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My first week in Sittwe ended with a bang – three in fact.
It was 4am and I’d been asleep for 5 hours after an evening spent rubbing shoulders with the aid worker crowd in town.
The first explosion forced my eyes open. Silence followed and I doze back to sleep. Then came the second blast, “could it be thunder?” By now I was half-awake. The windows shook as a third rumble ended with a reverberating-crack. Wired, I fumbled over the mosquito net that covers my bed and made my way to the window. The streets were dark, the guard’s light out. I couldn’t see our neighbours house. The city was silent.
“What do I do now?,” I wondered, shrouding the light of my iPhone.
4:16 am “Hi – are you awake? What were those banging sounds?,” I whatsapp my colleague.
I wait for the sound of voices, sirens, screams, anything. I even open my window to see if there is smoke in the air.
Three blasts, and then nothing.
4:25am search: “Power outage and loud boom. Should I be worried?”
Google assures me that a fuse box is likely to have blown somewhere, the blasts a result of surges in the power lines.
4:40am: No response from my colleague. Back to bed I go, zipping myself into my mosquito-less tent. I close my eyes and drift back to sleep with my door locked – a false-security given the paper-thin walls of my room.
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Life in Sittwe is eerily peaceful. Situated just 100 km south of Maungdaw, where violence in August 2017 pushed more than 655,000 muslims into Bangladesh, its easy to forget the ‘situation’ unravelling throughout the state.
The expat community is small and move between the same handful of places during the week, filling the town’s most popular restaurant on a Friday night.
Tourists are rare in Rakhine state, so it is easy to assume that the foreigner you greet in Cafe de Sittwe or pass on an evening run is an aid worker.
Many live permanently out of hotels. The shortage of available expat rental properties testimony to a certain disdain toward INGOs who are believed to neglect the impoverished ethnic Rakhine population (a perception that INGOS are working to shift).
In the Sittwe bubble, the locals that I interact with – neighbours, colleagues, veggie-vendors and drivers – are usually part of the majority Rakhine community. Most are buddhist, some are hindu or christian.
A series of gated displacement camps line the beach front. Inside the closed-camps live some 120,000 Muslims who were banished from the downtown area following inter-communal clashes in 2012. Foreigners cannot access the camps without travel authorisation and movement in and out is restricted for the camp’s residents. I’ve been told that a short walk down the beach brings you into contact with IDPs, many eager to linger in your company.
We left the beach on Friday night after a magnificent sunset, having be-friended a stray dog (or two). The road we walked down was unlit, making a hand torch essential in avoiding the danger of passing motorbikes. Two young boys followed us, laughing and mucking around on push bikes. A bomb would be detonated on the same road just eight hours later. Was it already planted as we wandered home? Who knows.
Life in Sittwe for the many expats who briefly call it home seems to revolve around work, as well as the frustration that comes with being in the periphery of a large scale humanitarian crisis and unable to access affected populations. Days are filled with negotiating travel authorisations, including for the IDP camps just a kilometre down the road. The frustration is washed down with dinner on a Friday or volley-ball on Saturday. Life becomes mundane.
Friday night’s bomb scare comes as a reminder that despite the delight in finding Toblerone on the shelf of Sittwe’s (shoe-box sized) grocery store, we are living in a place where life-threatening danger is a daily reality for most.
I’m only one week into my stay in Sittwe – and have a lot to learn.
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