Final post on Myanmar

The last day here was wonderful. I went on the Twantay Excursion (Twantay is a small village 24 km from Yangon) it was originally suppose to be a trip of pottery viewing and buying with a short service visit to an orphanage thrown in for good measure. But the group that went the previous day said thumbs down to everything except the orphanage. So our trip was just a brief stop in a village to watch them make pottery, then off to the orphanage.

It was a private Buddhist orphanage and when we got there the children were shyly waving at us and smiling. The head monk, sort of an imposing, gruff type came down stairs into a courtyard and blew his whistle and the children came running from all over and lined up by sex and by age. There were girls and boys as old as 16 and a couple of tiny little boys that were only 2 or 3, and everything in between. They all had their palms pressed together in front of their faces, like prayer hands. They proceeded to sing us a few little songs, but it was somewhere sort of between singing and chanting really. So then it was our turn and we did "I'm a little teapot" and "Itsy Bitsy Spider." Then they did THEIR version of "I'm a little teapot" and totally blew us out of the water. The vibe was friendly yet awkward. They had arranged for us to hand out candy and clothing to the children, and this raised the level of awkwardness by a mile. They all still stood there with their hands pressed together in perfect rows while we walked around trying to guess sizes. Some seemed pleased, most seemed shy, some seemed sort of annoyed (it was very hot out). After everything was distributed they said "Ok, you can interact with the children now" but they were all still standing there at attention, and wouldn't break ranks until at last the head monk blew his whistle again. Then the fun started. I played volleyball with a few boys for 20 or 30 minutes and my wrists are red and bruised. People were carrying around the little ones and playing duck duck goose and red rover (red rover doesn't translate as well as duck duck goose). If it hadn't been so infernally hot, it would have been a perfect morning. The guide said many of the students parents had died or malaria or TB, but many had also been abandoned. Their chances of being adopted are practically zero as the government doesn't allow adoption until they've been orphaned 5 years. I don't know how much difference our visit really made, but at least it was something different for them maybe, a change of pace.

On ship time was early 2:00pm and we sailed around 4:00pm. The groups that went to Mandalay (I think it was about 200 people) all have adventure stories to tell. There was major flooding around Mandalay and a dam broke. It washed out a lot of roads and one group had to ford a river with their luggage, One group was stuck on a bus for 18 hours and the trip Mary and Kelly were on ended up taking a 6 hour boat ride down the Irrawaddy to Bagan to catch a flight out of there. Everybody's back safe and sound and I think mostly it was exciting more than terrifying.

Also I heard an exciting rumor, our beloved and foxy captain, Captain Roman, has been off the ship since Vietnam. "Family emergency," we were told. Au contraire says an informed source, evidently our captain is banned from captaining a ship in Myanmar since the last time he was here he had a fight with the river pilot. Even to the point of fisticuffs, perhaps. That has just turned his dashingness quotient to 11. We've had kind of a squirrelly Brit as the captain since Vietnam, but Captain Roman will be back in India. Sigh.

All in all I think people had a marvelous time here, the Burmese people really are so warm and wonderful it's hard not to be touched by them. I hope that they're on the verge of a real breakthrough and that the miracle the Vietnamese are talking about in their country now, will happen in some kind of way for them too. It's really hard to get your head around that sometimes. So often it seems that having enough jobs and adequate health care and access to education and clean water and clean food just go hand in hand with Westernization. The Burmese have a such a rich culture and history and really are such beautiful people I feel a twinge of regret when I think of traffic and fast food and department stores. But who am I to stand in the way of their Home Depot because I enjoy quaint third world charm. I don't know the answer, maybe there's a middle ground somewhere. I really don't know what I'm talking about.

So now we're off to India, two days and we're there. Bam!