From Matupi to Rezua, Chin State, January 16, 2019

On a road of gravel and rock notched into the Chin massif a motorbike roars and raises its tail of dust. My heels spur the gears, goad the revs. The cry of the pistons bounces off the buttresses.

Notch cut into the flank of the relief with great reinforcements of dynamite. Gash dug into the rock with the point of a steel knife. It took bulldozers, it took excavators, but what one sees above all along the road are hands: hundreds of workers repairing the roadway with their palms and their muscles. They live the road, breathe the road, sleep the road under tents of tarps covered with dust. Under the scarves and the hats that protect from the sun gleam many young faces, adolescent lives broken in to hard labour. Ants that break stone with the sledgehammer, sort and arrange the pieces by hand to form the bed of the road. I have to ride over this bed of big wobbly shards for kilometres, and I know – I don’t know – all the sweat there is in each metre won.

At the edge of the road vibrate crushers fed on diesel. They grind the pieces of rock into gravel. Thus the road is laid layer on layer, from the big shards to the flower of the rock – and onto this fine grit a boiling tar is poured, heated in gutted barrels, with iron buckets pierced like colanders. Nothing or almost nothing is imported from the cities or from outside: the matter of the road is taken from the mountain itself, and transformed, broken, mixed, heated on the spot, by the force of iron, of arms, of diesel and of fire.

Then in a curve the fear. When three big chunks of boulder block my way. I brake, I raise my eyes. Two youths are perched on the rock face, their work is to bring down the rocks, their raw material. They heard me coming: on their ear alone my life has rested. They look at me now, wait for me to pass, their shovel sunk under an enormous boulder, ready to lever and dislodge this block of stone that would have crushed me.