International Buddhist Education Center (IBEC), Sagaing, Friday Nov 28

Dear All,

I have arrived at IBEC—it is far from quiet. There's a special pagoda festival at the pagoda across the road from where I stay, and much of the time a loudspeaker blaring. They have cleaned a little room for me in a little guesthouse, which has a couple other tiny rooms and a large open space where about eight 9^th grade students sleep on the linoleum laid on the floor, amidst belongings and books, and clothes on hangers from strung ropes. They brought a bed frame into the little room for me, and I have folded a couple of the provided blankets to use as padding to sleep on. The other teacher will show me how to shower Burmese style, pouring bowls of water over yourself while wearing a longyi tucked up shoulder level, from the cistern of water outside (sorry, I don't know how to cut and paste, so sometimes my pphrases are not in clearest order).

The guesthouse is just outside the monastery grounds, at the bottom of the hill.  On the way down to it, we stopped at the little baboo house of the teachers friend wwho served us tea leaf salad and sweet

bananas and a legumes sweet. [above typos a sample of my typical kindle email.]  The television was on, and there was a tv ad about how washing your hands is healthy between a show ending with Jingle Bells in Burmese and the following very melodramatic Korean show.   I am (this nearly read "wampum"—kindle trying to be helpful) served yet more food, a lunch of several dishes, when we reach the main house in front of our little guesthouse hostel.

The shower lesson was quite an experience. A half dozen girls showed me how to tuck the longyi

about me just below my shoulders, then helped me bathe by pouring bow!s of water over me—I Fletcher like (not sure how kindle turned felt " into "Fletcher"!) like a princess being bathed by her maidens. Only, my longyi kept coming untucked, so it was hilarious as they had to keep helping me refold and retuck it, all of us laughing all the while.

At dinner which was served to many people because of the festival, one of the other teachers, Aung Khaing Soe, whose niece Sumon lives in our guesthouse, joined us.  I was struggling to get to get the little keys into the little lock I'd been given for my room, and he had the magic touch which could actually get the key in and to lock and unlock; "slow and gentle," he instructed me, and I was finally able to do it myself. After dinner, Sumon brought me up the steps across the road to the pagoda, filled with offerings of flower, fruit, and racks of clothes-pinned kyat bills.

My kindle just lost a long descriptive email I'd written here—