Back from Burma

I got back to Bangkok from Burma on Monday, a relief. The place was hot, enervated and tragic. Joe is still there, trekking in the North and East. He is utterly taken by the country. It's Asia a hundred years ago, sometimes a thousand years ago, and he loves both the simplicity of life in rural Burma and the quiet dignity with which its Buddhist-to-the-core people make decent lives for themselves and one another even as their own government heaps the most grotesque indignities upon them. I like these things too, but the place gets me down.

I wrote an op-ed piece for the Berkshire Eagle on Burma under the pseudonym Gerald R. Scutler. It briefly updates the political situation, tells about some survivors of Cyclone Nargis we met or heard about, and describes the funeral we attended of a senior monk. The piece should run soon in the Eagle, and you can Google it at "Berkshire Eagle Burma Gerald R. Scutler." The pseudonym is a precaution. Western journalists aren't allowed into Myanmar. On my visa application I'm a "retired teacher." Though when I told a Burmese friend I was being careful not to say anything on the internet that might cause problems for me or anyone else later on, he said, "Don't worry. They can't read."

I am not in touch with Joe---AOL is blocked in Burma most places most of the time---but he managed to phone his mother before the entire country ran out of $20 phone cards. Barbara emailed me to say Joe was fine and he was happy off in the forest living among his people, the Shan, Karen, Kachin, Wild Wa, etc. He flies on to India April 3 to take more pictures in Varanasi, then returns to Bangkok April 15. We arrive home April 22 and will have to act like grown-ups for a while. But not for TOO long, we hope. (We go to Zurich May 11-18. A gay film festival there will show two Strachey films, and they are recklessly paying me to come over and say what I think of the films, ho ho.)

I love being back in Bangkok. It is stinking hot, but it's full of happy-go-lucky Thais. I've started taking Thai language lessons. The "natural" approach used at the American University Alumni Association language school is basically a "plunge in and sink or swim" method, and so far I am sinking.

It's partly guilt that led me to do this. I have a good time snickering to myself
at the way many Thais speak English. When I returned to Bangkok on Monday, the desk clerk at the Pinnacle Hotel said to me, "Bama lane?" She was asking if it had rained in Burma. But at least many Thais can speak English at all. So I plan to do the best I can, and if I provide the Thais with a few good laughs along the way, that's fine too.

I am haunted though with the memory of giving the United Nations day speech to the student assembly at Shimeles Habte School in Addis Ababa in the fall of 1963. Insanely, I decided to give the speech in Amharic. My Amharic was limited and clumsy and not much beyond the level of Where is the railway station? The Ethiopian teacher I asked to help me translate my remarks into Amharic was doubtful and kept suggesting that maybe I should just give the speech in English, which students in the upper grades could pretty much follow. But oh no, we're the Peace Corps, we ride with the people, thought I. It was nuts. I must have sounded to the students as if instead of invoking the spirit of enlightened internationalism, I was standing up there saying, "Bama lane, Bama lane." If they snickered, they had the good manners---which is very Ethiopian---not to do it to my face.

One of the many pleasures of life in Bangkok is reading the letters to the editor in The Bangkok Post, one of two English language dailies. Most of the letters consist of teeth gnashing over Thailand's chaotic politics, which I won't attempt to sort out here. (Today the "red shirts" are assembled in front of Goverment House to try to force the "yellow shirts" out of office by yelling at them.) A sizeable minority of the Post's letters, however, are from foreigners who have chosen to live in Thailand but spend an inordinate amount of time complaining about the place. There was a good one yesterday from a man objecting to Bangkok taxi drivers who endanger their passengers by taking their hands off the wheel to "wai" three times whenever they pass a Buddhist temple or shrine. Personally I have never witnessed this phenomenon, but hope to.