When I was living in Sky Villa in Mandalay back in January, it seemed an unremarkable apartment complex. There was no signage or name on the front of the building, so it was unknown even to people who lived close by. It was always a chore to explain where I lived to the tuk-tuk drivers. The three-wheeled tuk-tuks are the only taxis allowed in Mandalay.

On March 28, the building was taken down by an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.7. The lower five stories (out of 12) collapsed immediately. When the pillars broke, cables that looked like spaghetti sprang out in all directions. Some observers concluded that the pillars had been compromised by all the holes made for various cables and pipes.

The building was reported to have the city’s largest concentration of bodies after the quake. Trapped victims were still screaming days later. Beauty queen Silimee, who represented Myanmar in a 2018 pageant, was a resident of Sky Villa and died in the quake. The residents I talked to had been at work at the time of the quake, but they lost all their possessions. Now the building represents everything that is wrong with Myanmar, its name synonymous with scandal and death.

The U.S. has pledged $9 million in quake relief compared to $13.9 million for China.

Myanmar’s last major quake was a 7.1 in 1956. Like the March 28 quake, the epicenter was in Sagaing, a town just north of Mandalay with a monastic complex. The country has had little experience with earthquakes in recent years and was entirely unprepared.

Mandalay was once the royal capital, and is now a city of monks, pagodas, and nuns. With a population of 1.7 million, it was the No. 2 city in Myanmar. Nearly every building has been seriously damaged and 3,700 are dead nationally.

In the mornings, I would walk to the palace, which was about 30 minutes away from Sky Villa. The palace itself was destroyed by fire in the 1940s, but there is still a beautiful wall and a moat. I would feed the fish and “make merit,” as the Buddhists say. As the fish fought for the food, they could jump up out of the water by four feet or so.

When the quake hit, I was in a hotel in Yangon about 400 miles south of Mandalay. The building swayed for about 10 seconds. Although I had never been in an earthquake before, it immediately occurred to me that it might be a quake. The hotel’s reception assured me that it was not, but they called back a few minutes later to confirm that it was. There was no noticeable damage in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city.

Myanmar is a superstitious county and many Burmese got on Facebook to explain the quake in moralistic terms. A group of monks taking an exam were killed during the quake. Some posters asked if they were being punished for sin. A monk who survived the incident responded that their sin had occurred in a previous life and karma had been passed along.

A businessman from Sagaing was trapped for two days when his hotel in Mandalay collapsed. His dramatic story was a popular video. Rather than blame karma, he talked geology. Myanmar crosses two plates, he explained. A plate connected to India had moved 49 millimeters north while the Sunda plate in the east, which is connected to Thailand, refused to budge.

Since 1962, Myanmar has usually been under the rule of its isolationist military. As a result, the country remains severely underdeveloped despite its promising reserves of natural gas and rare earths. In 2023, Myanmar sent $1.4 billion worth of rare earths to China for processing. The electric vehicle industry depends on the unregulated mines, which are controlled by the Kachin Independence Organization, an ethnic militia.

Since a coup in 2021, Myanmar has been a pariah state. Everyone I have talked to is a fan of Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy opposition leader. The military hardly tries to sell itself or its agenda, either internationally or to the Burmese public. The soldiers don’t hesitate to shoot at unarmed crowds of protestors. The rifles may be antiquated, but it’s the only argument the regime needs to make.

All the same, pre-quake Mandalay had little in the way of a military presence. There were roadblocks around the High Court to prevent a car bombing and a checkpoint was occasionally set up on 60th Street. When I asked about rebels, the soldiers laughed and said they weren’t worried.

Before the quake, Myanmar’s biggest problem was an irregular supply of electricity. Sky Villa had a row of diesel generators outside. Such generators are common in Myanmar.

Thingyan, Myanmar’s water festival, was scheduled for April 13. Officially, it was cancelled to mourn the quake victims. The children love Thingyan and were not having any of that. When they saw me walk by, they ran to get water and dump it on me. Fortunately, I was prepared with plastic bags to protect my phone and wallet. The tradition represents a cleansing of karma from the old year in preparation for the traditional New Year’s Day on April 17.

The New Year is a traditional day of prayer. I went to Shwedagon Pagoda, Yangon’s most famous attraction. “Shwe” means gold while dagon is an old name for Yangon. Shwedagon was the subject of a recent internet hoax with a damaged pagoda in Pindaya in Shan State misidentified as Shwedagon.

The tourists were gone, but the pagoda was packed with worshippers. To get to the top of Shwedagon hill, you have to climb barefoot up ten staircases. The first time I went, I thought I’d never make it to the top. This is my third time and it seems that my feet have toughened up. There’s actually an elevator for those without Buddhist feet, which I would have taken had I known about it earlier. Either way, the gilded pagodas are quite a sight when you get to the top.

To pray at a pagoda, you need to know what day of the week you were born on. Wednesday evening is counted separately from Wednesday morning, so there’s an octagonal structure with eight statues of Buddha to pour water on.

The March 28 earthquake was a “supershear” event along the Sagaing fault. There were a series of aftershocks after the quake. During these shocks, the fault experienced slippage from Mandalay all the way to Bago, 330 miles south. This slippage took only 80 seconds. If another quake causes the southward shear to continue, it could arrive in Yangon.

Astrologers have predicted a quake in Yangon on April 21 or 22 and many are worried. Yangon’s last major quake was in 1930.

Peter Kauffner is an American teacher living in Myanmar.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license.