Daw Mya Kyi, 117, at her home in Mae Taw Su village in Amarapura township last month.

I’VE interviewed amay (mother) Daw Mya Kyi three times. I remember the phone call that first brought me to her house, about 45 minutes from the downtown area of Mandalay. I remember the shock when the officer from the Department of Social Welfare told me her age.

Daw Mya Kyi, born in Mae Taw Su village, Mandalay Division – 117 years old.
“She’s the oldest person in Myanmar,” the officer said.

“She might be the oldest in the world – here in Myanmar,” he added, with a sense of astonishment.

Her age has been verified by the Department of Social Welfare, however she is not recognised as the world’s oldest person. According to AFP, the world’s oldest known person is 115-year-old Gertrude Baines, who lives in Los Angelese. (In Myanmar, ages are counted one year ahead of in Western countries, so Daw Mya Kyi would be considered 116.)

The first time we met, Daw Mya Kyi seemed unhappy – bored and lonely. She was living a monastery at her home village, Mae Taw Su.

The curse of old age may be outliving the ones you love. Daw Mya Kyi’s husband, U Ni, has long since passed away and she has even outlived one of her daughters. She smiled when I asked if she remembered her husband. “Of course,” she said.

The second time, now living in a house a kindly person had donated to her, Daw Mya Kyi seemed much happier. After that visit I had promised the next time I returned I would come with printed photos of our visit – she didn’t seem disappointed this time, when it was obvious that I’d forgotten.

As I arrived at her house on my bicycle last month, she called out to me: “Girl, bring you bike inside, it’s too hot to be riding around.”

I enjoy visiting amay, even though we don’t talk all that much.

This time she tells me she has a headache but is taking medicine that a women from the village gave her.

I try to press her on her secret to long life – some advice to give to readers.

“Mostly, I just live a normal life. I eat whatever I want. Well, up until now – I’ve decided not to eat sour foods anymore. I think that it may cause people to die,” she says, without elaborating.

She’s just arrived back from an homage paying ceremony, where she was given K500 and some rice.

“The presenter gave me the microphone to talk to the people there,” she said. “I had no idea how to use it. I looked at the other old people with me at the ceremony. They were about 65 years old – I thought, they are still young.”

Religion is still a large part of Daw Mya Kyi’s life. When I asked what she still wanted to do, she replied that she wished to make a donation to the monastery – a bronze bell.

Naturally, we came back to that common topic of discussion, the weather. “It’s hot now but yesterday it rained a lot,” she says. “I thought a wedding in our village was going to be cancelled but the monks chanted, asking for the rain to stop.”

I get up to leave, and Daw Mya Kyi tells me one of her two daughters is coming soon to visit her (she has no contact with her eldest daughter).

I ask if there’s anything else she wants to tell me. Her reply was simple: “If you meet with the woman who donated this house for me,” she says, “please tell her to visit me, I don’t know how much longer I have left.”

She gives me many well wishes as I ride off on my motorcycle.