dollars we spend on our meal will cover the cost of the generator required to cook it and give us the light to see what we were eating, or the petrol for the motorbike to go and get 2 bottles of beer for us. There’s no point stocking beer. How on earth do they provision the kitchen, I wonder? It was as fresh and delicious as I remember: peanut tomato salad, spicy fresh Rakhine squid with green chilis, coriander, lime and red onions. Fried clams and vegetables in oyster sauce. A pan-fried whole fish in a fresh, herby, spicy sauce. But it’s world’s apart from my last visit where we had struggled to find a seat given the volume of revellers, where beers were held aloft on trays by waiters weaving through the throngs, where fire dancers lit up the trees above table after table of people devouring piles of the much-celebrated food.

Back in Yangon I stay with a friend (Burmese) who is a studied aesthete and his home is the glorious product of his passion. It is the Best of Burma - beautiful teak and cane chairs, soothing bamboo blinds which filter the afternoon light into satisfying stripes, carefully curated and positioned earthenware pots. He lives in a leafy, residential part of town away from the hubbub, his garden an oasis of tamarind and cherry trees and chilli plants, with lofty palm fronds bobbing shadows across the ground. The familiar call of the asian koel (listen here) cements my zen and I am a thousand miles from the hectic pot-holed parts of our journey, of the tension of the road-blocks, of the brutal, though beautiful, road-side existence of so many in Burma. I feel instantly guilty, sharply aware of the contrast, disloyal for flying out and home to my easy London life with its abundance and ease and pleasures I take for granted.

But these are all useful feelings. Or at least feeling them and directing them into something generative is useful. It is extremely hard to live in Burma at the moment, with its grinding daily challenges, the administrative burdens of business, the almost total absence of functioning infrastructure, and the roaring inflation which has rendered a basic salary or harvest income unworkable. But witnessing the resilience of those who suffer these things is very inspiring. And awareness that by virtue of not being personally ground down by them, and by doubling down on our efforts as a business, we can directly alleviate that pressure for the makers we work with, is exceptionally energising.

The harder life gets in Burma, the harder we want to work to counter the difficulties. This is not something we can rush; you cannot rush a coffee plunger. You must go at the speed of the grains to avoid the coffee spilling up and out of the spout. There is nothing we can do about the environment in which we have chosen to work. But we can continue to slowly, carefully navigate it, one day at a time, and do our best to harness the contrasts presented by each end of the zoom calls.