I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is Maps and directions to famous filming locations.
I write to you from Bangkok. I will return to REDACTED on Sunday where I will again be out of email and internet contact. The events of the past weeks are shocking, barbaric, and unbelievable. Though my school was closed for a few days, we are now operating on a half-day schedule.
I am just now able to see the internet news here in Thailand. I am moved to tears to see the overwhelming support of the international community, especially since today, Saturday, is the Support the Monks’ Protest in Burma Day. I wish the people in Burma had access to the news to know how many millions around the world are gathering in solidarity.
I will most certainly relay this message of support upon my return. Information has been cut off to most of the country, and many Burmese use shortwave radios. Some have been arrested for listening to BBC and VOA.
Covering the items with blankets to avoid being seen, I was able to safely deliver 220 pounds of rice and 400 bottles of water in my truck to a local monastery. Two days later, the monks were taken during the night. We don”t know where they are.
I am aware that the news coverage of Burma has declined over the past days. This is primarily because the internet was shut down. BBC received 20,000 images in one day, they received but 12 the next, when the government shut down the internet for the entire country.
The violence has not stopped. So many are being taken away at night, beaten, and detained. I have eyewitness accounts from several Burmese saying that the violence is continuing in neighborhoods during the night. These incidents aren”t being photographed because only the soldiers are allowed on the streets during curfew hours.
Here are a few stories that aren”t making the news:
The father of one of our students at school posted negative images of the regime on his blog and escaped just before the authorities came to his house. He and his family are safe, back home in Korea.
Demonstrators identified in the international news such as CNN/BCC are being arrested at night, beaten, and taken away. One long-haired Burmese man seen on BCC is in hiding. He came in the middle of the night to my friend”s house, asking that he cut his hair to hide his identity.
The monasteries are empty. We don”t know for sure where the monks are.
One of my Burmese colleagues runs a health clinic with her husband. Many of the wounded demonstrators came to the clinic. The army demanded that they board it up within 10 minutes or they would be arrested. My colleague saw several corpses, and many arrests are still being made at night in the houses of her neighborhood.
The hardest thing to deal with right now is the lack of reliable information and the complete lockdown of internet, which has been down for over a week. Though all the major news items of the past weeks have happened within a mile or so of my house, the lack of information/news journalism is paralyzing. The paradox is that we continue with our daily life: we still go to school and to the fruit market, passing truckloads of armed soldiers. Life, strangely, goes on, which seems, somehow, so very surreal, as if we”re all dreaming.
Through it all, we have been deeply moved by the brave in heart, the demonstrators and monks who risked their lives for peace. The exuberance of the Burmese people in the streets those first few days of mass demonstrations was palpable; it was as if a weight had been lifted off of the country: everyone was happy, and smiling in the streets.
The lid of oppression had been temporarily lifted. It was so inspiring to see the demonstrations and to see the people standing up in unity after all these years. Most of the Burmese students who I teach have had relatives who were shot or imprisoned during the uprising of 1988, so recent events have been both exhilarating and traumatic for them.
At school we are trying to provide an environment where students can have a dialogue about the political situation in this country. We are trying to find a balance between acknowledging what’s happening in the streets of our city and continuing to teach course content. I am so glad that school remains open. Staying at home is mind-numbing; students and teachers want a sense of normalcy.
One of my colleagues was a teacher at the University of Rangoon during the 1988 uprising. She saw all her students taken away. I”m so glad that most of my students are still with me. I feel my role here is to teach future leaders: students from 28 different nations, including children of UN workers and local Burmese students.
I continue to believe that being an educator carries such a grave responsibility, especially during these times. Though I long for home, I want to be a witness for what is happening. Just being here matters. In places such as Cambodia, there were so few witnesses to tell the world. If we were to evacuate, my Burmese colleagues and friends would feel deserted.
I strive to be like the monks in the streets by being as peaceful as I possibly can. As truckloads of soldiers roam the streets, I look at their faces. Some of them are terrified, having been forced to join the armed forces. They are asked to “kill or be killed.”
We are trying to create a space to process trauma and to do peace-building work. In dealing with our personal trauma, perhaps we can provide opportunities growth in dealing with trauma in the greater society.
We are all assessing the risk factors and are being pushed outside of our comfort zones in these times. We are taking calculated risks. We are not discouraged by the suppression of the demonstrations; there is a deep, deep dissatisfaction among the people that still remains.
Over the past two decades hundreds of thousands have died in struggles to create independence and democracy, and it is not over. We want our school to remain open; we don”t want to abandon our students nor this country.
Many of you have called or emailed asking how you can help.
One way to help is keeping informed and spreading the word about what is happening in this country. The internet offers much better commentary than the television media, with many support groups forming overnight to organize campaigns and peace vigils.
Please forgive the somber note of this email. I”m usually much more upbeat and optimistic. But, I”m finding it difficult to be cheery these days, and I walk around with a deep, deep sadness for the nation of Burma and the people who I love so dearly.
Thanks for your prayers and support,
In Peace,
REDACTED
(Recommended reading: The Voice of Hope by Aung San Suu Kyi , which has given me much solace during these days.)
I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.
Garth Sundem gets way too technical in figuring out how much coffee he ought to drink in the morning before he can be considered functional, but hey, his blog is named: [Geek Logic] For the record Garth, friends don’t let friends drink *$s and drinks with names like Moccachino aren’t coffee; they’re coffee-flavored milk shakes.
C= In shots of espresso, the amount of caffeine you consume in an average morning
St= The hours of sleep you got last night (subtract one for every time you woke up in a cold sweat, thinking about the things you need to do today)
Su= The hours of sleep you need to remain civil with telemarketers
K= How many kids do you have? Kids in diapers are worth two; kids over age 18 are worth half
Bt= How busy are you today? (1-15 with 1 being “easy like Sunday morning” and 15 being “presently birthing triplets”)
Bu= How many hours per day do you usually spend in non-recreational activities?
N= Hours of naptime you can squeeze in this afternoon
Cups is the number of cups of coffee you should consume before operating heavy machinery.
[For the record, I prefer a more biological metric. I consumer coffee until the shaking of my hands becomes too violent to allow me to type. I then figure that an espresso per hour will maintain the proper buzz.]
My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.
This is a passage I copied from The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke.
“It”s every gambler”s weakness, kind of like a drunk”s. He thinks he can intuit and control the future, but his real mission is to lose.”
“Why would a man want to lose?”
“So he can blame the universe for all his problems.” p. 233
To improve my vocabulary (and my reading) I always keep a dictionary close at hand because I aspire to a Shakespearian vocabulary. Inspired by the new PBS Kids show Word Girl, I’ve decided to add My Words as an occasional feature here at Have Coffee Will Write. The word I’ve chosen for today is avuncular.
-adjective, of, pertaining to, or characteristic of an uncle: avuncular affection. [Origin: 1825-35; L avuncul(us) a mother’s brother, equiv. to av(us) a forefather + *-ont- + *-l(os) dim. suffix (cf. uncle) + -ar1]
Today, as I go about my tasks, I’ll think about: People often confuse urgent trivialities with vital events. p. 15
I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is Paint Chip Business Card Holders!
Eddie: There’s one thing that I could never imagine, and that’s being straight out of basic training and coming right to Iraq. For me, it took almost two years of being in the 82nd before I finally deployed. I ended up getting caught up in restructuring the division, and went places that kept me from deploying sooner. I was always bitter about this. One…
I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.
My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.
This is a passage I copied from The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke.
I went home for lunch. Alafair was in her room, working on her first attempt at a novel, tapping away on a computer she had bought at a yard sale. I had offered to buy her a better one, but she had said a more expensive computer would not help her write better. She kept a notebook on her nightstand and wrote in it before going to sleep. She had already filled two hundred pages with notes and experimental lines for her book. Sometimes she awoke in the middle of the night and wrote down the dreams she had just had. When she awoke in the morning two scenes had already written themselves in her imagination and during the next few hours she would translate them into one thousand words of double-space typescript.
She often wrote out her paragraphs in longhand, then edited each paragraph before typing it on manuscript paper. She edited each typed page with a blue pencil and placed it facedown in a wire basket and began composing another one. If she caught me reading over her shoulder, she would hit me in the stomach with her elbow. The next morning she would revise everything she had written the previous day and then start in on the one thousand words she required of herself for the present day. I was amazed at how much fine work her system produced. p. 175-6
Today, as I go about my tasks, I’ll think about: identifying priorities: A signifies vital; B signifies important; C means of some value; and D means a complete waste of time. p. 14
I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is No coffee.
1SG Troy Steward: One common feeling that most soldiers possess after being in war is that of, “Hey, I am here so hopefully my son doesn”t have to be.” War is an ugly thing and, as I have said before to many people and stated on my blog, “The people that hate war the most are those that have had to be in it.” In fact they are probably the only ones…
I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.
The list is very limited but Niknayman has begun the recording and sadly the roll will grow in the days, weeks and months to come. CNN has video of people not in uniform herding protesters into trucks to be taken away. This is how you make protest go away. The mothers of the disappeared in Argentina are still waiting after 30 years.
Iraq has ordered $100 million worth of light military equipment from China for its police force, contending that the United States was unable to provide the materiel and is too slow to deliver arms shipments, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said yesterday.
The China deal, not previously made public, has alarmed military analysts who note that Iraq’s security forces already are unable to account for more than 190,000 weapons supplied by the United States, many of which are believed to be in the hands of Shiite and Sunni militias, insurgents and other forces seeking to destabilize Iraq and target U.S. troops.
“The problem is that the Iraqi government doesn’t have — as yet — a clear plan for making sure that weapons are distributed, that they are properly monitored and repeatedly checked,” said Rachel Stohl of the Center for Defense Information, an independent think tank. “The end-use monitoring will be left in the hands of a government and military in Iraq that is not yet ready for it. And there’s not a way for the U.S. to mandate them to do it if they’re not U.S. weapons.” The Washington Post
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