Myanmar work includes new rules

It’s been a little over a month since that Sunday night when my wife came in to tell me the news.

I was on the computer, and it was about 7 p.m. when Connie came in to tell me that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi had been detained.

It was a shock, but it was not a shock.

My Myanmar connection goes back to 2012 when I did a month-long residency there as a Fulbright Senior Scholar training journalists. A parliamentary election was coming up, the military dictatorship seemed to be easing restraints and our embassy in Yangon thought it would be a good idea for journalists to have some training when it comes to covering elections.

Obviously, I was not the perfect choice for the job.

Covering an election in Jay County is a piece of cake. The vote is free and fair and transparent. Routinely, I’d be in the room with county officials as the ballots were tallied.

Covering an election in a country of 54 million people and more than 130 different ethnicities when the political leader of the party pushing for democracy was under house arrest was something else entirely.

But I was available and intrigued, so I got the nod. Plenty of homework followed before I set off.

The training went well — two sessions a day so we could reach as many folks as possible — and the military dictatorship continued to loosen the reins. Just before I returned home, there was a conference during which authorities announced a major relaxation of restrictions on news media.

And I clicked with the country, its complicated history, its people, its culture and the colleagues I worked with in the training sessions.

That was nine years ago.

Since then, more elections have been held. The National League for Democracy led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi gained power, and folks started trying to figure out how this democracy thing works.

Not all went smoothly. The military — which under a 2008 constitution automatically controls 25 percent of the parliament — launched a brutal campaign against Myanmar’s Muslims, known as the Rohingya. When the international community objected, Daw Aung Sun Suu Kyi — de facto leader of the democratically elected government — defended the military’s actions, besmirching a Nobel Peace Prize she had won not long before.

In other words, things were a mess.

But a 2020 election provided a ray of hope that things might get better.

That’s part of what lured me back into the country.

A few weeks after announcing my retirement, I found myself checking on news from Myanmar on a website called The Irrawaddy, which is named for the country’s biggest river.

The website was advertising for a part-time copy editor and social media person.

On a whim, I sent an email saying I could do half the job — copy editing — but I’m an idiot when it comes to social media.

Short version: They hired me.

Since August, I’ve spent roughly three to five hours a week editing copy for the English language version of the Irrawaddy website. Sometimes it’s things that have been written in Burmese and translated. Sometimes it’s things that have been written by Myanmar reporters for whom English is not their first language.

And it has been rewarding.

It was also fun until that Sunday night Connie came in to tell me that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi had been detained by the military in an apparent coup.

Then the rules changed.

Then it wasn’t an old newspaperman’s lark. Then it was serious.

After editing dozens of stories about the 2020 election, I was suddenly editing stories about the overthrow of the results of that election.

Think-pieces and op-eds about how the newly elected government would take shape and address the issues of federalism and ethnic conflict suddenly gave way to accounts of arrests, detentions and violence against demonstrators.

Under the new rules, I have a Signal account so that my communications with The Irrawaddy are encrypted.

Under the new rules, I touch base every morning to see if there is new copy to edit — accounts of crackdowns on the civil disobedience movement that has squared off against the leaders of the coup.

Under the new rules, I find myself worrying about my colleagues. Some are in Myanmar, some are in Chiang Mai on the border of Myanmar and Thailand. The other two copy editors are in Cambodia and the United Kingdom.

We spend a lot of time dealing with the different time zones confronting us.

And the story’s not done.

The military has the guns. The advocates for democracy have the people.

That could shake out very badly.

Or it could become the biggest story of the young 21st century.

As for me, I’m just happy to be playing a small — very small — part in it.

Stay tuned.