As our taxi chugged past yet another group of Burmese laborers tarring the highway under the searing August sun, I noticed one of the young ladies' cannonball-shaped bellies. She couldn't have been more than seventeen years old. How effectively would the expectant mother's lungs shield her unborn baby from the noxious fumes?
Traveling from Kentung to Mae Sai (Thailand), we had been relegated to a four-hour taxi ride through the hilly Burmese countryside, but that did not bother me. To be quite frank, I would rather have driven the first leg of our journey to Kentung from our origin at Inle Lake. Unfortunately the government had long since closed the road across Shan state for political reasons (read: ethnic cleansing), hence airplanes were the only means of traversing the eastern part of the country.
The interminable exit "interview" with the Kentung municipal immigration authorities hadn't been as unnerving as I had anticipated. The hour-and-a-half exit formalities might have been reduced to minutes, had the decrepit immigration office been outfitted with computers instead of manual typewriters. Years and years of punching away at those archaic machines had left the arthritic digits on the feeble yet determined uniformed man sinewy and blunt.
For most of the ride to the Thai border I reflected on my experiences of the past month – the antiquated automobiles; trekking to a remote village inhabited by Padaung (a.k.a. "longneck") women; the ubiquitous horse and carriages in Maymyo; the leisurely ferry ride down the Irrawady river to the magnificent temples of Bagan, miraculously left untouched by Kublai Khan’s Mongol armies… four weeks and not a trace of Coca-Cola or any other foreign goods.
I failed to understand why Than Shwe’s ruling junta repressed such a destitute and docile nation of people. My photos reveal a Myanmar that the media does not publicize. Not the protests, nor the associated carnage, but the lives of the victims most affected by yet another one of the government's botched policies.
- Forrest Briggs
Oct. 2007
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