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 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. 

Donate Blood - TLC 19

Experience, a wonderful little teacher nowadays said, giving blood helps someone who needs it more than you. Survival luck. Giving blood gifts life.

Living safely is dangerous.

Lucky had rare A-. He donated after receiving permission from Ankara medical authorities. Yes you may, blood is no argument.

The blood bus sat near a busy downtown intersection. He walked past pretzel sellers, cascading water fountains and shit covered statues of hero soldiers firing rusty guns into cobalt skies.

Paying attention he heard imprisoned Turkish journalists crying, begging, and pleading for free speech in a totalitarian Deep State of Fear.

A voice in the wilderness cried out, “The application of Articles 6 and 7 of the Anti-Terror Law in combination with Articles 220 and 314 of the Turkish Criminal Code leads to abuses. In short, writing an article or making a speech can lead to a court case and a long prison sentence for membership or leadership in a terrorist organization. Together with possible pressure on the press by state officials and possible firing of critical journalists, this situation can lead to a widespread self-censorship.”

Dissent is terrorism, said the angry frightened Prime Minister, slapping a Soma miner for booing him in public. Oh the shame.

Lucky climbed on the bloodmobile express.

A smiling Bulgarian nurse asked health questions in broken English. Another nurse took blood pressure. She attached a tourniquet to his left arm. “You have excellent veins.”

She swabbed one and slid a needle in. “Open and close your left hand.” Blood river flowed.

Outside tinted windows in blinding sun Turkish, Armenian, Kurdish and Syrian parents gripped children’s wrists. Fingers never touched. Scraggly half-starved men unloaded boxes of tomatoes from a truck. Light reflected off cheerless sunglasses. Savage salivating salvage teams folded and loaded crushed cardboard boxes into metal carts.

Sad affective-disordered businessmen spilled black market Iranian nuclear fission material and Syrian VX chemical liquids into Ankara’s water supply. Sharing is caring.

Suchness, a heavy responsibility weighted lives.

Nurses waved goodbye, “You brought someone luck by donating life.”

“It’s a small powerful gift. One stranger helps another stranger.”

101 people lined up to donate platelets. “This should be fun,” a girl said to her mother, “I love needles.”

Tears flowed into The Dream Sweeper.

Puppet Masters in Tibet - TLC 18

The endless Tibetan knot is the cycle of existence, said a monk. Existence is attachment, loss and suffering. Grasping is suffering. Suffering is an illusion. Let go.

Regrets and fears are monkey mind movies.

Pure joy, compassion, gratitude and forgiveness are clear.

Easy to say, hard to do be do.

Work like you don’t need the money. Dance like nobody’s looking. Love like your heart’s never been broken.

Nothing behind. Everything ahead, said Meditation.

Chinese-Tibetan puppet leaders in Lhasa informed monks they would increase patriotic re-education classes in monasteries. Re-education Through Reform, ideology, propaganda and fear-based thought control is the way comrades. We have Power and Control using fear and intimidation.

We wash your brain daily.

The Chinese, after looting and destroying 2,700 monasteries and killing millions in Tibet before, during and after the Cultural Revolution restricted the number of monks at the three major Lhasa monasteries, Sera, Drepung and Ganden. They recruited Tibetans as spies to live and work in monasteries.

This system proved effective from 1966-1976 when family members reported on each other neighbors and capitalist running dogs. It was a practical peoples’ campaign of fear and suspicion creating paranoia and ideological control.

Monks and nuns in monasteries who resisted or questioned this form of subtle or overt patriotic brainwashing risked imprisonment, torture and death. They knew what happened to monks and nuns at the notorious Drapchi Prison outside Lhasa.

“There are two kinds of suffering,” said a girl weaving wool carpets outside her yurt on the Tibetan plateau hearing wild blue rivers sing below mountains. “Suffering you run away from and suffering you face.”

Inside Drapchi, Chinese guards beat nuns and monks with rubber hoses filled with sand. They applied electric cattle prods to genitals, sending wire-cranked juice into skeletons, extracting screams.

“Denounce the Dalai Lama,” ordered an illiterate PLA soldier from Human Province. He tightened metal around a nun’s wrists until she screamed.

“Never.”

He wiped her blood off his broken glasses and increased pressure. Someone had to do this dull job.

“Save my face,” sang a Fujian university student, an innocent ignorant invisible victim of the one-child genocide policy. She wrung out a mop of spider webs creating water rainbows before swabbing a classroom. 15,001 students had failed higher-level exams for more prestigious institutions. They settled for this. No choice. She washed uneven crumbling cement floors with strands.

Operatic actors offstage fashioned animist death masks for a performance with a funeral formula.

“This is not a fucking rehearsal,” directed Altman. “Get to the verb.”

“Arrive on time, know your lines and wait for the check,” said the Tibetan weaver as radioactive light shafted mountains.

Rational speaking animals mumbled sounds, words, coalescing consonants, vowels and syllables. Etyms dancing with atoms made up everything with axioms of choice.

Divorce - Save Face - TLC 17

“I know,” said an articulate woman lawyer in Unit 55 - Mastery level 68 - one day, “that my English is not grammatically perfect but I know my English is very fluent.”

“That’s beautiful and true,” said Lucky, seeing how she’d realized her confident nature to master a second language. He’d translate her awareness to students hoping her illumination would shine through their temerity.

He wrote on glass.

Foreign neurotic teachers lamented loss and dreams. One American’s joyful hyperactive energy regaled mentors with exhaustive stories about a stateside son. How he’d found a part-time job at Archery, a national discount chain, attended a technical school and bought a used Swedish car with a bloody knife in the trunk.

She talked a good game about writing. When it came down to the real work, she said, “I only write silly sentences.” She kept stringing word pearls on her lifeline. Positive therapy. She had a good heart.

Lucky gifted her a box of eight Honer blues harps before walking to Bursa. She was overjoyed. They were the only two deranged fools blowing.

Sometimes he blows and sometimes he sucks.

At TLC two drama queens from New Zealand and Scotland revealed personal horror stories of abandonment and neglect. Emotional histories expanded their quest for love with Turkish men confronting insecure masculine jealousies shattered by strangling mothers intent on controlling their little boys through prolonged adolescence rendering them insolvent and mute given to infantile behaviors and heartbreaking confusion in long strange fatal attractions.

Flower petals whispered, “He loves me, he loves me not.”

In Turkey divorce was seen as a failure. Shame on you, said Shame.

Marriage is a business deal with bad sex, said a heart broker, a form of volunteered slavery.

The majority of women knew their place and stayed in it. Blend in sweet thing. We’re in this for the long haul honey-bunny.

An emotional graveyard bloomed where mothers controlled and manipulated their offspring’s behavior, attitudes and counterfeit freedom with a heavy dictatorial hand called love. Working on love’s chain gang.

One was different. After seven months of marriage she filed divorce papers. She’d believed him in the beginning.

“I feel so much better. He lied to me. He courted me with sweet words and I thought, or believed I thought or thought I believed he had an open mind but I was disappointed because he wasn’t honest...so after weeks then months I saw his, how do you say, irresponsibility, how he wouldn’t contribute his heart to me, to our relationship and then, when I tried to talk to him he was closed to me, he shut down emotionally and I was working and trying to keep the flat up and work on our relationship but I saw it was difficult, then really impossible to live with everything in my brain and heart.”

She exhaled. “Now, when he saw my action to end the marriage he was filled with remorse and regret and apologies. But it’s too late. I told him to move out. Sent him home to his mama. He bothers me everyday in his childlike whining way but it’s over. I can handle it. I am strong and know what I want in my life. My family is very supportive of my decision.”

“Good for you. In China it’s about saving face. Fake face lies. Appearances. You’ve realized growth and self-respect. Some discover their courage, take control of their lives and some don’t.”

“I am not living the lie anymore. I feel free.”

“You discovered courage and accepted responsibility for your life. I am happy for you. Your heart-mind is calm. Be well.”