Phonsavan

To travel is very useful, it makes the imagination work, the rest is just delusion and pain. Our journey is entirely imaginary, which is its strength. - Celine

I facilitate English, the language of barbarians in Yangon, Myanmar.

Ah bliss. I salute the sun every morning from the 8^th floor balcony with twinkling stars flocks of crows and silent burgundy monks clanging gongs.

Wing song.

Bamboo grows strong. Resilient.

Laundry dries faster than a speeding sparrow.

One small life chapter began in Phonsavan, Laos, a sleepy, dusty enclave near Vietnam.

The Plain of Jars wars and scars.

Survivors and archeologists say the jars were funeral containers holding bones of relatives. Jarring fact.

Truth is beyond a shadow of a reasonable healthy doubt they were drinking vessels of GIANTS.

I know. I was there 4,000 years ago.

This is what happened more or less.

A wealthy Lao landowner hired a Burmese management team to build a golf course near the airport.

Golf is good necessary and an important social, cultural and economic improvement in the quality of life when it involves business between two of the most impoverished Asian countries placing a ball on a T.

Factoid. Lao GDP per capita - $2593, Myanmar - $1347

Why drive when you can putt?

They had a meeting. What do we need, asked Mr. Lao? We need a lot of land - grass, trees, sand, water, - irrigation systems, electricity, roads, parking lots, air conditioning, a clubhouse, a driving range rover, range rover can I come over, said the Burmese developer.

We need umbrellas, clubs, balls, toilets, ATM machines, restaurants, capital expenditures for furniture and fixtures, food, napkins, plates, cutlery, lawnmowers and many servants. You build it, said the Lao man and wealthy Asians will come and go.

A ten-year old girl said Laos is divided in two parts. The Chinese own the north and Vietnam owns the south. So it goes.

At the corner he turned into Nham Nham market-street. The U shaped dirt lot market faced 1-D. Tuk-tuk drivers and small pickup trucks waited for passengers to Never-Never Land or distant H’mong villages.

Fifty or more H’mong women selling produce spread out inside the U before dawn. Community.

At 8:30 Mr. Important, an old man in a red coat walked around telling everyone to pack it up and move on. Carts, baskets loaded, wheeled trolleys disappeared. Women unable to rent interior market space stashed baskets of greens near the interior market. They’d set up on stone passageways at 4:30 p.m. for evening business.

The outside edges of the U are lined with shuttered shops.

At a pharmacy he conversed with a happy female doctor who works at the hospital and is pleased to introduce him to her 14-year old daughter who can speak English but is too busy now playing a game on her phone, see you later he said to the pharmacist ... passing wooden shops with sewing men and women, hair salons one in particular where a smiling Vietnamese woman cuts his hair and cleans his ears, rice threshing people working machines, tools and farming essentials before entering twisting narrow cement interior islands of fabric, dresses, shirts, pants, shoes and MSG packaged food stuffs as women converse, watch imported Thai videos and play with curious eyed kids.

The traditional market was covered with rusting PSP sheets and tattered umbrellas along the edge with excellent fruits and vegetables. Carnivores buy buffalo, chicken, beef, grilled bats and fish. Dirt and haphazard cement floor. Watch your step.

How slow can you go?

He never saw foreigners here.

He enjoyed the ambiance, peace and quiet, observing life, mimicking language and eating thick noodle soup with boiled liver slices swimming with ginger, ground red chilies, two boiled eggs. The kind woman gave him a platter of fresh lettuce. $1.25.

An old funny woman doing good business fries small cakes and coconut balls. Early on, after he discovered the noodle place he heard her say loud and clear, I don’t know and I don’t care.

He turned laughing. How and where did she hear and learn this? From my son. Otherwise her English was nonexistent. She badgered him to buy thick sweet milk coffee.

Women chop, cook, chatter in low tones, breastfeed infants, stoke cooking fires with kindling, fry snacks, sell fast food - meat, noodles, vegetables, and fruits to motorcycle helmet shoppers, moms, dads, school kids, shopkeepers from the interior and wandering lookers gossiping, exchanging lives.

H'mong women don’t buy here. They sell on the edge. They grow all the food they need.

Self-sufficient.

A Little BS

Lombok

I climbed through the center of Bali

inside magical light

past a sacred volcano at Lake Batur

with a small portable typewriter

a map carved on narwhal bone

a roll of scented four-ply toilet paper

codices or painted books and texts

on bark paper called Amate

and cactus fiber including

palimpsest animal skins and dialogue of Mayan origin.

My hair caught fire.

Gathering flames I lit a piece of bark for guidance.

I mixed volcanic ash with water creating a thick paste of red ocher, a cosmetic balm of antioxidants.

I applied this to my skin to gain entry and passage through the spirit world of ancestors.

Land Mines

Below 5* hotels at the House of Blues filled with wailing songs of loss, betrayal, welfare, neglect, abandonment, misery, hope and have mercy on slide guitar backed by a harmonica in the key of C in her crying heart, a 10-year old Cambodian girl stared up at mirrored skyscrapers watching the Wheel of Life flash prisms into sky.

She’s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper working with imported 300-count Egyptian threaded linen. No lye. A thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage.

She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food. She is a quadriplegic, an amputee with one leg after discovering a land mine on her way home from school. Her t-shirt screams:

Beware of Land Mines

She wears a permanent tear on her left cheek.

She said: Here I am. I communicate my reality to the world. Do you like my shirt? Can you read words or do you need a picture? How about a picture of a picture? I don’t know how to read so I like to look at pictures. 

My country has 16 million people and maybe 6-10 million land mines. Adults say there are 40,000 amputees in my country. Too many died because we don’t have medical facilities. Mines are cheap.

A mine costs $3.00 to put in the ground and $1,000 to take out of the ground.

I’m really good at numbers.

Talk to me before you leave trails to explore the forest. It's beautiful and quiet. I know all the secret places. I showed my picture to a Cambodian man and he didn’t like it. He suffers from denial. He said it gave him nightmares. He’s seen too much horror and death in one life. So it goes.

My village is my world.

My village is the other world.

Where do you live?

I am one of 26,000 men women and children maimed or killed every year in the world by land mines remaining from some ongoing or forgotten conflict.

I love unpleasant facts.

I am a walking, talking, breathing encyclopedia of knowledge and wisdom.

Reports from the killing fields indicate there are 110 million land mines buried in 45 countries. It will cost $33 billion to remove them and take 1,100 years. Governments spend $200-$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000 mines a year.

Cambodia, Angola, Afghanistan and Laos are the most heavily mined countries in the world.

40% of all land in Cambodia and 90% in Angola go unused because of land mines. One in 236 Cambodians is an amputee.

I hear children crying. Doctors struggle to remove pieces of metal from my skin. I cannot raise my bandaged hands to cover my ears. Perpetual crying penetrates my heart. Blood tears soak my skin.

The technical mine that took my right leg off that fateful day as I walked through pristine rice paddies near my village expanded outward at 7,000 meters per second as ball bearings shredded everything around me.

It may have been an American made M18A1, shallow curved with a 60-degree fan shaped pattern. The lethal range is 328 feet. Perhaps it was a plastic Russian PMN-2.

I never saw it.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I didn’t die of shock and blood loss. A stranger stopped the bleeding and shot me up with morphine.

All strangers in a strange land carried morphine.

Standard issue.

April 4th is International Day for Mine Assistance.

Artificial

Facts and truth have nothing in common.

It’s a blessing to understand another human being without words.

I hang laundry near the street. Memory’s lie is tempered by talking monkeys. Two boys harvest trash. One barefoot boy plays silent music with a long thin bamboo fiber. The other twirling a walking stick used for prodding garbage carries a plastic bag. Papa’s got a brand new bag.

Local people mill around. Milling around is an art form. They exist with a pure innocent childlike wisdom. Passive is their inherent Buddhist nature. They’ve suppressed their ego. Ease god out.

Others voice imaginary alien freedom ideas.

I am Other. I live in my heart-mind luminous universe.

A sofa with a roof on wheels towed by a motorcycle carries fat white Europeans to see 8th century Angkor temples.

They are the look and leave people. They are too busy passing through life to feel anything.

Eternity, a young handicapped man wearing his new skin-tight artificial plastic left leg and foot shuffles through dust. He walks home. It is everywhere and nowhere. You can’t go home again.

Jungle Story

Once upon a time in the long now there was a continent, a landmass floating on water. White barbarians called it Asia on dusty maps. Deep inside Asia were vast lands, rivers and mountains.

Overtime, a historical bandit with a reputation for laughter, magic, fear, superstition, and an insatiable appetite for diverse languages and cultures lived in jungles and forests.

Jingle, jangle, jungle.

Using natural materials villagers created musical instruments, simple weapons, homes, fish traps, snares and looms. The women had babies, wove cloth and prepared food while the men fished, planted crops, domesticated animals. Children played and learned life lessons from nature with extended families. 

One day a boat filled with white men sailed up river to a village deep in the jungle.

They wore shiny clothing, spoke a language the people could not understand and carried weapons that made a lot of noise and scared everyone. They pretended to be friendly by offering gifts. The leader of the village welcomed them. They had a party.

Every day more white people came up river on boats named Destiny. They were on a quest for gold and slaves. Owning, using and discarding slaves had proven to be an essential part of their evolution on other continents.

Their mantra was: cheap labor, cheap raw materials, cheap goods, cheap markets and much profit.

White people said, we are civilized and you are savages. We have religion. It is called Wealth & Greed. We are on a mission from the great chief. We control people. We control nature. We have machines. We take what we want.

The village gave them hospitality, shelter and friendship.

The white men took control of the village, people and jungle. Every day the white men marched their slaves deep into the jungle singing, “We control Nature. We shall overcome.”

They spread diseases. They planted fear. They planted envy and jealousy. They manipulated villages against villages. They divided people against people. Divide and conquer. History taught barbarians well.

They harvested wealth in the form of people, precious stones, rubber and every raw material of value. They were never satisfied. Their appetite grew and grew.

If we want to survive we have to move to a new jungle far away, said the village shaman.

This is the story they told their people one night below stars singing with their light.