Htay Kon Village, Pakokku

Today is the anniversary of Richard’s death. It is good to have something useful to do.

U Thain Htay Win, owner of the Royal Palace Hotel in Pakokku told us that nearby Htay Kon Village is a particularly poor village. It is nick-named Sandstone Village because the surface of the land is thickly strewn with sandstone chips. Of course this is not good for farming.

Two or three of the houses (there were 70 in all) were of woven bamboo with a corrugated metal roof, but the majority of houses had walls and thatched roof of woven toddy palm leaves (more attractive but much less strong). We stop at just such a house.

A very old man appears from the gloom at the back, leaning heavily on a stick. This is U Lor aged 93. He has never learned to read, but would like to try a pair of wegies so he can look far away. He put on the glasses and then looked around at all of us and asked if we could see him too!  That was a first! He was joined by his wife Daw May age 90, she found glasses to suit her too. Daw Gyi (67) arrives. One of her eyes constantly runs tears and is almost sightless. Fortunately we had some glasses that suited her. Elderly Daw Thein Su (75) can read so she is very happy with sa kyi reading glasses.

Fifteen villagers have gathered for the show. Win San explained we were giving first to the old people (who need them) then to younger folk (if they need them). U La Chaung (67) looks great in some glasses with black and red frames. We tell him he looks like a movie star. Saya Htay notices U Bein (60) has found a pair of glasses that suit him but they have lost their arms! Don’t worry, I can fix them, came the reply! Daw Thein Oun (72) went to see a ‘doctor’ in Pakokku two years ago. The ‘doctor’ sold her a pair of sunglasses despite her saying she could not see any better with them. She was cheated, but could do nothing about it. We were so pleased we had some to suit her.

Win San took a woman outside into the light to photograph the very large lump on her neck. She explained it had grown like that over the years, it did not hurt her but she could not go to the hospital because she had no money. We felt helpless to help. The only small thing we could do was to give her a pair of sunglasses – with which she was enormously pleased!

I was still wondering why this village seemed so much poorer than most others, bearing in mind they were able to grow butterbeans, yellow beans and peanuts in the fields that were not too thickly strewn with sandstone chips when two flocks walked by! One flock was of goats, the other of sheep. Now we were really puzzled and then we learned the answer. In 2013 toward the end of the dry season when there was no water around 22 houses were lost when a fire raged through the village. Many people lost everything. Many have had to go looking for work as ‘coolies’ in Pakokku.

U Ka La (75) took the one pair we had with a detached lens. Fortunately Saya Htay found the lens in the bottom of the bag. He assured us he could fix it! To our surprise in walked U Ya Maung (78) wearing a thick lensed pair of glasses he’d been wearing for 18 years! They had been fitted back together many times judging by the accumulation of string and elastic bands wound around the bridge and ear pieces..

Win San had as usual to answer the battery of questions about me. He tells people I come from KL. They say they don’t know KL, so he explains. Then, invariably, someone points upwards and says she has come from the sky, she is a good nat.

The Clean Drinking Water Project

Ko Aung Win is the Headman of Nyaung Pin Zauk village of 100 houses and 500 people. He was elected, democratically, three years ago by the villagers. He is known to have vision, be able to organize and achieve the villagers’ desired results. And so it would seem. Two years ago the village water tank (read lake) was increased to double its size. Rammed earth-retaining walls of about six metres were built. The government supplied the machinery the villagers did the work. The water it holds is used for washing and laundry, but it’s not drinking water.

The Headman took me on his motorbike to another lake about a kilometre away on the other side of the village. This is drinking water and last year the villagers managed to dig it out and double its size. Eventually we came to the source of the lake: a large, rock-surrounded pool that has an all-year-round flowing spring beneath. Enlarging this is the next project. Already the villagers have plumbed its depth to more than five metres. They now wonder how much wider it could become and they aim to find out.

Bullock carts can’t get near the spring as the terrain is too rocky and anyway many in the village don’t have a bullock cart. Some women walk up to a kilometre each day carrying full water containers on their head.

I ask Ko Aung Win if he has a plan for next year. Yes, he has, he tells me. He wants to give every house a pipe for drinking water. $1,000 would purchase the pipes needed for the 100 houses. Where to find that money is my puzzle now.

Salay Pagoda Festival

  

Today we are attending the Salay Pagoda Festival to celebrate Waso Full Moon Day. It was Gautama, the last Buddha, who established Waso and instigated its strict rules. (My information here comes from Professor Saya Htay). Waso is known as the Buddhist Lent and extends from July to October. During this time the monks cannot travel and must stay in their own monasteries. There are practical reasons for this: July to October is the rainy season. In those early times the monks had only one or at most two robes: if they got wet they could get sick. In addition, farmers would have planted their seeds: peanuts, sesame, rice and vegetables and they didn’t need monks trooping across the fields disturbing their crops.

In all, the Buddha laid down 227 rules, however it seems many have softened over the years. These days during Waso people are not allowed to marry and old folk must meditate each week on the Sabbath day. Many folk give up alcohol and smoking and eat only vegetables. Some fishermen give up fishing: presumably they have another source of food. There are no festivals after Waso until October’s full moon day, which will occur around the 16^th of that month.

In a small town on our way to the festival all traffic had stopped and everyone was standing looking one way. Suddenly there was the eerie sound of a WW II air-raid warning (was it a coup? I wondered). To my astonishment everyone fell silent for two minutes. This was for Remembrance. The observation of Martyrs Day falls each year on 19 July. It is the day that General Aung San, the father of Aung San Su Kyi, was assassinated.

Around 6.00 this morning some 25 monks from the surrounding circa 25 monasteries walked to the Salay pagoda. The foreigner couldn’t face a two-hour drive at 4.30 in the morning so what follows is as told by Professor Saya Htay and her Associate Win San. The monks would have walked – barefoot of course - to collect their food from the festival goers. All the outlying villagers had arrived the day before, watched an impromptu theatre in the evening and stayed overnight in the zayat, temporary accommodation built for this purpose. The monasteries would have sent bullock carts to take back the numerous gifts. First, there would have been a great deal of food for the monks to store, then robes which may have been woven by the villagers. I remember in December one year I attended a similar festival in Yangon at the Shwedagon Pagoda. The difference was that at the Shwedagon it was a competition that involved women weaving robes all night from dawn to dusk to try to finish robes for the monks.  I was told this didn't happen here.

Waso Full Moon Day

Waso Pagoda Festival is celebrated Myanmar-wide. It is held on 18th July this year (the lunar calendar doesn’t change but our Gregorian calendar does). Waso is an opportunity to offer flowers to the Buddha and to the monks. The latter also receive new robes woven by the people. The festival we are attending is at Salay a village near Chauk in Magwe Division.

Driving slowly through Chauk, I noticed a man sitting beside the road one of whose eyes was badly shriveled. We stopped and Saya Htay told him of our free Used-Glasses Project. The young man (35 years) was working his land some years ago and a sliver of bamboo sliced into his eye. The doctor wanted to remove the eye, but he resisted. That eye is of course sightless but the other one was a bit hazy too. Ko Naing Oo tried on the glasses and the third pair gave him clearer vision. He told us he never dreamed he would ever have glasses.

Driving on to Salay I noticed Jessu biodiesel trees flanking the road and I remembered how they came to be here and how useless they have been for the people. The Power that Was some time ago, was a great believer in Astrology. He asked his Astrologer how he could remain All Powerful and was told to do three things. First, he had to change the colour of the flag. It is now green, yellow and red stripes with a star in the middle. Second, new bank notes were to have the elephant printed on them. There are now K5,000 elephant-imprinted bank notes. Third, he had to get the whole country to plant Jessu also known as the bio-diesel tree. So it was said, it would power all the vehicles in Myanmar. Whether people liked it or not they had to buy the saplings and plant them in their gardens, along the roads, in villages and in towns. Regrettably, this did not work so the people lost much time and money.

As we neared Salay there were other sights and sounds along the way. Groups of mostly young people shook noisy offering bowls and called out for contributions from drivers attending the Festival.

Mintap, Chin State

Our journey to Chin State from Mandalay Division was long. The mountain ranges that were visible ahead ran north to south along the border with Bangladesh. Further south was Rakhine State. The scenery was magnificent: rainforest kilometre after kilometre with thousands of teak trees shading the road. I learned a sobering fact about teak trees. All are owned by the government and are generally sold to India or China. Anyone (other than the government) caught cutting down teak faced three months in jail. The new government is changing this.

In six months teak will still be owned by the government but can only be sold to local people at a consequent lower price.

We are travelling is the wet season, so all is shades of green. Areas of cleared land are covered with healthy looking crops. Rice, coffee, sweetcorn, sesame, bananas, jackfruit, grapefruit, oranges and huge ginger as well as tomatoes, aubergine, chillies and cabbages.

In Pauk we came across an unusual looking river that seemed to be a tributary of the Chindwin. It was enormously wide but only in the middle was it fast flowing. The shallows were dotted with mining equipment. It looked to me as if they were mining, or more graphically sluicing, gravel. But it turned out they were mining gold! Judging by the houses nearby there was either very little gold to be had or the money for the gold was not going to the villagers.

Mintap where we were headed is atop a mountain range with the usual heart-stopping U-turns on perpendicular roads. I stayed the first night at the brand new Hotel Mindat. It was so new that it had no guests: neither foreign or local. As it had no internet (I am sure that will come soon), I moved next day to a guesthouse called Moe Pi that had the most obliging manager: Ko Htang.

After a full day of Chin traditional wedding, a performance by a tattooed lady who could play the flute using her nose and several successes with the Used-Glasses Project I looked forward to using Moe Pi’s internet. However, when I asked Ko Htang for the password, he was very doubtful that he had ever had one.  Apparently there are people in the world who know even less about the internet than I do, which most people would doubt possible. We tried somewhere else, but it was closed either from lack of customers or lack of signal. So we renamed the area The Never Never Internet Land. Due to the lack thereof, all photos of happy smiling faces owning new glasses will have to be accomplished later (possibly in another lifetime).

Shin Pyu

Yesterday was a long day: Win San drove for over nine hours. We left Mandalay and the traffic jams and headed west to Sagaing, then to Yesagyo, Myaing and at last to Mintap over the Chin border.

Myanmar maps lead their own life giving often no hint as to what’s on the ground. Rivers are usually marked, but not always. One today had a bridge two miles long yet didn’t feature on the map. Mountains and mountain ranges never appear. Perhaps I should buy a topographical map, but then I might be too scared to travel. I love driving toward mountain ranges that appear in the distance, but I like them to stay in the distance.

Soon we drove over the Ayeyarwady River on the new bridge opened in 2001: a huge construction for both rail and road. The old bridge was built by the British in 1852. I remembered that when first I travelled in Myanmar heavily laden trucks were not allowed to use the by then rickety bridge. They had to be ferried across – literally – on barges.

Near Yesagyo we crossed the Chindwin River.

Toward the middle of the journey we spied elephants on the road: surprisingly, two of them were white.

We had come across a Shin Pyu procession, when young boys are initiated into the sangha or monkhood. This was a very up-market and costly one (so we didn’t offer glasses!) There were dozens of little boys all dressed as princes riding on horses, trucks, motorbike tractors, or carried on the shoulders of some of the men. The elephants were not of the ivory variety, but men dressed up to carry the would-be novices. They were headed for the monastery where the little boys would have their hair cut and during the service would be admitted to the monastery where they would stay as many days as their parents could spare them, learning to be novice monks.

I wondered if we too could go to the monastery for the ceremony, but no, we still had a long way to drive.  So I leaned back in Win San’s very comfortable taxi and thought of a Shin Pyu ceremony I attended when I travelled on my own in 2006.

At that time I wrote:

I’m now staying at the May Guest House in Nyaungshwe, which is the gateway to Inle Lake famous for floating gardens, Intha fishermen, silk weaving and jumping cats at a monastery. Ko Nyi Tin, owner of the Guesthouse tells me that across the road, today, at the Hlaing Gu Kyaung, is a novitiation ceremony. I settle into my room and then cross the road.

There are about 200 people, mainly women and children gathered in the thein (consecration hall). They have been sitting for a couple of hours already. My arrival causes ripples. I sink to the floor, back against wall and wait for something to write about. Eventually the children tired of someone seemingly doing nothing turn their attention to the spectacularly dressed novitiates. Four proud mothers sit on the floor beside a dais covered by pink mattresses and green pillows on which four small boys lie, sit, jump up and down and wreck the arrangement of their candy floss-pink satin outfits. Four dads jump up, lift the shirt of the outfit and re-buckle a large belt around each thin waist of the small boys. They smooth out their crumpled longyi too.  Back the boys go to bouncing. We listen to a musical trio: a crooner with a microphone, a xylophonist dinging with wooden sticks and a Yamaha organist plunking. Outside the thein, in a shady zayat (pavilion), sit dozens of turbaned Intha, Pa-O and Taung-Yo men here to witness the all-important shin pyu ceremony when the boys will be initiated into the sangha (monkhood). Bells ring urgently. I dash down a corridor and outside to witness some ceremony.

But it’s the ice-cream man.

I remain outside for a few moments. “Where you from?” starts a lively conversation with a former public servant who prefers democracy to the present arrangement. He translates an invitation from Ko Maung, who speaks no English, for me to visit his home and village. The Intha people around Inle Lake are mostly famed for their unusual rowing with one foot and for their floating gardens, but Ko Maung is a rice and sugar cane farmer. Sugar cane is important here for making rum, as well as for its more prosaic uses. I accept the invitation with pleasure. Then I return to the women in the thein. There’s another three and a half hours to go. My legs go to sleep. I hope my bottom will join them. Sitting with legs tucked under me and keeping the soles of my feet from facing the Buddha is an easier task for these women, who have had years of practice, than it is for me. Ah, men are filing in. Something may be happening.

False alarm.

The Buddha image sits on a several-metres-high elevated throne. He’s hidden below the chin under a golden silk cloak. I've seen Buddhas covered in winter before, but maybe they cover them for certain ceremonies too. Perhaps they will whisk it off when something happens. Either side of the throne is vase after vase of flowers: red cannas, pink and white Chrysanthemums, yellow dahlias and red roses. Cannas are identified with the Buddha: perhaps for their blood red colour, but also because rosaries were once made from the wood-like seeds. Beyond the flowers numerous rice sacks prop behind copious bottles of cooking oil and donations of money decorated into small trees. In yellow plastic bags are a robe, towel and medicine for each monk. The cost of shin pyu is considerable and the parents must provide everything. 

As Myanmar are keen on astrology, numerology, dates and times, I predict mid-day as the auspicious starting time. It's 11.30 now. I gaze around. The women wear their finest longyi. They have flowers in their hair: some have orchids. Some hold their bun fast with gold or silver coloured clasps. Older or poorer women secure their hair with combs.

I was wrong. Proceedings start and it's only 11.45. You never can tell.

The action is away to one side, beside the day bed. A monk is shaving each small boy's head. His mother and older sister hold a fine white cloth and catch the hair as it falls. Later they’ll bury it in the precincts of a pagoda. It’s a solemn moment when the boys’ heads are smooth: they become sons of the Buddha. The monks arrive. They troop up the stairs and enter the thein. A monk hands the boys what look like white paper chickens. But they're probably not, given this is an especially joyous ceremony and bird flu broke out in Myanmar two days ago. A monk with a formidable navy blue birthmark on his face takes charge. The Sayadaw (abbot) chants a prayer. The boys hold the paper chickens in front of their faces and chant while the congregation joins in the responses. It all seems so similar it could be a Church of England service. Two of the initiates are nine and two are 12. They have learned the all-important request to be admitted to the sangha. They give their request and responses loud and clear. Even when chanting with the congregation, we can hear their voices. They will stay in the monastery for seven days this time: perhaps longer when they come again as novices when they are older. They must follow the dharma, eat nothing after noon, nor sing or play, possess money, sit on a high seat, blaspheme, kill, steal, lie or interfere in the business of the other monks. Though at nine and 12 they are unlikely to get drunk, have sex or listen to heretical doctrines, they are not allowed to anyway. The boys take off their princely robes - as did Gautama Buddha more than 2,000 years ago when he left his palace and his family to go off and seek enlightenment. They prostrate themselves three times and then don the saffron robes. The Sayadaw hangs the thabeiq (alms bowl) over their shoulders and accepts them as novice monks – samaras.