Insight Myanmar

Coming to Practice

Episode #511: Like many young Kiwis, Jarrod Newell wanted to see the world. Taking advantage of the special working holiday visas available in the United Kingdom, he traveled to London,where he participated in the city’s wild, partying lifestyle. After saving some money, he would pick up and find some new place to visit, ultimately making his way across cities and even continents. While attending hippy festival in Greece, he met a girl who had just completed a ten-day vipassana retreat in the tradition of S.N. Goenka, and told him of an upcoming course in Crete, and Jarrod went there straight away. The course experience was brutal, but had a deep impact on him. After ten years, he finally returned home, and now a committed meditator, sat and served regularly at the local vipassana center. When Jarrod heard that Goenka would be leading a pilgrimage through Burma, he knew he had to go. As soon as he stepped off the plane in the Golden Land, he realized he was somewhere special. He was especially moved by his sitting in in a cave at Shwe Taung Oo in Monywa, where Ledi Sayadaw used to reside nearly a century ago. It was there that the idea of ordaining as a monk came to him, and Goenka eventually gave him his blessing to take robes. Now a monastic, he returned to Shwe Taung Oo Pagoda, where he decided to sit six, 10-day self-courses in the style of Goenka retreats, with just one day between each. As a monk, Jarrod was greeted with open arms and an open heart by nearly every Burmese person outside the military that he came in contact with, and on more than one occasion was invited to remain in whatever area he was in for life, with promises that all his needs would be looked after. However, in the end, he decided to disrobe, and returned to New Zealand via India, where he sat a 60-day course. When he was 32, Jarrod enrolled in medical school, and met his future wife with whom he had three daughters. He has a medical practice, and has opened a business. “I'm just very much a householder,” he notes. But the memories from his time in the Golden Land are never very far away for Jarrod, and the lessons from those years are precious.

On the Threshold

Episode #510: “I'm not an activist,” says Bart Was Not Here, a Burmese artist whose politically oriented work reflects a life shaped by dictatorship and displacement. He argues that art creates a space where memory, humor, fear, and imagination can coexist, allowing both artist and viewer to navigate political realities in ways that ordinary language cannot. Bart sees current global politics as part of a wider shift toward more extreme forms of power. Myanmar’s experience, he explains, no longer feels unique but echoes developments now taking place elsewhere. This awareness shapes both his personal outlook and his artistic practice. As an individual he worries about the state of the world, yet as an artist he values the act of creation as a protected interior space from which to observe, reflect, and transform experience into form. Satire plays a central role in his work, as Bart argues that humor can deflate authoritarian power by exposing its absurdity; a practice that Burmese have long been trained in doing. In a society familiar with repression, he notes how humor becomes a subtle form of resistance. For Bart, absurdity reveals how power, while often appearing grand, can be exposed as brittle and theatrical. These ideas shape his recent exhibition, Threshold. The project emerged after he moved to the United States and received an immigration identification number for non-citizens. The label struck him as a strange science-fiction scenario—a “Third World alien” entering the first world. From this experience he developed the idea of a threshold: a suspended, liminal space between departure and arrival where identities shift and renegotiate themselves. It is an interconnected world rather than a series of isolated paintings, and populated by both mythic characters and archetypes from his own internal landscape. Through his layered environments, Bart explores systems of control, waiting, and escape. Ultimately, however, he insists that art should remain playful and exploratory. As he puts it, “Nothing is really that deep… it’s all spectacle and entertainment.”

Reality Bites

Episode #509: “I don’t have hope. But I think that this is something that I should accept. It is reality.” Chalida Tajaroensuk, a longtime advocate of democratic reform and human rights across the Southeast Asian region, argues that human rights work collapses when it is built on prediction rather than conditions. Her account begins in a provincial Buddhist temple where community care wasn’t an abstract virtue but daily labor among the elderly, the poor, and those without family. From there, she traces a path through Thai student activism, the violence of the 1970s and 1990s, and a period in the jungle alongside the Communist Party, followed by disillusionment with ideologies that promise total change while leaders chased private benefit. Against grand theories, Chalida advocates a method that stays stubbornly small and specific—bailing people out of detention, negotiating with authorities, finding schools for Myanmar children who can’t study in Thai, persuading landlords to accept refugees who must report regularly, building neighborhood trust so displaced people can survive with dignity. “Do a small thing, and then when you have success, you feel success with the small.” Chalida extends that realism to refugee policy, arguing that reforms can still fail in implementation through language barriers, exploitation, and the hollowing out of camp life when key workers are forced to leave. On Thai public life, she is blunt about worsening conditions and the shortage of leaders she trusts, although what remains is obligation and repetition—ground-level fact-finding, people-to-people exchange, and the insistence that action continues even without a promised ending. Asked why she keeps going, Chalida returns to responsibility, not optimism. “I think that this is my duty.” She does not promise outcomes. She does not offer closure. She insists only on the smallest honest pledge: “Today we do today’s best.”

The Justice League

Episode #508: Damian Lilly, a veteran humanitarian and human-rights specialist, who has worked in conflict zones across the world, believes assistance must be joined with protection and accountability. “We can’t just be there to assist people—we also need to be there to protect them.” He formed this conviction through his work with Médecins Sans Frontières, documenting sexual violence in places such as Afghanistan, South Sudan, and the Congo and turning testimony into pressure on governments. Working with the UN, he returned to South Sudan later as Senior Advisor on the Protection of Civilians. The civil war there drove more than 250,000 people into UN compounds, and although his work helped shelter so many people, he looks upon it as a failure because in the end, there was no justice or redress. Protection without justice, he says, “really loses sight of what we’re trying to do.” Later on, he was posted in Gaza in his role as UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees: during that time, there were three Israeli military incursions into the territory between 2008 and 2014, with no real repercussions, which only reinforced to Lilly how impunity fuels repeated wars. Accountability, he says, fails not for lack of law but ofpolitical will. When his wife, also a UN employee, received a posting to Myanmar, Lilly and his family moved to Yangon. This was shortly before the coup. He reports watching the tanks roll down the streets. In response, Lilly co-founded the Myanmar Accountability Project (MAP) to pursue prosecutions abroad through what is called “universal jurisdiction,” where crimes against humanity in one country can be prosecuted in another country’s national courts. MAP is seeking cases in countries like Indonesia, the Philippines, and Turkey. Lilly critiques the International Criminal Court and UN Security Council for their paralysis, timidity in engaging the junta, and reluctance to recognize the NUG as the people’s legitimate representative. While the UN employs the claim of neutrality to justify continued relations with the junta, Lilly argues that true neutrality means fidelity to humanitarian principles, not moral equivalence. Despite bureaucratic inertia and shrinking aid budgets, Lilly insists that localization, persistence, and creative legal action can still advance justice. “It is a complex area,” he says, “but an important part of how we address many of these situations.”

Terra Incognita

Episode #507: “It’s a process of learning and unlearning, and understanding that knowledge exists in many places and is everywhere, not just in the academy,” says Davina Quinlivan, an Anglo-Burmese writer and research fellow in English and Creative Writing, of her second memoir, Possessions. Her first book, Shalimar, reconstructed her father’s wartime childhood in colonial Burma through historical inquiry, while Possessions turns toward embodiment and the present, exploring how inheritance lives in memory, belief, and the body. Quinlivan recounts her parents’ Anglo-Burmese backgrounds: born before World War II, they knew each other in Burma before their families emigrated to England in the mid-1950s amid post-independence uncertainty. After marrying other partners, they reconnected decades later and married. Raised in West London in the 1980s, Quinlivan grew up with an inherited Burma shaped by atmosphere and narrative. Though she never experienced what her parents described, their stories formed her imaginative interior. Knowledge in her childhood home was transmitted not through books or institutions but through language, food, fragments of memory, and silence. As the first in her family to attend university, she immersed herself in film and French feminist philosophy, later completing a doctorate and building a long academic career. Yet she began to question the hierarchy that privileges institutional knowledge over embodied and inherited forms. Living in rural Devon with her husband and children, she found English folklore—oak trees, medieval churches, Green Man carvings—entering into dialogue with Burmese cosmology. When her youngest son suffered recurring febrile seizures, she rendered the experience through mythic frameworks, imagining ancestors as active presences. Rather than resolve identity into a single narrative, Possessions holds together multiple landscapes, histories, and ways of knowing within one life.