Myanmar (Burma)

Story & photos by Ryan Libre, for the Pulitzer Center

Tim Patterson, for the Pulitzer Center,

photos by Ryan Libre

Loud voices jolt me awake. It's past midnight and I'm here in the Himalayan foothills of northern Myanmar illegally. Adrenaline pumping, I roll under the bed as shouts shake my hut's thin bamboo walls:

"Happy Christmas! Merry Christmas! Jesus Christ is born!"

I check my clock. 12:10 am on December 1st. Here in Kachin, the Christmas season has begun.

"Myanmar politics are the most complicated in the world," said Daw Kong, director of the Kachin research and information network, as we settled down for tea and conversation on a hilltop near the Chinese border.

After three weeks in the small pocket of northern Myanmar held by the Kachin Independence Organization, I still struggled to make sense of the tangled history and delicate balance of power that defines the political landscape of Kachin state.

It's midmorning, and Thein Soe is hard at work on a new canvas. A leader of Burma's underground art movement, he has been an artist for more than four decades.

Soe, 61, who asked that his real name not be used for fear of arrest, is bone-thin with a face that resembles Edvard Munch's expressionist painting, "The Scream." Over the years, he has weathered the junta's 46-year rule, watching the military run one of the wealthiest Southeast Asian economies into the ground, crush pro-democracy demonstrations and ban most freedom of expression.

My search for truth in Burma began in a sleepy embassy in Vientiane, Laos, where I sat sweating on a patent leather sofa in a crumpled silk shirt and tie, pulling phony business cards from my wallet and lying through my teeth. It was two months after the monk-led anti-government uprisings of last September, and I had already been rejected a tourist visa twice in Hong Kong and Bangkok. I decided to hit the diplomatic backwaters with a different tack.

Jacob Baynham, for the Pulitzer Center
Vientiane, Laos

My search for truth in Burma began in a sleepy embassy in Vientiane, Laos, where I sat sweating on a patent leather sofa in a crumpled silk shirt and tie, pulling phony business cards from my wallet and lying through my teeth. It was two months after the monk-led anti-government uprisings of last September, and I had already been rejected a tourist visa twice in Hong Kong and Bangkok. I decided to hit the diplomatic backwaters with a different tack.

It's only mid-morning, and sitting in his simple studio in the shadow of some of Rangoon's wealthiest mansions, Thein Soe is already exhausted.

"In your country, you work two days and you have food for a week," says Maung Lwin, a welder taking a break for tea after lunch. "Here, you work for one day and you eat for one day." Lwin supports his family on an average daily wage of $2.30, the same salary the government pays a specialized doctor. Money is so tight that even sitting down for a 15 cent cup of tea takes careful consideration.

"You are human, I am also human," he tells me. "But my luck is not the same as your luck."