Spring Break Part III: Mormons in Burma

There is more to Burma than appears on the surface. To really know the place one must go there. This is true with every place, of course, but it may be especially true of Burma. Because to learn about Burma by reading books or newspaper articles is only to get a partial image of the country. There are for instance many things going on in the country now that our common knowledge to people in the know, but these things are never written down, either domestically or abroad, out of concern for the repercussions that may follow if the junta gets word. Even this blog post will gloss over some details in order to protect those living in Burma. I'm not implying that there is some grand revolution in the works. In fact the average Burmese person has far less of a revolutionary spirit and "anxiousness for democracy" than the western media might lead you to believe. I'm just talking about the small bits of gossip that are never published but make up the flow of daily life in Burma.

While I was in Yangon I had a hand in spreading one of the unwritten headlines of the week.

Zach and I were in the Mandalay airport waiting to board the plane to Yangon when an American couple approached us, asking if we had a cell phone. They seemed a little distraught. The night before they had been having dinner at their hotel (the same one we had been staying at, as a matter of fact), when they saw two Americans being escorted out of the building by two soldiers wearing the standard dark green uniform with red patches. The couple was passing out slips of paper to other westerners as they left. In their handwriting it said that they had been arrested, and that someone should call the embassy. The couple with us at the airport had been trying to make the call but hadn't been successful. We shared in their concern, as you can imagine, and said that we would do what we could to look into the matter. Meanwhile I also discovered that this couple coming with us on the same flight was Mormon. In fact the husband had served as a bishop under my old mission president when he had been serving as a stake president. Mormons were the last kind of people I had expected to run into in Burma.

When we got to Yangon we reunited with some of our close friends, both Burmese and expats. We told them about what we had learned, and discovered that one of our expat friends new the couple who had been arrested. Then our Burmese friend called the embassy on his cellphone, using his English name and a perfect American accent, and asked about the couple in question. We learned they had been put on a train to Yangon, and while we weren't told anything else explicitly, the assumption was that they were being deported and presumably black listed from entering the country again. A disappointment for them I'm sure, but at least they were safe.

A couple days later we went to a concert at the American Embassy where a band from L.A. was playing. "Ozomatli." It was a great concert, and basically every expat in Burma was there, as well as some of the more connected non-military Burmese. Our Burmese friend went around asking people in the know for more details about the arrested American couple. He didn't get much more out of them, but by now you the reader are beginning to understand how stories circulate in Burma: Someone sees something or hears about it and tells it to his friends. One of those friends is probably connected to the people involved in the story somehow. Then somebody else knows who to ask for more information. In the meantime the story is told to more people. And pretty soon everybody knows. Nothing is ever written down, and everyone is careful with whom they talk to, but this is how news travels in Burma.

Interestingly, the same expat friend who knew of the couple who had been arrested also happened to be staying in the same hotel where Mr. John Yettaw had been staying, the man who was caught swimming across the lake away from Aung San Suu Kyi's house, an incident which has resulted in Aung San Suu Kyi's imprisonment. (She is the leader of the National League for Democracy, and has been under house arrest for 13 of the past 19 years.) Some news reports say Yettaw was a Mormon. Perhaps there's some conspiracy of Mormons infiltrating Burma... but I doubt it.