Eye Clinic Opening Celebration

women preparing Mont Lin Ma Yar (Burmese snack) at celebration of the eye clinic opening

Dear All,

Friday afternoon (12/19) most of the teachers and old students piled into pickup trucks for the four hour journey to the principal's village. (Many of the older novices and university students had already gone earlier in the week to help in preparations, which included posting pictures of the principal and the clinic on every pole throughout the town.).  I was in a car with other teachers who did not speak English at all, and was going to be dropped in some guesthouse in town but, visualizing being utterly stranded, I insistently asked to at least first see where the hospital was before they left me.  

 

And it turned out quite far away.  When we arrived there were hundreds of people milling about, a ferris

wheel in the distance, and bushes decorated with lights—the festive atmosphere of a fair. I was very happy to recognize some English-speaking students from the weekend class I'd taught at IBEC, who led me to Ven. Sobhita seated on a couch holding audience for a roomful of people. He made arrangements

guestroom with tanaka round

for me to be in a close-by guesthouse, and a couple of the students brought me to dining hall for dinner and showed me around the area, and then brought me to the guesthouse, where I asked for another blanket to supplement mine to bed down on the straw mat in a small room with them, adjoining a larger room with maybe another dozen teachers and students.

The nest morning our hostess bought some breakfast for us, bringing it to us in layered tins, including mohinga for me. And she and a couple other woman refixed my longyi, which didn't hang right after the previous fix.

They took out the pleat tuck and zipper seam, turning it back into a more proper longyi, albeit with a waistband to tie it with, as it'd originally been.  Took a walk in the morning and had fun hanging out with the students, who spoke quite good English.

 
 In the evening the students went on the ferris wheel (while a couple of boys climbed along the turning web structure), and then to the performance, where they brought me backstage and I took photos of the women in their elaborate costumes at their makeup tables.  

famous actors Htun Htun and Nay Toe

  
Next we went to where the musicians were playing beside the stage, and found some seats ourselves at the edge of the stage. Then several famous Myanmar Academy Award winner and nominee
actors/singers arrived from Yangon, and the students excitedly brought be backstage to introduce me to them.


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Afterwards we got seats again at the other side of the stage to watch the performances. It started at about 9 and went all night (we left around 1 a.m.). 

 

watching the performance from the side of the stage

 

  People from the audience would reach up roses to the singers, and occasionally someone would come up on stage to give them some money and a hug.

another famous actor, Sunday morning

On the trip back, I started out on the truck-bed of a pickup with a dozen other teachers, and it was a harrowing bumpy ride just from the hospital grounds to a monastery on the outskirts where we stopped.  Fortunately, while we were waiting there for some other passengers, the abbot of the monastery adjoining IBEC (where the Chinese lessons are held) who had stopped at the monastery also, made some calls and found us a van that we were able to transfer to for the ride back.

December 22 
 


The next day Aung Khaing Soe invited me to come with him and his father (and a few others) to Inwa, an ancient historical site nearby with an old fort, an ancient stone monastery and an ancient wooden monastery.  

On the way home, we visited a jade pagoda under construction, an amazing project by some donor in the jade trade, all being built of beautiful jade, many of the mosaic jade pieces in the millions of dollars. 



It’s lovely but mind-boggling, this incredible discrepancy between such a superlatively costly though magnificent construction, and the thin women laborers in their straw hats carrying stones and shoveling gravel.

 

I continue the “Under the Trees Class” from about 1 to 3:30 or 4 for the novices the following week, including even on Christmas Day, drawing a few pictures with which to tell the Christmas story.

Two catastrophes that day: in the morning getting a massive oil stain on the outfit I most wear; and worse, as I was trying to back up my camera photos in the evening, accidentally deleting about 200 of them—very depressing. [later note:  photos were happily found upon return tucked in a folder inside another folder in my camera].
 
 It doesn't feel like Christmas here at all, but I do sing a couple of Christmas carols as I come down from the hills in the evening dark.  Aung Khaing Soe and the head monk with the warm demeanor were seated on a platform under the trees near the teacher's guesthouse in the dark, and I sat and conversed with them for a while.