Today’s post is an interview with a local Myanmar. His views are obviously not shared by everybody and are not intended to be a generalisation. For anonymity reasons, we’ll call him Graham.
DD: Where would you go if you could travel anywhere in the world?
G: I would go to Africa, do a safari and watch all the animals they have there. I never left Myanmar though.
DD: Tell us a bit about your education?
G: I left school when I was young because we couldn’t afford paying for my education. I started working when I was 10 as a carpenter to pay for my last few years of school. Then I was lucky to find a good English teacher. A few years later I started working as a tourist guide.
DD: Do you have brothers and sisters?
G: Yes, I have one brother and one sister, both younger. With what I earned, I paid for their education and they could go to university. Like that, we will be able to offer a better life to our children. Each generation needs to improve the situation of the family. Now that we all work, we told our parents to retire, and we pay for them.
DD: What about unemployment and beggars in Myanmar?
G: If you are not old or cripple, you have no problem finding a job to pay for your food and a roof. Beggars are mostly lazy. If people make so many children that they can’t feed them, it’s their problem.
DD: Do you have a wife and children?
G: No, I have a good life, for now, I don’t want a wife for now. I don’t have a girlfriend either because if you go out with a girl and then don’t marry her, she will have problems finding another boyfriend because it will be known she already had a boyfriend. And I don’t want to do that to them.
