marxist elephant control stick

An angry, frustrated, underpaid, undersexed overworked female Vietnamese teacher moonlighting as a paid Communist party member stooge admonishes her pool shark students for breaking the cue ball off green banked walls, Play the angles you idiots! she shouts, elevating her Marxist elephant CONTROL stick, stabbing them, prodding them, driving them forward, accelerating them through educational fields filled with land mines.

She pounds her stick on a bamboo podium to get their attention. She releases her repressed anger and frustration, Your fate is to put up with me! she screams. Students cower behind rote memorization rules named Fear.

Famine survives in green paddies beneath heaven’s gateless gate as emaciated farmers work steaming streaming white oxen past orphaned sex slaves selling bananas, trinkets and skin to lost scared alienated caffeinated satiated rich obese white tourists.

Vegetable lovers sleep on discarded Burmese teak furniture. Across from the restaurant behind a mud spaceship hut is an iridescent dirt playing field and elementary school. Curious disheveled smiling children stare.

In a dusty lot someone squats over a mud toilet. They shit fertilizer 7.5 miles into the center of the Earth creating earthquakes in Christchurch and Japan. Radioactive debris floods the Mississippi Delta singing the blues.

photos of tuberculosis

Misha Friedman worked with Doctors Without Borders or Medecins Sans Frontieres.

While working in Chechnya in 2008 he began making photographs.

He continued to work with N.G.O.’s to pursue stories, “because journalists can’t be trusted,” he said. “These patients, who do they trust? They trust the people who care for them. So credibility comes from showing up with people they trust.” 

“Most of the people you see here are dead,” Mr. Friedman said last week, looking through the photographs. “My images have not really helped them. Maybe they’ll help people in the future. Maybe they’ll help with fund-raising here and there. But to these particular people, they did not help.

“So that part is harder, being kind of just a photographer.”

You may see his slide show at LENS.

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/08/saving-lives-or-photographing-them/

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An invisible epidemic

image is everything

once upon a time in cambodia i went to the barber.

i saw some glossy pictures. handsome. beguiling. 

i want to look that man, i told the barber.

do you have any money.

yes. i showed him some paper.

you have to wait.

how long.

years.

ok.

monkey mind

After climbing Qinchengshan mountain in western Sichuan where Taoism began 2,000 years ago he introduced meditation concepts to his Grade 8 Chinese students.

“Mediation is sitting quietly to develop a calm mind,” he said.

“You sit tall with your hands on your knees, gently lower your eyes and focus on a single breath, ‘in, out, in, out.’

“If your mind becomes distracted by past or future thoughts you bring it back to your breath, ‘in, out, in out.’ Your single point of awareness. Be your breath. Do it for yourself. Not your friends, parents or teachers. Meditation allows you feel a harmony and balance.

"You will feel more peaceful and happier than other people busy rushing around. Your goal today is just to sit for five minutes. Sit and practice for five minutes every day before school. Eventually you may want to sit for twenty minutes every day, whenever and wherever you like.”

He wrote Chinese words on the board. Jing — quiet, stillness, calm, and Ding — concentration and focus - so they’d see the linguistic connection in Mandarin.

“When you begin to sit in meditation your mind will be very uncooperative. The ego or emotional mind will fight against it’s extinction by the higher forces of spiritual awareness. The ego loves the day-to-day circus of sensory entertainment and emotional turmoil. This game depletes your energy, degenerates your body and exhausts your spirit. We call the ego the monkey mind.”

They laughed.

“When your mind is calm and focused in the present it is neither reacting to past memories or preoccupied with future plans. No regrets, no fears. These are two major sources of chronic or long term health problems. People suffer because their monkey mind is busy regretting the past or afraid of the future and it drives them crazy, this little monkey. Do you want to try it?” 

“Yes.” 

“Great! No books, papers and pens. If you don’t want to try it, it’s ok. Please just sit quietly respecting others sitting in meditation. See how it feels. Let’s begin. Adjust your posture with shoulders back. Relax. Focus on your breath, ‘in, out, in, out.’ He dimmed the lights.

After five minutes he rang small Tibetan bells.

“How did it feel?” 

“Beautiful,” said a girl. “I was flying.”

silent love

I am a beautiful deaf mute woman.

I speak sign love, sing, dance and laugh in Cambodia. Spoiled whining children and small adults run around screaming. I can’t hear them. It’s a blessing. I read lips screaming I want food. I want love. I want education. I want medicine.

I had a dream. A grandfather in Laos is an idiot. He runs his truck. It’s his solace. I love the smell of pollution on Sunday morning. His daughter burns plastic trash. Parents and children inhale fumes.

Ancestor worship. In Vietnam it’s incense.

In Laos it’s exhaust and burning plastic. Here it’s cow shit. Youngsters respect their elders. Shut your mouth. Do not say anything to venerable grandfather. Birds sing with hammers. I feel vibrations.

Their traditional silence kills them softly. Truth is a powerful weapon. Most people are afraid of truth. Hearing, speaking, realizing truth entails risk. Daring is not fatal. Truth is a deaf mute seer in Cambodia.

Everything here is a secret. Shhh fingers on my lips. I am secretly married to a false dream of going to Australia with Thorny. He is 50, married with family there. He works for an NGO in Cambodia. He builds fake bamboo homes. He plays my father figure and rescuer. 

I come from a poor rural Cambodian village. I was the last of 11 children. I am 28. I came here with my sister, 32. She got pregnant by a married New Zealand man. She had a daughter. She pretends to be married. It’s all show here. He sends her a monthly handout, pays the electricity. 

My sister set up a hair salon business in a temple tourist town. It fell through. Salons are a dime a dozen. Thousands of undereducated poor passive girls don’t read or dream. They cut. Do their nails. They digit phones.

Staring at mirrors is their fate. Some moonlight as beer girls and hostesses. Where is Mr. ATM? No money, no honey. 

Vietnamese plant rice. Cambodians watch it grow. Laotians listen to it grow.