Today is Monday, February 25. Earlier we had a truly life-affirming experience. Our boat has room for 32 passengers but we eight plus Nu Nu are the only ones presently on board. So we are able to do some things that a larger group would not be able to do. We visited a village that has never had Western visitors before. Even Nu Nu had never visited this village and I believe it was Ton Naung (sounds like Tonight), the first officer of our ship, who suggested this activity to her. She appeared quite excited when she told us about it, also adding that if we didn’t like it, it wasn’t her fault. Not to worry, we said, we are game for anything.
As our ship approached land, the villagers, children and adults alike, began to emerge from the trees and to shout and wave. It was a red letter day! We disembarked one by one onto a sandy beach and as we came down the wooden gangplank which had been deftly set out complete with rope hand rails, crew members from our ship flanked each of us and practically carried us over the deep sand to solid ground. All the while the children and their parents were staring and crying Mingalaba! Mingalaba! Welcome, hello, nice to see you. They couldn’t stop smiling. And neither could we.
We followed our leader into the village and, like the Red Dao village in SaPa that we visited last year, this one is like out of another century--bamboo houses, lean-tos for storage, skinny cows, ox driven carts, no roads, just paths worn down by years of bare feet, and primitive tools for basic survival. They did have one ingenious device: it reminded me of those “you slice ‘em you dice ‘em” gadgets that they advertise on TV for chopping vegetables. But this larger version had a woman sitting on it who fed corn husks and wheat into a thresher type gizmo which chopped it up and dropped the resultant slivers into a basket. This becomes feed for the animals.
News travels fast and pretty soon we had a large entourage of folks who seemed thrilled by our very presence. The purported purpose of our visit was to donate some supplies to the school--some notebooks, pens and pencils, rulers which we had bought yesterday in Mingun, and some easy English readers. Nu Nu had brought these things with her because there is always some place to donate them. In addition, Pearl and Robert had lugged forty pounds of books from America to donate, an arrangement that Pearl had made in advance, although not necessarily to give to this particular village. As we made our way towards the school, we stopped at almost every house to talk to the people (through Nu Nu or the crew members) and in every case they were welcoming and eager to show us their homes. We stopped at the home of a very old woman smoking an interesting looking thing, bigger and whiter than a cigar. At first she didn’t know what to make of us but after we were explained to her she smiled her toothless smile and seemed to welcome the cameras. First she wanted to remove the supplies she was using to make the smoking contraptions--kind of a Burmese version of tidying up for guests--but no no we gestured, we want to know what it is and we want to take pictures of it, and of you. I was sure she would shy away from the cameras but she didn’t, and as soon as she understood that we wanted to learn about what she was doing, she gave us a willing demonstration. She had corn husks in one basket, and wheat seeds and tobacco in another. She would strip the corn husks to the right size, add a handful of wheat and tobacco and some other unknown herb, roll up the package and tie it with a string. Then you light one end and smoke it. They were about as big or bigger than the largest cigar you’ve ever seen. Nu Nu explained that you don’t smoke the whole thing at once, just take a puff or two, put it out and then puff again later. The house she was operating out of was very modest, but next door there was a quite substantial house (for the neighborhood), and she owned that house too. I asked if she was the elder of the village, but Nu Nu asked and she said no, there is a gentleman there who is almost 100 years old and she is only 85.
As we were leaving to move on toward the school, Nu Nu knelt down in front of the old woman and very discretely pressed a few bills into her hand. She then bowed her head to the ground as a gesture of respect and said some words very lovingly. It was so beautiful and the old woman just smiled and nodded.
We made our way past more houses and through a wheat field and finally arrived at the school. The principal and three teachers were out front to greet us, having been forewarned by the children that some strange people were in their village and were making their way to the school. We learned that the village is very lucky to have teachers at all, let alone an English teacher. Many similar villages are so remote that no teachers will go to teach there.
Inside there were twelve students sitting at three banks of desks with a chalkboard in front of them. The chalkboard had an English lesson on it--fill in the blank: She (had, have, has) an orange for breakfast. In addition to those twelve, all the other younger children who had met us at the beach were now inside the one room classroom, so it was a crowd of at least forty counting all of us and the other adults.
By now we were snapping pictures like mad and the children couldn’t wait to have their pictures taken and then to see themselves on the small screen. It was hard to get the more rambunctious ones to be still for the pictures, and some of the boys would push the others out of the way so they could be in every shot. All in all, we spent about forty minutes inside the school, talking to them--its amazing how much you can communicate without words. During this time, Nu Nu presented the principal with the supplies and each of us were allowed to hand a couple of notebooks and pencils to one particular child and have our picture taken with that child. We took hundreds of pictures of the children and we have vowed to choose the best ones and somehow or other get them delivered to the village.
After the supplies had all been meted out, including Pearl’s books, the children lined up and recited their abc’s and counted to ten in English for us. We clapped and they beamed proudly.
As we made our way back to the boat, a couple of the ladies shyly gestured could they touch my arm. Have at it, says I, and they touched and gently pinched the skin on my arm. They wanted to see if my white skin felt the same as theirs! The others had the same experience. They wanted to know why our skin was white and we explained as best we could through the interpreter. A difficult concept if you have no frame of reference.
I wonder if from here on in, time will be measured by the day the Americans came to their village. Years from now, children will be told, ah yes this was before you were born, that special day when eight Americans came on a special visit and gave us books.
As our ship approached land, the villagers, children and adults alike, began to emerge from the trees and to shout and wave. It was a red letter day! We disembarked one by one onto a sandy beach and as we came down the wooden gangplank which had been deftly set out complete with rope hand rails, crew members from our ship flanked each of us and practically carried us over the deep sand to solid ground. All the while the children and their parents were staring and crying Mingalaba! Mingalaba! Welcome, hello, nice to see you. They couldn’t stop smiling. And neither could we.
We followed our leader into the village and, like the Red Dao village in SaPa that we visited last year, this one is like out of another century--bamboo houses, lean-tos for storage, skinny cows, ox driven carts, no roads, just paths worn down by years of bare feet, and primitive tools for basic survival. They did have one ingenious device: it reminded me of those “you slice ‘em you dice ‘em” gadgets that they advertise on TV for chopping vegetables. But this larger version had a woman sitting on it who fed corn husks and wheat into a thresher type gizmo which chopped it up and dropped the resultant slivers into a basket. This becomes feed for the animals.
News travels fast and pretty soon we had a large entourage of folks who seemed thrilled by our very presence. The purported purpose of our visit was to donate some supplies to the school--some notebooks, pens and pencils, rulers which we had bought yesterday in Mingun, and some easy English readers. Nu Nu had brought these things with her because there is always some place to donate them. In addition, Pearl and Robert had lugged forty pounds of books from America to donate, an arrangement that Pearl had made in advance, although not necessarily to give to this particular village. As we made our way towards the school, we stopped at almost every house to talk to the people (through Nu Nu or the crew members) and in every case they were welcoming and eager to show us their homes. We stopped at the home of a very old woman smoking an interesting looking thing, bigger and whiter than a cigar. At first she didn’t know what to make of us but after we were explained to her she smiled her toothless smile and seemed to welcome the cameras. First she wanted to remove the supplies she was using to make the smoking contraptions--kind of a Burmese version of tidying up for guests--but no no we gestured, we want to know what it is and we want to take pictures of it, and of you. I was sure she would shy away from the cameras but she didn’t, and as soon as she understood that we wanted to learn about what she was doing, she gave us a willing demonstration. She had corn husks in one basket, and wheat seeds and tobacco in another. She would strip the corn husks to the right size, add a handful of wheat and tobacco and some other unknown herb, roll up the package and tie it with a string. Then you light one end and smoke it. They were about as big or bigger than the largest cigar you’ve ever seen. Nu Nu explained that you don’t smoke the whole thing at once, just take a puff or two, put it out and then puff again later. The house she was operating out of was very modest, but next door there was a quite substantial house (for the neighborhood), and she owned that house too. I asked if she was the elder of the village, but Nu Nu asked and she said no, there is a gentleman there who is almost 100 years old and she is only 85.
As we were leaving to move on toward the school, Nu Nu knelt down in front of the old woman and very discretely pressed a few bills into her hand. She then bowed her head to the ground as a gesture of respect and said some words very lovingly. It was so beautiful and the old woman just smiled and nodded.
We made our way past more houses and through a wheat field and finally arrived at the school. The principal and three teachers were out front to greet us, having been forewarned by the children that some strange people were in their village and were making their way to the school. We learned that the village is very lucky to have teachers at all, let alone an English teacher. Many similar villages are so remote that no teachers will go to teach there.
Inside there were twelve students sitting at three banks of desks with a chalkboard in front of them. The chalkboard had an English lesson on it--fill in the blank: She (had, have, has) an orange for breakfast. In addition to those twelve, all the other younger children who had met us at the beach were now inside the one room classroom, so it was a crowd of at least forty counting all of us and the other adults.
By now we were snapping pictures like mad and the children couldn’t wait to have their pictures taken and then to see themselves on the small screen. It was hard to get the more rambunctious ones to be still for the pictures, and some of the boys would push the others out of the way so they could be in every shot. All in all, we spent about forty minutes inside the school, talking to them--its amazing how much you can communicate without words. During this time, Nu Nu presented the principal with the supplies and each of us were allowed to hand a couple of notebooks and pencils to one particular child and have our picture taken with that child. We took hundreds of pictures of the children and we have vowed to choose the best ones and somehow or other get them delivered to the village.
After the supplies had all been meted out, including Pearl’s books, the children lined up and recited their abc’s and counted to ten in English for us. We clapped and they beamed proudly.
As we made our way back to the boat, a couple of the ladies shyly gestured could they touch my arm. Have at it, says I, and they touched and gently pinched the skin on my arm. They wanted to see if my white skin felt the same as theirs! The others had the same experience. They wanted to know why our skin was white and we explained as best we could through the interpreter. A difficult concept if you have no frame of reference.
I wonder if from here on in, time will be measured by the day the Americans came to their village. Years from now, children will be told, ah yes this was before you were born, that special day when eight Americans came on a special visit and gave us books.
1 comment:
Mom and Dad:
So great to hear from you again...we were all quietly worrying, although knowing that you just couldn't get internet service, but still....it's good to hear your "voice" again through the blog. Beautifully written, it gave me goosebumps to read how they touched your skin, and your reference to the "day the Americans came". Skype us sometime so we can see you!
Love,
David
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