Macau Temple

Hong Kong - influenced by Rothko

Ponnatee Resort

The air conditioner is going flat out and I almost feel cold, the first time in weeks I’ve been anything but warm or hot - and this is winter in Thailand.  It even seems to get warmer when it rains here.

Yesterday I visited three villages inside Burma – Halockanie, Baladen Pite, and Tee Wah Doh – and today I am in a very nice air conditioned room a thousand miles and a thousand years away, or so it seems.  The people in the villages live in bamboo houses, or wood houses if they are well off.  There is no glass, no tile, and no concrete in their homes, and if there is a fire everything burns – everything except their knife and cooking pot.  They live without electricity or running water, and not all of them have latrines.  Dogs, pigs, and chickens are more numerous than people.  Little kids run around half naked, playing with simple toys, but they look well cared for and most of them appear well fed.

We visited several schools and held mobile clinics in each.  I saw several children with congenital abnormalities - one boy had severe scoliosis (curvature of his spine); a little girl had a strange abnormality of her eyes so that they appeared to be constantly bobbing; like two corks in the ocean.  One mother was sitting on the front of her house holding her severely retarded fourteen year old son in her arms.  He cannot talk, walk, or feed himself, yet he was clean and appeared to be very well cared for, a testimony to the power of a mother’s love.  I don’t think he would get that level of care in any institution in the U.S.

Most of the villagers look happy and interested in what is happening around them, only a few of the poorest seemed apathetic.  The school kids were clean and working hard at school.  No one was ‘goofing off,’ the way we did in school.  The teachers are very young and hold very important positions in their communities; in their culture teachers are held in very high esteem.  I was very impressed by them.

On a different note, today I learned that Terry, my friend of more than fifty years, died quietly last night after years of fighting Parkinson’s disease.  I met Terry when we were freshmen in high school in Portland, half the world away from here.  He was on the reunion committee for our high school class and this year will be our fifty year reunion – I’m sorry he won’t be there.   He lived a life of honor and courage and he will be missed by so many people.

Often I talk with my son Colin on Skype.  This week he drove over miles of snow covered roads to get to Seattle where he is starting a new chapter in his life.  It is exciting and I’m sure things will work out for him; it’s just a bit nerve wracking in the beginning –a new city, new job, new people.  What a different lifestyle we live compared to those people in Halockanie.