The Wild Swans and the Stone Frog

novices running down hill path toward kitchen

 Wed  Dec 10

[note: this got uploaded by accident behind the Wild Swans entry, so took place before the trip to Thuzar Win's village]

I thought today at last there would be nothing left to relay, but we met a couple of Thuzar’s old schoolmates, Wyne and Aung Pho, at the internet café in town and they brought us to her house, where Wyne's mother had opened a noodle shop. They treated me with some of her delicious vegetarian stew-like dish and Shan noodle soup, both “ayin gown-dey” (my transliteration of “very good” in Myanmar) while they practiced their English with me.  I am helping all three with their applications for a Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative program thru the U. S. Department of State, and with finding a way to translate their village experience into credentials for why they should be considered as promising candidates for the five-week global environment issues program.

Thursday Dec 11

Wyne, Aung Pho, Thuzar Win at Indian tea shop

 Wyne and Aung Pho came by and brought us some distance on back roads to a little Indian tea shop where we had chapatti and myriad little dishes. A Myanmar movie was playing on the TV about a transgender boy and girl who are in love each other, and whose mothers are very upset around their transgenderedness; apparently the main mother’s heart perceptibly softens as she watches him/her cry, and eventually she gives them her permission to marry, and there’s a sweet domestic scene between the two children (the actors/actresses are among the top ten of Myanmar).  However, the movie didn’t seem to end there, so don’t know how it did end in the end.  (Transgenders and gays are not so accepted in the culture here according to the three (though the head of the Mon Women Empowerment Association I volunteered with a few days last year in Mwalaymine was “Jack”) and the couple remarks that’ve come up in the older classes display definitely 50s/60s attitudes; but maybe the Myanmar film industry is a bit more Western and progressive in this area…)
  
Either I tore my longyi on a bush while exploring a side trail last night or the mouse got at it (I've put a strip of linoleum weighed down by bricks over a large crack between my floorboards this afternoon to keep out the mouse or rat that ran across my bed this morning). Thuzar brought it to the women in the teacher guesthouse where one of them worked amazingly instant magic on it with her sewing machine, cutting and sewing, and now I have one again like new.

Friday, Dec 12

Met with the primary grade children under the trees again, with whom I have been sharing The Wild Swans story book (one of the few paperback children’s books I found at the library sale just before I left).  I made eleven little pieces of paper and had them draw a boy on one side and a bird on the other (and had one student draw a girl; another, a sun).  Had them also draw shirts on eleven other little pieces of paper, which they put over the swans which then, once they turned the paper around, became boys again. In a couple classes, they acted out the roles too, and the transformation from boys to birds and back.

During the break between classes after the second grade children ran off, I was surrounded by about a dozen high school level novices who’d been watching from the side and who wanted to hear the story, so I went through the book with them, with more detail, and they listened with great interest and attention, more so even than the second-graders.

There’s a wonderful sweetness, warmth, innocence, friendliness and openness in the novices.  FYI: the students ordain as novices during their stay, but only a few will go on to become monks, though there are two or three who would like to stay as monks when they finish school,  and they are not unlike other boys in their interests and dreams. Their career goals cover the range from soldier and engineer to poet, doctor, and teacher, ; and when we did a conversation exercise that involved sharing what made you sad, as many novices as non-novice students named a broken heart from a lover (ie girlfriend) not returning their love.  But it's a warmth and openness, and generosity of heart, that's so present in everyone I've met in my previous trips here also. (And so different from the "cool" hard-edged image of the models in their tight levis portrayed in the advertisements beginning to hit Myanmar tv and billboards.)

 In the afternoons I sill sometimes teach the first half of Aung’s upper grade class; the second half he has to teach them what they need to pass their government exams. 

       Wyne and Aung Pho, who come almost daily to have me go over their latest scholarship applications drafts), brought an army nurse friend with them today, and when she heard I was a psychotherapist (most people haven’t really known what that meant), she asked me about nightmares she has, so I was able to give her a couple dreamwork suggestions for working with them—good to be useful in my field. (Just coincidentally, the next storybook I’ve started with the children is Joseph and His Magnificent Coat of Many Colors with its four illustrated dreams…) 


Saturday, December 13

        On my morning walk, climbed many steps up to a little shrine with a great golden Buddha, on the paved road between the two large pagodas at the top of the hill, going back the road way so I could photo the two immense stone frogs at the gate entrance far below.