Mandalay 11/27/15

WDear all,

I write this at Peacock Lodge in Mandalay on my kindle.  Every once in a while a boy will walk by singing —it's one of the beautiful things about Burma, how this happens.  (We just now had a little earthquake—the building rattled for about a minute, and I heard a lot of voices, then later I was told it had been an earthquake.) The sounds waking up here are different from Yangon; instead of pre-dawn roosters there is the sound of the monks and the nuns chanting as they stop at our gate, and the neighboring ones, with their begging bowls as they make their alms rounds, the monks in brown and the nuns in their pink.  Some are in little processions, others alone, some quite young, maybe only seven or eight. (On my earlier trip visiting a nunnery/orphanage, there was the sweetest little three year nun.)

At Peacock Lodge, the hotel manager tried to help me call the number I had for Phuang Daw Oo, a monastery school in Mandalay that I had found while researching on the internet (one which wanted a couple month commitment, but from which I'd never heard back); however, the number was not in service.  But it turned out the school was not only in the same quarter of town, but on the same street as where I was staying, and only about a twenty-minute walk along the canal.  So I walked over, getting only a little lost at the end where the road jogged a bit to the right on intersecting with a large street, and finding a little lane that led into the school compound through a side entrance, and that landed me quite close to the office.  

A tall, kindly and warm monk, who turned out to be the vice-principal, U Janeyya, showed me to the office where the principal U Nayaka warmly welcomed me ("yes, come teach whatever length of time you have!"), and the volunteer coordinator, Monica, was located.  Her English was fluent, and she explained that it was not possible for them to provide lodging at the monastery for someone there on a business visa, only a meditation visa (apparently each localgovernment official has their own understandings), but occasionally someone on a tourist visa could stay for a week if there was space. After our conversation, U Janeyya, who'd become a monk in middle age after being a businessman, showed me around the large city-block long school, little children enthusiastically coming up to carry my bag as we walked down the corridors.

 

[From online description of the school:  "Phaung Daw Oo Monastic Education High School was founded in 1993 by Venerable U Nayaka and his brother, Venerable U Zawtika. It started as a primary school with ten local volunteer teachers and over 300 students. The school was established with the purpose of providing free education to poor children. PDO is predominantly for poor students who, for various reasons, are unable to attend government schools. Currently, the school is successfully running from Kindergarten to High School levels with over 6000 students and 280 teachers. The students are from both urban and rural poor families and include orphans, abused, neglected, abandoned and poverty stricken children of different ethnicities from all around Myanmar."]   

 From the school I walked several long blocks to the moat of the Royal Palace; and from there, hot and dehydrated, back to the guesthouse, stopping to get a couple tiny bananas to tide me over to dinner since I hadn't had anything to eat all day.  Relaxed the rest of the afternoon at the little patio table by the canal, then went into the courtyard for dinner, taking out my kindle to write more on the lost email I am  currently attempting to reconstruct, and was invited by a friendly

German couple to join them at their table. It was my first Western contact of the week (and one of my only ones for the next many weeks).

In the morning, I donated the finished book I had randomly picked up for my airport reading from my shelves where it'd been sitting for some years, given me by someone letting go of their books, When Elephants Weep, to the little lending library of the guesthouse, and after breakfast and a morning walk took a motorbike-taxi downtown, where I transferred to a pick-up bus to Sagaing. 

 

It took about an hour and a half just to load, stopping at a few different places and waiting (and waiting) for passengers, until, finally full, it proceeded to Sagaing where I disembarked and walked to the hotel lobby where we'd arranged that I meet the IBEC volunteer coordinator.