In May, we entered the last quarter of our tour. All of the storylines — my work, our lives here, and what’s next — started to converge, signaling that the beginning of the end was underway.
Tag: Rangoon
100-Day Countdown
We returned from our R&R to the United States in early May to a change in seasons. Burma’s hot, dry weather had given way rather abruptly to the equally hot but much rainier monsoon season, about a month earlier than I had expected. After just one day of overlap in the office, my boss departed for his own R&R in the United States for a few weeks. As I assumed the acting position, I was keenly aware that the countdown of our last 100 days at post was just getting underway.
Thingyan (Water Holiday)
Thingyan is one of Myanmar’s most important holidays and marks the traditional Burmese New Year. Celebrated over several days each April, it is a time of renewal, reflection, and community.
The festival is best known for its joyful water-throwing traditions, in which people splash each another with water as a symbolic act of washing away the misfortunes and impurities of the past year. In real life, this looks like a street festival in which everyone is happy to be thoroughly drenched. Beyond the festivities, many Burmese people observe Thingyan through acts of merit-making, including visits to pagodas, donations to monasteries and charitable causes, and time spent with family. Traditional music, dance, and foods are also central to the celebration. Combining both exuberant public festivities and deeply rooted spiritual practices, Thingyan reflects values of generosity, reconciliation, and hopes for a prosperous and peaceful year ahead.
Not Your Content: A Complicated Witness
For the past six months, I have been cooperating with the reckless driving case against the truck driver who hit and severely injured me last November. While as a victim I have appreciated having an opportunity to be heard, the process has — perhaps unsurprisingly — required me to repeatedly present my trauma for examination, documentation, and validation, often with unclear results.
Before the Tipping Point
March felt like something of an in-between point on this tour: past the halfway mark, but still before it was time to worry about another PCS move.
The weather carried the feeling of a perpetual lazy summer. I was no longer struggling with a walker or wheelchair, and spent much of my time focused on physical therapy. I was endlessly grateful to have regained some mobility and freedom.
We were done with our January and February trips to Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand, and soon it would be time for our big April R&R trip back to the United States. But for the moment, it was simply good to be at home.
A Rolling Portrait: Yangon Circular Railway
In March, the embassy’s Community Liaison Office (CLO) organized a weekend day trip to ride the Yangon Circular Railway.
Often called the “Circle Line,” the train travels on an approximately 28-mile (45 km) loop track around the city. It is supposed to be one of the most atmospheric and socially revealing railways in Southeast Asia. It’s not only a commuter railway and a relic of British colonial infrastructure, but also an informal street market, a lifeline for people who need to travel inexpensively, and a beautiful way to understand how the city is laid out.
A New Normal
As I mentioned in a previous post, February was the month where life started to slowly feel like it was getting back to normal again for us in Burma. We returned from our R&R in Vietnam and Indonesia with some fresh perspective and gratitude, ready to hit the reset button.
As we reached the halfway point of our tour and I was finally able to leave my walker and cane behind for good, we focused on making memories and ensuring my accident neither became the legacy of our time in Rangoon nor overshadowed the time we had left.
Both/And
My truck-versus-pedestrian accident was 10.5 weeks ago — almost two and a half months. One of the most difficult aspects of my recovery, aside from the physical injuries themselves, has been holding space for very different, simultaneous thoughts and feelings about what happened and how to move forward.
So Glad You’re OK
I came home to Burma the Friday before Christmas and stepped back into my Rangoon life from the before times. Only I didn’t look the same on the outside, and I didn’t feel the same on the inside either. I had been medically evacuated and hospitalized in Thailand for over a month after being unexpectedly hit by a truck while crossing the street in front of my house. I’d broken my pelvis in three places, along with cracking two ribs, breaking a toe, and suffering a bilateral concussion and extensive road rash.
My traumatic injuries were still healing when I returned, and I was only 50% weight-bearing on my left side. Returning to my house and my work, nothing fit quite the same—it was like trying on someone else’s clothes. I had to contend with other people’s reactions to my visible injuries and the shock of what had happened to me, while sorting out my own feelings and struggling with my new limitations in real time. And as I settled back into post and the external cuts, wounds, and bruises slowly began to fade, I heard one thing over and over again: “I’m so glad you’re OK.”
Ableism and Access: Return to Burma
About 10 days ago I returned home to Burma. I’d spent a month hospitalized in Thailand after being hit by a truck while crossing the street in mid-November.
While I was in the hospital, I wanted nothing more than to come home and “get back to normal.” But the two days I spent in a hotel between my discharge and my return home illustrated how difficult navigating the real world would be as long as I could only bear about 15 kg of weight on my left leg. Most able-bodied people simply never notice the ways in which the world is inaccessible to those who move through it a bit differently.
The Land of Smiles
Taking an international flight in a wheelchair is something I never imagined I’d experience. Yet when I arrived in Bangkok a little over two weeks ago, that’s exactly how I traveled—having not taken a single step except for the small ones over the seam between the breezeway and the plane, the only gap the wheelchair couldn’t bridge.
The morning three days after my truck vs. pedestrian accident, motorpool drove me from our house to the airport. An embassy nurse and my husband accompanied. I was pushed in a wheelchair through check-in, immigration, security, and Rangoon’s mostly-empty international departures terminal. I was the second passenger to board the flight, transferred into the tiny, narrow wheelchair that fits down the plane aisle. I settled into a comfortable business-class seat and never got up during the 70-minute flight. When we landed in Bangkok, an ambulance—and finally, answers about my injuries—waited just beyond baggage claim.
Aftermath
Coming home from the embassy that Sunday morning after my accident ushered in not only new levels of physical pain, but a lingering stretch of complicated, disorienting emotional terrain.
Butterfly Effect
The night I was hit by a truck earlier this month while crossing the street is blurry in places, with some parts missing entirely. I think of the first 48 hours afterward in two distinct phases: the initial hours of confusion, memory loss, and non-linearity; and the remainder marked by pain, overwhelm, regret, and the slow, devastating realization of what had happened.
The day and night of the accident had been completely ordinary. Ordinary, until a second before impact, when I turned my head expecting only traffic coming from the right and instead saw the truck barreling toward me from the left, traveling on the wrong side of the road. Everything after that is blank for maybe half an hour, followed by other gaps and hazy fragments during the three or four hours I spent in the hospital.
Wrong Lane
After more than six weeks of the longest government shutdown in history, things were finally starting to brighten up towards mid-November. After a sudden medevac to Bangkok, my husband V had successful gallbladder removal surgery and returned home to Rangoon. The U.S. government reopened and federal employees received our three missing paychecks in quick succession. The bid season relaunched, sparking renewed excitement about our potential next tour. V and I spent a day off together in observance of a Burmese holiday—swimming in our favorite local pool, then enjoying a quiet evening at home relaxing with our cat. All seemed to be getting back to normal.
Then, the following Saturday night, we had one of the worst nights of our lives—sudden, unexpected, and completely out of the blue. It was the kind of night that shifts your reality, stripping away any illusion that you are in control and leaving you in a world so different from the one you knew just moments before that the surreality comes in continual waves of disbelief.
Sixth Tour Bidding: Not So Fast
When I first wrote about sixth tour bidding in late September, I described it as a “ready or not” situation; bidding had snuck up on me quickly at less than two months into a one-year tour. But just two days after the cycle opened, everything ground to a halt. October 1 marked the start of the new fiscal year, and without an approved federal budget, the government shut down. And so, at least for now, this bid season has become another exercise in “hurry up and wait.”
Collecting Postcards 