Kamarsae Village and Bago

November 26, 2015 (written in Sagaing)

crossing bridge

at Ko Kyi Win's house

The last day in Yangon (Nov 26) four students and our driver and I went to Kamarsae Village where I'd been last year.  After we picked everyone up we stopped for a breakfast: fortunately I wasn't hungry and had only a couple spoonfuls of someone's mohinga, because once arrived at the village, first we stopped at the house of Ko Kyi Win (Nyunt Than's brother; his son is Mg Htet Aung, the one who'd showed me around last year and is one of my students now), where they served us tea and Burmese traditional treats.
 

 

Mohinga at an auntie's house

Then we went to one of the girls' auntie's house, who served us a lavish mohinga spread, of which I had a couple servings. Then we stopped at another auntie's house, who also had prepared   The cook recognized me and greeted me warmly and enthusiastically, saying she had missed me ever since I left.  Daw Khin Win, Nyunt Than's cousin, gifted me with her notes, half Burmese, half English, from a meditation retreat she'd done, and I gave her my earrings, all I had with me to give.

other auntie's house

refreshments for us. And then over rickety bridges (the riverbed was dry when I was here last year, but now the bridges are up and boats carrying passengers down the river dividing the town) to the house I stayed at the year before—and another round of refreshments!!!

Ko Kyi Win and Daw Khin Win

Next we all went for a walk down the river to the pagoda that had been being renovated when I was here last, and the two girls showed me the corner stupas that their fathers had donated the money

Pagoda in village

for. One of the girls kept stopping and posing and taking photos of the two of them and of herself, looking like a model or movie star. Then the girls visited an auntie while the boys and I retraced the walk through the back lanes of the village that we had started last year, and on which my camera's battery had given out. Mg Htet Aung even remembered where it had given out, so I was able to get the pictures that I had planned on going back for the next day, only the police had called that night to say I'd had to leave.

on walk

Back at Ko Kyi Win's house, yet another multi-dish meal!!!!!!!!!   And then it was time to leave.

meal at Ko Kyi Win's house

We stopped in Bago on the way back and visited the great golden pagoda, and three reclining Buddha pagodas! At the last one, the girls and I had coconut milk directly from the coconuts which were  opened with a machete, while the boys had palm juice. Back in Yangon, we stopped at a fancy seafood restaurant, and then dropped everyone off. Mg Htet Aung took off before there was a chance to say goodbye, and I was feeling the lack of having been able to do so—then a few minutes later, still in the van, I got a good-bye call from him. 

 Reclining Buddha, Bago

Next morning early U Kyaw Lin Naing Oo, who's been such a gracious host to me and so helpful in getting me a SIM card, new charger for my kindle, my dinners, and my plane ticket, picked me up and brought me to the airport for my 6 a.m. Mandalay flight.









[Note:  to see more photos you can go to: https://www.flickr.com/photos/129187095@N02/sets/.  The first album "Top 400" is a selection of the best photos, so that would be the one to look at unless you want to look at even more in any particular phase of the trip.]

A Kindle-written Message from Your Tomorrow _________ November 25, 2015

Still working to grasp the time thing: that when I write an email today, you're getting it yesterday; that my morning is your yesterday afternoon and evening…

 Two students have gifted me with a beautiful purple traditional longyi and blouse.  It's hard to meet and get to know people even for a brief few days—and then that's it. And it's amazing how much you do get to know someone in so short a time. One of the conversational role plays we did, though, had them interviewing each other for an article, and topics they came up with covered fashion tastes, favorite movies, sports, favorite music, family, so you do get a sense of someone (and add to that the earlier sharing of their scariest, most beautiful, and most exciting experiences).  When I shared I liked classical music, Aung Min Thu and one girl both lit up and said they liked classical music too (in addition to the heavy metal rock and hip-hop Aung Min Thu had earlier shared).

We also spent one session practicing the conditional with the question what would they do if they won the lottery, and with sharing what kind of animal they would be if they were one, and why.  The animal the girl who liked classical music chose was a bird. Aung Min Thu's was the eagle; Mg Htet Aung's was a lion; other choices were a dragon, wolf, cats, and butterfly.

One discussion was on favorite movies. (Korean movies were extremely popular.) Another was on heroes – General Aung San and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi were mentioned by more than one. Several of the students had seen the film The Lady on dvd – as I'd assumed, it hadn't played in the theaters. 

local street with food stall and water pots (and TV satellite dish)

Regarding the larger situation in the country: while in some ways change may be beginning, in significant ways there is none. In addition, now there's massive displacement of farmers for incoming foreign development and construction, and the new wealth is mostly going to the top.  There are also hard to miss changes like cheaper and newer cars—but not good roads so more congestion and longer to get places; more cellphones—but not adequate coverage; more computers—but an internet that is overloaded and hard to access.

This has all been written ln my kindle so sorry if a bit unedited and disjointed. But it's a first for me in being able to use a tiny touchpad keyboard (even though it's taken me ages to get this typed.) And I actuaaly texted nh first message today on my Thai phone, which you can now buy affordable SIM cards for (down from $300 a few years ago.)

Let me know of you would like to stay on my emails mailing list, as I don't want to burden or bore anyone with extra email

nuns on alms round on Yangon street

                                                            

Teaching English and Shwedagon Pagoda, 11/231- 11/25

 

I've loved teaching English with this group of trainees—they have a wonderful sense of humor, with a broad range of fluency and shyness—and apparently they are finding the classes fun and enjoyable.  We've done everything from role plays practicing describing how their company can help prospective clients, and handling client complaints, and using an

Appointment-Making handout exercise I'd downloaded before leaving—to reading aloud from a story book I'd brought, working on pronunciation—to  collaboratively creating a story (complete with enchantments, ogres, and heroes), each contributing a line at a time—to interviewing each other about their hobbies, their favorite beautiful place, and their most scary experience (my most recent one being driving in Yangon traffic).

The youngest student in the class, 17, Aung Myin Thu, named the Nargis cyclone of a few years ago as both his most scary and his most beautiful experience--seeing the roof of his house fly off and away (he was inside when it happened) and seeing trees uprooted and fly away in the sky.  He's the website developer and designer there, and he showed me his current village on googlemaps, embellished with some high-rises and Ufos he'd created—and he found my house on googlemaps too.  It was so amazing—he was able to find Solano Ave and 838 Stannage (with Bonnie's car in the driveway); the plum tree in front of the house is in blossom.  It was as clear a picture as the photo I'd once taken.  Although shy, he also is hilariously creative in our business role plays, and has a wonderful sense of humor, coming up with responses that have everyone in stitches. His father is a painter, and he clearly shares in his artistic sensitivity, and has a wonderful sweetness to him.

The company, whose name is Biz Leap, apparently was begun just a few months ago, and many of the young trainees are from Nyunt Than's village, children of relatives or friends or that he met and invited to come; one had come through a friend who was working there.

Last night four of the staff took me to Shwedagon Pagoda, very beautiful with the pagodas so brilliantly golden against the dark purplish clouds in growing dark, and the birds in the sky above catching the reflected lights below, sudden momentary flashes of light catching one's eyes.  Everywhere local people, mingled with tourists, and groups of Thai and Burmese monks were walking with flower sprays, or kneeling in prayer; and everywhere there were candles burning, shrines with brightly colored pulsating electric neon lights, and golden spires. Especially intriguing were the carvings of two quite expressive figures bordering one of the Buddha-holding niches.

And everyone, everywhere, even the littlest monk of a group of four, taking pictures with their cell phones.

In the brightly lit downtown area we passed through afterwards, the same new Western influence manifested themselves in a huge Swenson's ice cream parlor, some fast food stall with uniformed vendors, flashing advertisements, and, as everywhere, myriad mobile phone shops. We ate in a little shop, Shan soup. We were looking for mohinga (my request), and it wasn't available. But this morning, some delicious mohinga awaited me for my breakfast when I walked over to BizLeap. 

We've been on break the last couple hours, as they are all on a conference call to the U.S. with Nyunt Than.  Another afternoon everyone went over to a nearby storefront to work on the Khan Academy Translation-a-Thon. (The Khan Academy is an organization offering free online classes around the world; and people volunteer to translate the lessons into their respective languages: it's an incredible resource.) However, as often is the case, the internet was down, or at least so slow and sluggish as to be unusable.

I'm learning a certain amount of needed flexibility, between slow internets, and several hour breaks while the trainees take care of client work announced to me at the last minute, et cetera.  However, there are also incredible timely unfoldings such as the precision timing of my return from my evening walk last night to U Kyaw's hour-early arrival with my supper, I walking up just as he turned his car into the lane. And on the whole, even with the unexpected and vague, everything works out in its own timing perfectly.

About time to start up again, so will sign off for now.  Will probably head up to Mandalay on Wednesday.

Wishing you all Happy Thanksgiving,

Zoe

Arrived in Yangon Nov 20/21 (i.e. 11/21 Yangon calendar, 11/20 San Francisco calendar)

 

Arrived in. Yàngon to the sun setting red-orange in the mist and a flock of birds loudly. taking flight.  It's dark out. Width trl

[Wrote the above last night on my Kindle. I can't figure out how to find the commas on it, nor am very dexterous at aligning the cursor for corrections. Now I'm using a company laptop at the BizLeap office:]

Had a most welcoming airport arrival, with a driver holding up a "Zoe Newman" sign for me as I came out of customs to whisk me into a vehicle to drive me into Yangon.  Of course, no seat belts and the driving is crazy, constant honks warning pedestrians, bicyclists, and cars competing nose to nose to merge, missing each other by inches; sometimes a few cars will even move into one of the facing lanes for a few hundred yards before merging back into our side. 

Though only an hour away and despite visible modernizing changes, like the cell phones now in the hands of most of the eight teenage boys crammed in the back of the little open-air pick-up "bus" in front of us, it's a world still so different from Bangkok. It was dark as we drove in, tropical tree lined, figures in traditional longhi and skirts walking in the darkness along the road; or seated under roadside awning-covered shelters lit by a small hanging neon light or kerosene lamp; or stopped by a food cart; or squatted, cooking by the light of a candle.

Once arrived, I was met by my host U Kyaw Lin Naing Oo,, the Senior Manager of KOL (the company run by the village school friend of Nyunt Than, my Albany Burmese neighbor), and we went to eat supper in a roadside restaurant a few hundred yards away, before returning to where I'm staying in an old apartment room, paint peeling, of the KOL owner (who left for

Singapore this morning so I'll have the place to myself). It's next door to the IT company Nyunt Than has started with his KOL friend/partner here, where I am helping a group of about 8-10 young trainees  ခသကစူ  [here I seem to have hit some key that started translating into Burmese but fortunately had someone to help me this time, unlike with the airport computer that started translating to Chinese]  practice their English conversation skills for a few days  before I go north to Mandalay and the monastic school where I'll be volunteering for the rest of the time.

Zoe

11/19/14 In transit, Taipei Airport

Dear All,

I'm on my way. It's 6 am tomorrow now here in Taipei, 3:00 in the afternoon the day before California time.  In the last few hours have watched three films, the last one a French film something like "Qu'est-ce-que On a Fait au Bon Dieu?" which ｎ鼠乙提釔

6:10 am, 11/19/14, Taipei Airport

Subject: hit some translate-into-chinese button and couldn't

Sorry for the abrupt ending of the email just sent -- hit some translate-into-chinese button and couldn't undo it; so have had to go to a different computer.  Anyway, the French movie was good airplane fare. Frustratingingly, though, toward the end Eva Airlines kept freezing the film to make announcements, and then to display a slide show of generic cosmopolitan pictures as we were landing, so I have to hope that the next leg of the flight will have the same movie selection and I can fast forward to the correct place (a tricky proposition on these airline movie screens) to finish it.

No lost fleeces this trip, though did spend quite a few panicky minutes searching for my glasses --fortunately finally found them under the seat—apparently I missed my bag when I was dropping my glasses case into it (or trying to) last night.  [note: I was going to edit this piece of trivia, but when I look at it metaphorically, I am struck by its image of the looking to for a way to view, or a framework for seeing, that's turns out to not be in the bag where I am looking, but outside of that box as it were, not neatly bagged, and rather to be found by searching in a deeper understanding—or, here, underseating, a patient and open sitting with.  In that context, the last film echoes a similar theme: opening beyond prior limiting frameworks to a welcoming and embracing of the at-first-unacceptable, and its unexpected richness.

The sun is rising outside the airport windows here in Tapei.... 

wishing you all a good sunset, 

Zoe

Life is pure adventure, or, We do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

 


 
For the last two years, I've had calendars about journeys and travel on my wall, priming me as it were for the first journey that I took last year.

 One of the calendar quotes, by Maya Angelou, was "Life is Pure Adventure," and originally I was going to use that as the title for this blog, but blogspot informed me it was not available. So I googled and discovered more titles, and each of them felt a good title.

                                                                   For instance, there was the so apt Steinbeck quote, "we do not take a trip; a trip takes us." You might consider that as a title for what you read here. 

Martin Buber's "All real life is meeting" seemed a worthy candidate too, as did Basho's "Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home."   

There was also a lovely Abraham Heschel quote about the "endless pilgrimage of the heart" which I loved, and a wonderful Wendell Berry quote, with its reference to a "pilgrimage wandering and unmarked," both of which I also invite you to consider as title for these posts. 

I ended by creating a blog "away-from-the-safe-harbor" from Mark Twain's passage: "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore.  Dream.  Discover."    I decided, though, to let that hold last year's trip, and to begin a new one for this one.

Somehow in the end, have landed on the present name (from Ralph Waldo Emerson's  "Go where there is no path"), which in some ways is very similar to Steinbeck's "a trip takes us," and Wendell Barry's pilgrimage wandering and unmarked.   And since  I was bypassing the dozens of volunteer placements provided by the myriad volunteer organizations online that charged between $400-$1000 a week (some of them excellent programs), and had spent hours googling to discover direct opportunities, in some way I was forging my way where there was no path prepared and paved for me.  

And certainly even once there, it was more like being on a boat carried here, then there, by shifting currents, rather than on a path with clear signposts to follow.  Flexibility and openness were the key attributes called for; the path was formed in the very steps forward as the way cleared, and visible only in the looking back where the steps had found foothold.  Even at the intersections, the challenges were in there being no path, allowing only openness directly into what the moment held, offered, invited…and richly gave.  

 I had started with a couple of leads for possible volunteering from my trip last year, but got no response to my emails.  After hours online I finally located a monastic school in Sagaing near Mandalay called the International Buddhist Education Center, which offers Buddhist Dharma and standard education for the novices and children who cannot afford government schooling, free of charge.  After myriad unanswered emails, and almost at the point of giving up, I finally received a warmly welcoming letter to submit for a visa application.  

 Visa letter in hand, I made plane reservations, and the following week also received an invitation from Nyunt Than, my neighbor in Albany, to spend a few days with the trainees in a small company he is helping start in Yangon. So I changed my reservations to fly into Yangon instead of Mandalay, signed up for an online TEFL class, made arrangements to leave my car somewhere where it wouldn't collect four street cleaning tickets, and late November, took the BART to the San Francisco Airport for my midnight Eva Airline flight.

What follows are the emails from that trip.  Only like some ancient script that is read from right to left, and what would be our back of the book forward to the front, the blog structure means that to follow the journey chronologically, you must begin at the bottom, reading at the end, moving upwards.

    note: Although I include a handful of photos interspersed among these posts, I could not begin to include them all, but to see them you can go to: https://www.flickr.com/photos/129187095@N02/sets/.  The first album "Top 400" is a selection of the best photos, so that would be the one to look at unless you have time and interest to look at more in any particular phase of the trip.)