Typewriters, telegrams cling to life in Myanmar

Perched on a stool on a bustling sidewalk in Myanmar's biggest city, an elderly man pecks away on a clunky manual typewriter.

"It's a will," Aung Myint says, barely looking up as his fingers rise high over the keys and hammer down with a steady sense of purpose.

He points with his chin to a stack of about 30 papers he needs to get through before he heads home, many of them legal documents hastily delivered by lawyers who work at the nearby courthouse.

Reminders of a bygone era cling stubbornly and quaintly in Myanmar, a country that was in many ways frozen in time during a half-century of dictatorship and self-imposed isolation.

Now, three years into the nation's bumpy transition to democracy, smartphones and computer shops are common, but so are phone stands and typists. Even telegrams have not quite disappeared.

Aung Myint says his work is steady enough, but a far cry from the days of military rule, when he spent most of his time typing up authors' novels for submission to the now-defunct censorship board. He rarely broke for lunch back then, often working by candlelight well after shops were shuttered.

As his country belatedly joins the computer age, the 67-year-old says there are still those who feel a document lacks an authentic air unless it is pulled from the roll of a manual typewriter.

He also says there are several benefits to typing.

"You don't need to waste time with printing, and if you make a mistake, you can just erase it and type over it. It's easier," he said.

Nearby, Thin Thin Nu has a table on the sidewalk with five clunky, push-button phones. Such stands remain a common sight in Yangon, although less so than a few years ago.

Thin Thin Nu said many people use her phones only when their cellphone batteries have died. But with a monastery and a school less than 100 meters away, she gets plenty of other business.

Asked to lie

"When girls are talking to their boyfriends, they lean in as close as they can to the tree next to the table, picking at the bark, or nervously twisting the iron chain around its trunk," Thin Thin Nu says.

"Other times, they'll fight, banging the receiver down wildly. I've even been asked to lie, to tell the voice on the other end of the line, 'She is not here anymore', when the girl is sitting right across from me."

Thin Thin Nu makes only about $15 a day, less than half the amount she was making before the country of 60 million started opening up. But she thinks she can hang on a while longer. Most people in Yangon and the rest of Myanmar remain desperately poor, and her service, offered for 50 kyat (less than 5 US cents) a minute, is still the best deal they can get.

Poverty does not quite explain why government telegraph offices are still running. The few customers who saunter into the Yangon office, sometimes hours apart, are now mostly bank employees, sending undecipherable coded messages to offices in far-flung corners of the country that have yet to enter the digital age.

Associated Press