A group of strongly built young men gathers early in the morning in the suburbs of Yangon to work on their fighting skills. Some of them jump on cast-off tires to warm up. Others stretch or punch the air.
All of them pause and make way when a rickshaw comes by, because their gym is the street.
The men are members of Yangon’s White New Blood lethwei fighters’ club. Most come from rural areas of Myanmar, get fed by their coach and sleep in a nearby Buddhist monastery during their stay in Yangon preparing for fights.
Lethwei fighter-turned-coach Myint Zaw started the traditional fighter’s club 15 years ago, after he retired from the sport.
The club is situated on the road in front of his house in a Yangon neighborhood of improvised tin and wooden structures. Most of the equipment is improvised as well, including weights strapped to a wooden bar. A tree wrapped with old tires serves as a punching bag, although now the gym has a real one as well.
A local businessman helped put a roof above the section of the road they use as a gym so they can practice even during Myanmar’s unforgiving monsoon season. Neighbors share the shelter for community events such as alms offerings to Buddhist monks.
Myanmar has a rich heritage of martial arts that is believed to go back more than 2,000 years. Today, matches are held at festivals around the country and are popular with every strata of society.
Lethwei is a particularly rough form of kickboxing: There are no gloves, head butts are allowed and until relatively recently, fights simply continued until one competitor was knocked out. Now there are time limits.
GROWING REWARDS
Three of Zaw’s fighters competed this summer on a stage a world away from the street gym: a mixed martial arts (MMA) ONE Championship event broadcast globally on cable TV networks. It was held in Thuwunna National Indoor Stadium in Yangon, which is the country’s preeminent indoor sports facility, although it still lacks air conditioning.
According to Zaw, fighters received US$1,000 for each fight, with 20 percent going to the coach for providing training and food.
Ordinarily, fighters win much less money, but still make more than Zaw did in the days when Myanmar’s junta-led government was isolated from the world and international broadcasts were impossible. Back then, a fight would earn him just US$0.25.
BETTER LIFE
Dawna Aung, a lightweight fighter and 34-year-old father of two, hopes competing will help him change his family’s life.
The ethnic Karen lives in a rural village in Myanmar’s Irrawaddy Delta region, and his family runs a small dried fish business.
“The reason I join this MMA tournament is mainly for the money. My family will be OK if I can make a lot of money from that. And secondly, I really would like to show to the world what lethwei is,” Aung said.
He wants to fight another three or four years, become a champion and earn enough money along the way to expand the family business.
Aung lost his ONE Championship bout, as did Hlit Hlit Lay, fighting in the featherweight category. The only White New Blood fighter to get a win was Phoe Thaw, a security guard at the Japanese embassy in Yangon, who was also battered, but scored a victory because his opponent suffered a cut so bloody that the judge stopped the fight.
A few days after, Hlit Hlit Lay said he was heading back to his village. He planned to eventually return to Yangon to prepare for another fight, but needs to heal his wounds first.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing