Me and my German girlfriend owed our first house (in Mayangone township) to our friend Birgit who had lived there with her boyfriend. After their relationship broke up, she didn’t want to stay there anymore. So we got a reasonably priced place to stay: 750 USD per month for a small two-storey house. We made a contract for one year and ‘inherited’ the maid, a middle-aged Karen woman named Naw Naw. She was resolute and hardworking and lived in a bamboo hut not far from our home with her husband and a daughter. After a short time, my girlfriend had taken the woman to her heart and she became her adviser in every respect in an almost alarming way. I didn’t like it at all, in my view she was a bit too nosy … After one year our landlord demanded a hefty rent increase. We were really shocked as we had invested quite some money and made a lot of repairs to the place. In his view the house was now worth more than before and we’d have to pay for that … But then rescue arrived from an unexpected quarter. Our gem told us that right next door there was a nice big house nearing completion and the builders were looking for a tenant. They originally wanted $2,000 a month rent, but with the advent of serviced apartments, the housing market was changing dramatically. So we got the house for 1,000! It was three times the size of our previous one. So we moved in and I lived there for a total of 16 years!

Naw Naw had received a month’s rent commission from the landlords – she was rich! Somehow you could tell that she didn’t feel like being a maid anymore. Apparently she was never particularly popular in the neighbourhood because of her boastful behaviour. She boasted that her mistress had given her great gifts, such as Armani plastic bags, with which she strutted about the neighbourhood as proud as a peacock. And now poor Naw Naw, the occupant of a miserable shack, had suddenly become rich! This aroused the envy of the neighbours – at least that’s what she thought. She suspected that an evil neighbour woman had hired a witch to harm her family. First the cat died. Then the daughter got sick. Eventually she found magic potions in her garden, which should hurt her – allegedly buried by the neighbours. One morning several dead mice were hanging on our garden fence. I didn’t care much and ordered Naw Naw to cut those things off and throw them in the trash. She, on the other hand, was terrified, and when she didn’t come to work a few days later, we went to her house because we were worried. Could she have gotten sick? To our surprise, we found her house empty! Neighbours told us that the whole family had fled head over heels that night! For fear of evil spirits! We later were told that they had bought a property near Yangon, but we never saw Naw Naw again! We found a new maid, much nicer and a better worker than the old one.

As Naw Naw’s story shows, the belief in ghosts and evil spirits influences the everyday life of the Burmese to an extent unimaginable for a Westerner. Above all, death holds many dangers in Myanmar – not so much for the deceased, but more for their families. The bereaved family has to perform a whole series of precisely