Australian reporter Jessica Mudditt’s new book entitled “Our Home in Myanmar” sheds light on expat life in Myanmar prior to the coup.
The book, which was recently released, tells the story of Mudditt’s working life as a reporter in Yangon including her time at Myanmar Times and her work with Mizzima in a country gradually getting to grips with the possibility of democracy.
The following is an extract.
Chapter 15 - Snakes alive! - February 2014
I’d taken up writing for IRIN, the United Nations news service, for whom I’d previously freelanced in Bangladesh. The problems I wrote about tended to be monumental, such as the dire shortage of anti-venom in a country where 12,000 people are bitten by snakes every year. This was the focus of the first story I filed from Myanmar.
I began by meeting a snake bite specialist called Professor Khin Thida Thwin at San Pya Hospital, which had one of the country’s few specialist kidney departments. She was working with the World Health Organization to try to lessen the number of snake bite deaths, which in recent years had been as high as 1000 people per year. By comparison, of the 5000 people bitten in an average year in Australia, only two people tend to lose their lives.
The problem was that Myanmar could only afford to produce half the antivenom it needed. For decades, Myanmar’s military regime had spent as little as 0.5 per cent of gross domestic product on healthcare, which was among the lowest rates in the world. Millions of people simply couldn’t afford to pay for medical treatment and often went without it, meaning they died a preventable death or lived in terrible pain. The reformist government had started to spend more, but it was still totally inadequate for overcoming years of systemic neglect.
Despite her busy caseload, after the interview Khin Thida Thwin insisted on giving me a tour of the hospital. We walked up the hallway and I followed her into what I thought was a broom closet, but when she switched on the light I found myself facing four shelves of preserved snake specimens in jars. The snakes’ yellowed faces were frozen mid-bite and their bodies wrapped in messy coils. There was an assortment of smaller jars containing baby snakes. It was a terrifying sight.
We then entered a large ward where there were about 30 snake bite patients and their immediate family members, who cared for them around the clock due to the hospital being shortstaffed. I followed Khin Thida Thwin over to a fourteen-year-old patient called Day Wi. She’d been walking barefoot through a palm forest in southern Mon State when she was bitten by a Russell’s viper, which is one of the most dangerous snakes in Asia. She lay on a thin metal stretcher and opened one eye when she heard Khin Thida Thwin’s gentle voice asking her how she was doing. I looked down at Day Wi’s foot and gulped. It was a ghastly mess. My eyes were first drawn to two angry sores that were the size of lemons. One was a luminous red and the other, a hideous purple. The skin around the wounds was so blackened that it appeared to be charred. Across her foot and up her ankle was a series of festering blisters. It was so dramatic that it looked as though it had been created with stage make-up.
Day Wi’s anguished mother stood over her, trying to cool her with a palm-shaped handheld fan. I showed Day Wi’s mother my camera and gestured that I would like to take some photos of the wound. She nodded and took a couple of steps back from Day Wi, who I noticed at that moment was very beautiful. She lay there with her eyes closed like a Burmese Snow White after eating the poisoned apple.
I know that there is no such thing as an evil animal, but the horror and pain inflicted by the viper’s bite was appalling. Day Wi’s life had hung in the balance since she was bitten three weeks ago – it was only in the past day or so that Khin Thida Thwin had started to hope that the teenager might survive, because her kidney function was showing early signs of normalising. I wondered how long it would be until she could walk again.
‘Day Wi is one of the lucky ones,’ Khin Thida Thwin said gravely as we walked away. ‘She is being treated in hospital. Many Myanmar people prefer traditional medicines. Those treatments include spreading a chicken carcass over the snake bite, or getting another person to suck the blood out of the wound. If the snake can be caught, its tail is chopped off and the victim swallows it. We are trying to educate the public about how ineffective, or even dangerous, this all is, but eradicating such practices is difficult. It’s how things have been done for years,’ she said with a sad smile.
This last bit of information fascinated me, but my word limit for the article for IRIN only allowed me to skim over it. So I pitched another story to my editor at The Bangkok Post, along with the idea of focusing on the cobra, which I thought was the most magnificent and terrifying of all snakes. In the course of my research I had learnt that cobras were plentiful in Yangon and were often found inside people’s homes. I couldn’t think of anything worse.
My editor gave me the green light, so I went with my translator Raj to meet the reptile keeper at Yangon Zoo. He was reportedly the man to call if a snake was discovered somewhere it shouldn’t be. And if it turned out to be a cobra, all the better: cobras were Sein Thein’s favourite animal.
No sooner had he told us this than he stepped inside the cobra enclosure and fastened the latch on the wire door behind him. The cage was a bit like a chicken coop but with assorted
ledges for the snakes to sunbake on. In the centre was a hutch, where I presumed they slept. It was absolutely teeming with snakes. They slithered all over each other, making it almost impossible to work out where one snake ended and another began.
‘I get two or three calls every month from people who have found cobras in their home,’ said Sein Thein. ‘Last month, a housewife found a cobra in the toilet. Other times they’ve come peeking up through the kitchen sink. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been called after someone found a cobra in their suitcase. I always tell people: zip up your bags when you’re not using them. It’s a nice spot to curl up in if you’re a snake.’
I counted six cobras slithering across the thatched roof of the hut, which stood at eye level with Sein Thein. They seemed intent on getting closer to him, but he didn’t seem fussed in the slightest. In fact, he turned and faced Raj and me through the wire, thereby turning his back on the approaching snakes.
‘Once I got a call from a young couple who had just returned to Yangon after spending a month visiting family in Singapore. When they got home they were tired, so they got straight into bed. There was a cobra under the sheets!’ Sein Thein roared with laughter. ‘It just slithered out. They were fine, but the woman said she wanted to move house.’
As Sein Thein began telling us another story, one of the cobras flexed its hood and lifted the upper part of its body off the ground. It swayed to and fro behind him, flicked its forked tongue and zoned in on the back of his head.
‘Oh my god!’ I exclaimed – just as Sein Thein took a single step sideways and missed being struck by a hair’s width. I had no idea how he sensed to do this. He turned around and waggled a finger at the snake.
‘You come here,’ he said, grabbing its tail with one hand.
‘Let’s take a good look at you.’
He brought the snake out with him and laid it on the concrete at the zoo’s entrance area. With one knee on the ground, he used both hands to manoeuvre the snake, cupping one hand under its hood and the other to drape its body along the ground. Its silver scales were interspersed with thick beige stripes and it was at least three metres long. When it hissed, it sounded like a growling dog.
‘This is a king cobra,’ Raj explained, while looking on in disbelief. ‘They are the world’s longest venomous snakes. They eat pythons and other snakes in the wild, but here in the zoo we give them chickens. Sein Thein caught this one two months ago.’
The man and the snake eyed each other off – in Sein Thein’s eyes I saw almost tender fascination, and in the cobra’s, pure hatred. Zoo visitors had no option but to walk through the turnstile at close range to the spectacle, but the ever-calm Burmese families scarcely raised an eyebrow, although I did see one mother grab her little girl’s hand as they approached us.
‘Of course cobras come into people’s homes,’ Sein Thein said, without breaking eye contact with the snake. ‘Other snakes do too. They are hungry. With all these new apartment buildings going up in Yangon, the snakes are losing their habitat. A Buddhist will never kill an animal, but Myanmar people do all sorts of things to prevent them coming inside. They stir gold jewellery in a pot of boiling water and then sprinkle the water on the ground around their yard. If they have no jewellery, they drizzle lemon juice. Of course, none of this works in the slightest and the cobras come right on in,’ he said, laughing again.
As the cobra kept trying to strike at Sein Thein, I asked him whether he had ever been bitten during his years working at the zoo.
‘So many times!’ he said. ‘Twelve times, to be exact. I got bitten on the head a couple of months ago. I went blind for about three minutes. I was drenched in sweat too. My boss sent me to hospital, but I was fine. I was back at work the next day. It’s no problem for me if I get bitten, because I have special tattoos.
You want to see them?’
‘Yes please.’
To our relief, Sein Thein returned the king cobra to its enclosure, snapped the door shut and motioned for us to sit at a nearby picnic table. It was only then that I became aware of how
fast my heart was beating. Sein Thein, still standing, peeled off his blue polo shirt. Spanning his shoulder blade was an intricately detailed cobra with a flexed hood. Across his chest were smaller snakes and squares filled with numbers, swirls and squiggles.
‘The ink is mixed with cobra venom,’ he said. ‘That is what protects me when I’m bitten. I get the tattoos re-inked three times a year, on the nights of a full moon.’
Sein Thein’s face was deeply lined with wrinkles and his hair and eyebrows were greying, but he had the body of a teenage boxer – he was as lean as the reptiles he wrangled all day. I later asked a doctor whether Sein Thein’s tattoos could actually provide protection, and was told it was impossible. It was the repeated bites that protected him: quite incredibly, he must have developed a resistance to the venom.
‘Are there other snake catchers in Yangon?’ I asked Sein Thein.
‘I am the most famous,’ he said. ‘But there are others who catch cobras and sell them to Chinese restaurants. It is a popular trade in poor rural areas. The restaurants pay a good price because the Chinese love to eat cobra. They believe it gives them virility – you know, sex power,’ Raj translated with a blush.
‘I can tell you where to go if you want to write about it in your story.’
Sein Thein then excused himself, saying it was time to feed the crocodiles.
Our Home in Myanmar is available from Amazon and other major online retailers, and in Australia via John Reed Books: https://www.amazon.com/Our-Home-Myanmar-years-Yangon/dp/0648914224
The Myanmar language version will be published in September 2021.
