Calligraphy - TLC 25

On his final Ankara day he shared a Chinese calligraphy poem with students. It was an old Qing dynasty gift from primary students in a rural Sichuan school. This visual simplicity symbolized impermanence.

Bright beautiful elementary children in a radiant universe wearing Young Chinese Communist Pioneer red scarves around well-scrubbed necks sitting upright at colorful plastic desks raised hands when he asked questions yelling, “Let me try! Let me try!”

Young brave students had the courage to say this. Older students at middle schools, university and TLC were aged silenced and dumbed down through tyranny, religion, and oppressive parental and educational brainwashed ideological structural systems.

Shame married Guilt, producing twins. The more the merrier.

Adults had lost their instinctual curiosity, humor and enthusiasm. Only primary kids had the courage to say, “Let me try, let me try.”

Their beautiful pictographic calligraphy black ink read, “One day a man climbed into the mountains and reached a hut. He met some children.”

“Where is the teacher?” he said.

“They pointed up the mountain covered by clouds. ‘He is not here, he’s gone into the mountains to look for herbs.’”

Folding the poem he creased Chinese ideograms where latitudes and longitudes met horizons. His linguistic healing efforts departed Ankara with Bamboo.

Return to Mandalay

Hi. My name is Timothy Mouse. I am a wanderer. I wander and wonder. 

I was in Mandalay three years ago at a private school playing in the Montessori program.

The kids taught me to say I am a miracle.

The management wasn't very professional so I left after ten weeks. Probation is a two-way street. You can read a story about my experience in STORIES on the sidebar. 

It's called Dr. Scary and Mrs. Marbles. They were a strange dysfuntional couple. I really enjoyed Myanmar. The people are gentle, kind and smiling. 

Anyway, last year I had the chance to return with a language company in Yangon. It was a fantastic combination of helping others develop their vocabulary, criticial thinking skills and laughter while doing my street photography experiments. Everything I do is an experiment.

The CEO was mean and selfish. He lost the lease on one building where we had classrooms so I was downsized with three other teachers after five months. I was grateful for the opportunity.

I returned to Seems Ripe, Cambodia and did a volunteer English project in a rural reality for two months with low income families. I polished a new book of black and white images called Street 21, about Yangon. O joy.

I accepted an offer to return to Mandalay and here I is. I have classes with 9th graders, college prep seniors in a fancy air-con room and primary grades 1 & 2 at a rural private school. It's the first time any of them have had a native speaker.

Young learners teach me songs. We dance, sing and play games using the alphabet and colors.

It's the same old story - young ones have no fear and the older ones have been tyranized into passivity. Big ears no mouth authoritorial conditioning. As Einstein said, "Learning is an experience. Everything else is just information."

They are emerging from imaginary shells with a new sense of love, responsibility, leadership ability, polite manners, teamwork and courage. They experiment in creative notebooks. It's a joy to be a small part of their process. 

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.”  

The Language Company

The Language Company

Creative non-fiction. Journalistic facts. Literary imagination.

Unpleasant facts are littered through TLC like landmines, lovers, literary outlaws, educational malaise, geography, butterflies, rice, luck and sex.

Lucky Foot taught English at The Language Company in Turkey in 2008. He returned in 2012. Creating field notes.

A Vietnam veteran, journalist and facilitator of courage he gifted luck to people in China, Turkey, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos since 2004.

He showed up to sit for a spell nurturing positive relationships in the long now.

Accompanied by Humor and Curiosity he helped students speak English with fluency minus their illusions of fear and phobia's relatives:

Fear of taking a risk.

Fear of being incorrect.

Fear of peer ridicule.

Fear of poverty.

Fear of starvation.

Fear of being ordinary.

Fear of success.

Fear of abandoning a manuscript by Zeynep entitled TLC.

Fear of accepting responsibility for their choices

Dear of accepting the consequences.

Fear of letting go of old conditioning. Shadows.

Fear of being alive and real. Growing.

Fear of_______. (Your free choice)

Lucky, Humor and Curiosity observed parents, schools, and religions fostering passive acceptance, fear, indifference and rote learning teacher-centered systems. It was all about passing exams, not learning how to be more human and think for your self.

Status quo. Sheep mentality. Blend in. Questions are forbidden.

Authority washes your brain daily.

Zeynep, his young genius friend in Bursa, Turkey taught him about life in her totalitarian country. I say what others are afraid to say. Anxiety is a chronic national problem. Adults here are good at two things, eating and fighting. Dissent is terrorism say our corrupt manikin authority figures.

Leo, the Chief of Cannibals revealed dystopian China. I spent years carrying word shit in a Re-education through Reform Labor Camp for questioning Authority. Everyone here belongs to the Big Ears, No Mouth society.

Oh the shame.

Rita, the independent author of Ice Girl in Banlung shared stories about Khmer culture and Cambodian history. We've had twenty years of hopelessness. We breed. We work. We get slaughtered. Poor people see education as a waste of time and money. Rice comes first.

I dream I am a free person in a free country.

A seven year-old Vientiane kid explained Laos. I develop my authentic character with critical thinking skills, gratitude, abundance and wonder as an independent individual.

If you want to do great things you must take great risks and suffer greatly, said Zeynep. You either let go or get dragged along. 

Awareness. Mindfulness. Compassion.

It's not about people buying this book, Zeynep said. It's about people reading it.

Amazon Kindle and Paperback

Zeynep the heroine genius.

black Sea Oil

Men constructed an oil platform in Giresun harbor, the cheapest port along the BS. Pump money into economy.

A giant erector set. Takes a month, Derrick. Pull it out to see. Drill. Pump black gold.

Pump me baby. By low sell high. The more you drill the more you bill. ABC.

That explains everything, said a female student speaking with courage and clarity in Giresun why stupid immature men over the age of 30 still live at home with mama. Chains of love are heavy deep real.

They'd rather spend their money on fancy designer clothes, guns and expensive cell phones and go hungry.

What you don't see is fascinating.