 My name is Christina Simian. I'm from Sweden. Parts of my upbringing was in Romania where my dad is from. So I spent a lot of time there when I was a child, during summers, during the communist time and also after the fall of communism. We would always be afraid of the police, afraid that they would beat someone up or ask you for money. Some of my friends were sent to prison without a trial, so that happened in my teens. So I lost almost half of my closest friends over a couple of months. They were innocent. There was no trial, no nothing. And I think from that I gained somewhat of an understanding of how it is to live in a country that is not like Australia, that is not like Sweden, where people are afraid of the police, where prisons are in a horrible condition, I then went on to study law in Sweden. From that I started working with the Swedish government with these rule of law related policy issues. I realised I wanted to be observing the rule of law development industry and I knew I wanted to do a PhD and study somewhere. I wanted to study in an environment where you could look at different fields, where you could do fieldwork. I looked around, I heard about Australia, the Australian National University, especially the regulatory institutions network, and I thought this would be an amazing place to do the type of study that I wanted to do. Then as I looked into where I would want to do my fieldwork for my thesis, I discovered there was a lot of things going on in the rule of law area or a little field in Myanmar and I thought, wow, this is a great opportunity to be able to observe these processes and people that I am interested in. I first arrived in Myanmar in early 2014. Fieldwork means that you need to talk to people and in order to talk to people you need to be able to meet with people and for them to be able to meet with you they need to have time or they need to find your research interesting enough. I knew that national actors and the government would have so many requests from different people from different countries wanting to talk to them. So I was a bit worried about putting extra pressure on that system and I learned to always present myself as a PhD scholar and especially in Myanmar, culture education is valued really highly so whenever anyone heard you were doing a PhD about their country, they would be very happy about that. Binyangon is an amazing city. You have the downtown area which is full of colour and people and markets. You know, you have Chinatown, some fish market and just people everywhere and markets everywhere. It's an amazing area.