Sinle, Myanmar

Sinle is a small village that is built low in a valley in the Shan hills. It is nestled quietly on the lower slopes where the terraces begin to flatten out and step lazily toward the small rivers that crisscross their way toward the delta. At night you can see the stars unpolluted by excess and light. They come and go as the clouds whisk low from one horizon to the other.

Here is a deep quiet, one that slides down the hills and settles into this valley in eastern Myanmar. It is not an awkward or strange quiet, it is the type of quiet that you can sink into and feel comfortable with. It is the type of quiet that allows you to hear the singe and crackle of tobacco being smoked in the next room and the flutter of a bird’s wings as it settles onto a porch railing.

It’s in this quiet that I sat on the porch and watched the butterflies on their afternoon visits to the cauliflower. The butterflies are ghost-white against the green leaves. I spent an afternoon trying to photograph them because I wanted to capture the tiny flecks of brown and black that touch upon their wings. I wanted to photograph them against the darkening western sky that slowly fills with rain as the day wears on. Eventually I gave up on the idea because none of the photos were as beautiful as what I was seeing so I returned to the porch where I sat with Ei Je Pay and watched the water buffalo return from the fields.

Ei Je Pe built the first house in this village and lived there with his wife for 54 years. She died last year and he misses her. He misses cooking food for her and misses her presence. He is in his 80’s and simultaneously embodies both the fragility and strength of a life lived hard. He sits on the floor of the kitchen for hours with his legs crossed and his back against the bamboo wall. He smokes cheroots and pours himself tea from an old insulated plastic pitcher. I wonder if his wife used to the pour the tea for him? We do not share a common language and so we mostly sit and watch the small wood fire as it burns on an old piece of metal that is inlaid into the bamboo floor that flexes and springs under my feet when I walk across it.

His basement is filled with thousands of cloves of garlic. They are bundled and tied to the low rafters. The market price is down by 75% this year because of cheap imported garlic from China. Because of this there will be much less chicken and fish in the curries this winter but there will be enough rice to make it through.

Western mythology always assumes that life in a small village is simple but here life is complicated and tenuous but it is indeed beautiful. The land here is fertile and bountiful and when tended well can provide dozens of different types of vegetables and rice. The people who live here and care for this land prefer water buffalo to tractors because water buffalo know when to work and when to rest and because tractors are expensive to repair and expensive to feed. In the evenings the women return from their gardens and fields with woven baskets filled with what will become dinner. The lighter baskets are carried in the hands but the heavier loads are supported by a tumpline strap that crosses over their foreheads and puts the weight on their backs.

The roads are small and mostly mud during the monsoons. The hills are green and dotted with trees. The highest ones boast golden pagodas and monasteries that strike boldly against the canopies and grasses that surround them.

On my last afternoon in Sinle, I hiked to the top of the highest hill, looking for cell phone reception. The signal was still too weak from the top so I climbed a nearby banyan tree and held my phone above the branches and waited. From the top of the tree I saw a group of young boys who had made a pile of homemade fireworks and were firing them into the valley below.

I walked home accompanied by one of the dogs that lives at the monastery. It had kind eyes and a tail that never stopped wagging. He walked me to the bottom of the hill and as I joined the road that headed back into Sinle he disappeared into a rice paddy. The sun was sinking toward the hills and the western sky was darkening and in the quiet I could hear the rain begin to drop onto the leaves that surrounded me.