Phuang Daw Oo

It is so bustling here, with its about 2000 students who live here plus the 6000 who come from Mandalay itself for school; and the sound of children shouting, laughing and playing; and modern buildings, computers, and massive Western-provided teaching materials. The office is crowded with teachers doing paperwork and working on laptops.  It’s almost like being at a Myanmar version of a Western school. 

Phuang Daw Oo is a monastic school which serves orphans, ethnic and poor children and others who cannot afford to attend the government schools.  The IBEC monk principal was sharing some of the differences last night when I was talking to him in the IBEC office before I left.  He said this school has lots of funding from German, American governments and NGOs, which IBEC does not.  He also said IBEC focuses on imparting an education in the Dharma and Buddhist teachings as foundational.  Thus almost all the students that come and live there become novices during their stay so they can receive a training in living the Dharma in the monastic setting.

 It’s a very different experience and feel from IBEC.  One is that the most of the children all speak English so much better, as it has an immersion program where all the classes except Myanmar language is in English.  With the Western involvement there’s much more Western influence, materials and approaches used in the teaching (for instance, I saw a language lab, and the approach is child-centered).  It’s also not so monastic or traditional here.  The abbot here is much more informal than the

abbot/principal (right) of Phuang Daw Oo in school office

IBEC head monk (where the teachers and guests all do the traditional three bows when they enter and leave), and the children are in all sorts of clothes, shorts, jeans.  Everywhere they were playing—jumping rope, badminton, soccer, volleyball, and the local game where you keep the ball in the air with foot, knee, whatever.  

IBEC, by contrast, was very traditionally monastic, with the head monk principal seated in front of the golden Buddha shrine, receiving teachers and guests on the bamboo mat before him.  And there so few spoke English, and even with those it was so often difficult to understand. Yet there was an innocence and sweetness in the novices that was so special, a friendliness of the women in the kitchen, and a slowness and simplicity in the days.  I was really immersed in another culture and language there, and despite the physical challenges of being there, I am glad that’s where I spent the time as I did. 

Last night even missed a little the night-time loudspeakers and barking dogs; the night trips stumbling over the thong-scattered wood porch and concrete steps, down the dirt path, avoiding the occasional cow dung, to the Asian-style toilet, and back past the cistern with its little aluminum bowls for dipping water to wash; and the early morning bell striking of the monks’ alms round; and as it grew light, the old

man daily shuffling down the road with his stick, and the woman with her wide basket of fried snacks balanced on her head, calling out in her singsong voice.  And the last couple days’ motorcycle trips with Aung Khaing Soe in the early morning cold to a local teashop for mohinga.

Slept solidly last night though, and had a large bowl of warm mohinga, a little on the spicy side, for 200 kyat (20 cents) at one of the many little stalls crowded with school children just beyond the dorms. Leaving there, I ran into the assistant principal who had shown me around when I’d visited in November, and we chatted a bit. Later at the office, talked a little more with the head principal, who shared a letter from the American University, which is helping them with establishing a university program here and with providing teachers.  

main school building

 Afterwards I met with one of the teachers and we mapped out a schedule with me teaching two Grade 3 sessions, and Grades 4, 6, 8, focusing on pronunciation and reading.  The third grade teacher’s English is excellent (though even she drops her “s”s). I feel a little irrelevant here as everyone already speaks English so well, but she was enthusiastically happy about me teaching her class.

orphan/ethnic children evening class in library

There’s a substantial library here, and took out some books to share with the students; also talked for a while with the young housemother of the ethnic children hostel.  In addition to the orphan children and the ethnic children, there is a Nargis hostel for the children who were orphaned by the 2008 Nargis cyclone.  Each group has different donors, and the Nargis one is well funded, but the ethnic children (the ones from areas where there’s fighting) don’t have any donors, so the principal helps as much as he can, and their parents contribute what they can; still, many of them have only the most basic rice and curry. (I gave her the names of a couple organizations that I thought she could solicit a donation from.)

"Golden House" with the Nargis and other children from far

I think the length of the monastery school complex is at least double the distance between Solano and Marin. [editing note: it was not double]. I'm getting a little overwhelmed with all the "Where are you from?"s from children wanting to practice their English as I pass them.  I also feel a little lost here, it is so big, and haven’t had more than a two-word contact with any of the other foreign (mostly German) teachers.  One was having a heated altercation with another teacher (for which he later chagrinly apologized to me the next day, jetlagged on just arriving back from trip to Germany); apparently a citizenship class had been scheduled during the time he was trying to prepare the students for their upcoming final exams in February (the exams are a big deal; if you don’t pass you have to drop out.) However, I did talk with the German art teacher for a few minutes, and she showed me some of the students' art. The Burmese children have such a gift in art. I remember one little tiny boy at IBEC who would spend hours on the platform under the trees intently drawing, and copying book illustrations, and they were quite good. 

One of the art projects the teacher had done with the children was to start with a small piece of a piece of art, like a drawing by Albrecht Durer, and then the student expanded from it into a whole drawing.  Amazing work—some pieces that were museum-worthy.  Another project was collating together sliced pieces of the painted faces onto an accordion-folded piece of paper, such that when you approached it from one direction you would see one face, and from the other direction, an entirely other face.  The third project she showed me was where they had made a drawing with crayon which she’d crumpled, then smoothed out, and they covered it with a darker blue or black watercolor wash, which was subsequently lightly wiped away, leaving the color only in the cracks, and a lovely batik-like drawing.

my room

For dinner I had a small dish of tofu, pumpkin and greens from a food stall in the back lanes area where I had walked last night along with a banana, and the boiled egg I'd brought from IBEC.  I'd tried going up to the main street to try a tea shop, but the motorcycle traffic was so thick, and so much exhaust, and what with my not knowing enough Burmese to try to figure out what they had, that I'd turned around and gone back. It gave me the chance, though, to enjoy the dusk view from my veranda looking out over the canal, with the lit pagodas on Mandalay Hill in the distance.  Tonight I will join one of the teachers with the first half of the ethnic students' 9pm class.

Walking along the lane earlier, I came across a group of women in their bamboo hats carrying stones,
and sitting in the lane spreading and breaking the stones, and men with their tools smashing them. Later on a huge machine with a roller was approaching, maybe to compress them.  I had hoped from the

stone crushing machines on either side of my IBEC guesthouse that things were getting a little more mechanized, but I guess here it's still the backbreaking work of the women that I'd seen last time.

 

I found an English Myanmar weekly newspaper in the library, my first exposure to the news beyond the one page in English of a Myanmar newspaper someone at IBEC had shared with me. So many problems still: elections that were useless; investigative police force being reintroduced; activists protesting mine land-grabbing in Sagaing district, Rakkine protests against UN regulator, etc etc as well as something about the recent Air Asia plane that went missing for a while. Fortunately Richard says Air Asia has an excellent record, which is reassuring after their two disappearances (they are part of Malaysia Air whose first flight's disappearance is still unsolved) since I'll be flying Air Asia in six days.

Wishing you all a good week, and see you all soon (assuming my Air Asia flight doesn't disappear),

Zoe