Entries in asia (464)
Share Article one village
He was useful here for thirty-seven days. Passion and compassion. Joy and laughter.
Savon, her husband Savuth and two adolescents have a hard rural Cambodian life.
She sold spices in the Siem Reap market.
She dreamed having a small school at her home where village kids could learn English.
Private schools are expensive.
She asked foreigners if they would visit and teach for a short time. Beginning.
They started the school one year ago. EEC - English Education in Community, an NGO in a dusty village.
They advertised on work-away a site for volunteer ops around Earth.
Volunteers come and go. Children need consistency.
Volunteers visited from Japan, Denmark, Italy, Sweden, Ireland, Australia, USA, and UK.
The majority stay two weeks or longer. They teach and/or build new rooms and prepare the house before rainy season. $5 a day covers accomodation and meals.
Community.
Kids learn Japanese, English, have fun, how to think for themselves and help each other.
Fifty kids from 3-18, all levels.
Two classrooms - dirt floors, wooden benches, white board. Limited textbooks. Sigh.
One local Khmer girl, 15, showed exceptional progress translating and helping young ones. He suggested Savon hire her. She did.
Nature is the teacher.
There are two classrooms at a forelorn pagoda three kilometers away.
Ride a bike through world dust. Mid-day heat burns everything. Water buffalo, white oxen, rice paddies, naked kids, bamboo homes, ancient wooden structures, flat endless horizons, flaming plastic.
Celebrate your existence.
Rain is coming. Life blossoms this beauty.
Brushes iPad - Lao mountains
yan gone fairy tale
sharing apple core illusions of value creation
OZ king bankers - profit before people
minus integrity and ethics
humor laughed as
little ceo E
a small letter in a big alphabet
lived all daze long
in his fake castle
planning planning planning
welcome to my air-conditioned nightmare
people say nothing exists
i do nothing all day long
too busy to pay attention
inconvenient details
he hired hospitality
TO GET THINGS DONE
she evaluated his
broken garbage system
this stinks
E rearranged deck chairs
on his educational Titantic
a ship of fools
in yangon
theoretical clear learning objectives
SMART goals
dumbed everyone down
everyone drowned
a good fool is hard to find
said Crow with no mouth
winging free
Blend In - TLC 4
“You have a criteria for beauty,” said an austere Chinese university teacher-mother in an apartment elevator going to ground zero. “You should just blend in.”
She was petrified like 1.7 billion of being singled out, purged, tried and executed or sent to the countryside and re-educational brainwashing for expressing bourgeoisie ideology in a harmonious Marxist society.
Her paranoia meant no one dared talk about June 4, 1989. No one whispered about freedom, human rights or democracy. Their collective hardwired brains were wiped clean by Big Brother.
“I’ve learned,” she said, “to keep my mouth shut unless I’m eating fast before starving thieves steal my food or laughing to myself at the stupid laconic narrow-minded ways of our leaders. They are old despotic men. They sit behind blood stained teak desks imported from Burmese dictators. They chop seals and devour dolphins and whales with malice. They swallow tiger bone extract for sexual potency and wash it down with bear bile. Silence is our golden mean. My husband works in a distant province. He has a mistress named Orgasm. No money, no honey.”
She cried silent tears, raised her son and wrote life lesson plans. “By the book,” she screamed in silence facing eighty comatose students scrambling for a pass. It fell incomplete.
“Sixty is heaven and fifty-nine is hell,” said a thin girl in a freshman speaking class. “My parents will kill me if I fail.”
“What is your dream?” said Lucky.
“I want to be a waif when I grow up.”
Her naive honesty surprised him. “What is a waif?”
“You know, a homeless person existing on the street. Living on their wits with silence and cunning, like a mercenary, assassin or literary outlaw. Authentic experience. A free person has courage. They take risks. Not taking a risk is a risk. They don’t live off state handouts in a broken down system filled with graft, corruption and nepotism. They overcome suffering and hardship and deprivation. I mean a real person with dignity, self-respect and courage.”
Seventy-nine others failed to grasp her awareness and honesty.
“You are wiser than your years.”
Martha's Zen Card
I am a short story.
You are a novel.
It never occurred to Matt to buy indigenous cultural music while traveling.
Martha his girl friend considered it essential.
Music made her edgy and alive.
When she heard music she danced.
She returned to her primitive self.
She danced naked.
Ballet. Flamingo. Tango. Cha-cha. Lambada. Waltz.
He wrote naked verbs. They loved naked. Naked cherished syllable skin music.
They wrote, danced and lived like they were dead.
One day they would be. It's now or never.
They were free. It's the way to be.
Culture is what you are. Culture means you can forget.
Nature is what you can be.
People are nature's tools.
Passing through Body Sat Quiet in Asia on a three week, “Look, don't think” holiday from frozen Europe they happened into an 8th century tourist town music repository.
They smelled music before they saw it. Seeing music is an art form. Synesthesia.
In music like life, the end of the composition is not the point.
A music boy handed Matt an orange book. Write your melodic request here. Matt opened the book. A vignette floated free.
A Cambodian orphan girl popped out of blank pages: I am sorry. Goodbye and good luck to you and your family. These are our famous words. Big vocabulary. Tongues speak. Small life. Big chance. Yeah. Yeah.
Hunger Angel watched 24/7 in the big leagues.
Sanitation workers in green environmental vests with broom music swept streets for the New Year. Make it new. Make it new.
We should be so lucky to have crystal clean sheets.
Every day is anew year.
One day is like a minute.
One minute is like a day.
That's relativity. All my relatives are dead.
Never trust an atom. They make up everything.
When you know what you don't know you realize moral character with social intelligence, integrity, and courage.
Courage is an unknown word in our head and heart. Running away is our way. Everyday I have the blues. No one loves me but my mother and she could've been lying too.
You absolve in the rhythm when you have adequate life experience.
Silence and hunger are identical naked twins.
Fear and Ignorance produced Expectation & Greed.
I am good at two things:
Eating and sleeping.
Fighting and fucking.
Laughing and crying.
Reading and writing? That's for idiots.
The less I do the fewer mistakes I make, said Insecurity.
The fewer mistakes I make the less I am criticized, said Fear.
We know the essence of survival. Keep your fucking mouth shut.
One day, Bliss's part-time lover said, buy me a TV.
NO.
You have a job, a TV, a mother, a 12-year old daughter, two brothers, no father and no husband. I gave you money to buy a bike for your daughter and she lost it, money for clothes, money for medicine, money for food, money for temporary naked lust and currency sobriety. You play me for a sentimental fool. You're fucking crazy.
Her arrival was sporadic at best. She visited randomly at 8:37 for a shower, fucking and another shower.
He explored her lips, thin neck, small ears, crest of skin throat, narrow brown shoulders, pinpoint breasts with tongue talk, flat belles letters, long legs and played his way into her valley of potential.
He loved giving her oral pleasure.
Edging rose lips, long and deep. Slow and sweet.
Little man in a boat sang, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.
She reciprocated playing his bone flute.
Riding the pony, priming her G spot grinding hard and fast she exploded with precision and extra ambition whispering, Give me a baby. Give me a baby.
He deferred chromosomes. Fat fucking chance, there's no way under the tropical son I'll give you anything but short time, small money, temporary love and the high hard one in your strike zone with runners in scoring position.
Here's the pitch.
She stayed until 9:45 and left for work at an upscale spa wearing aromatic Grecian urns. He gave her 10 bones. Feed me.
Familiarity breeds contempt.
Get out of my life, said Telepathy. You are subservient and I am stupid to put up with this shit. He creased her indifference into a cumulus cloud. It rained goodbye and good luck.
She sat on the bed with her back to him. Sniffle, sniffle.
Her fake tears formed rivers named Regret and Hopelessness and Indifference.
Fish behind twelve Laotian dams financed with Chinese capital to provide electricity to Thailand fed 60 million Asians downstream in deltas.
His NO created black-eyed daggers. They stabbed him with hatred, loss, self-pity, violence and starvation. Revenge is best served cold with DNA.
They put on death masks.
Your mask eats your face.
They walked out into tropical heat. Separate directions.
Waves of loneliness shuffled down a broken street. Children dying of malnutrition at a health clinic on the coroner of Hope cried as desperate mothers received free blue placebos.
The day after tomorrow belonged to orphans and lucky losers with Wabi-Sabi.
Wabi - the beauty of the most ordinary circumstances and objects.
Sabi - to feel one's own sharp existence.
Martha and Tolerance danced through life.
Everything you know is a lie.
