It's Mister Smile (not his real name), a freelance Rangoon tour guide, who leads me beyond the lacquer curtain his government has draped over its problems. "Pay me what you like," he says, his grin revealing betel-stained teeth. "Just don't pay me in my currency. Or FEC's—the Monopoly money."
I like Mister Smile immediately. He takes me to a backroom money changer and a palmist, a Burmese pub and Shwedagon Pagoda. There we leave the crowds on the temple platform and descend the western steps to the site where Suu Kyi made her first speech. "I was here," Mister Smile whispers. "After an hour we ran. The police fired tear gas."
As we move around the capital, Mister Smile concludes nearly every explanation of the country formerly known as Burma with a sighing coda: "This is a problem." It's a problem that inflation runs at 20 percent annually. It's a problem that the SPDC allows drug lords to launder profits in luxury hotels and bus companies, that the education and health care systems have collapsed.
I pay him $15 and ask how ordinary people cope. "Do you know the story of the three monkeys?Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil," he responds with a shrug. "You can go home. We have to live here."
Comments (0)
Open / Close