Mahling, Burma

Learn. Play. Share. 

500 grade 10-11 students live at the school. They’ve come from distant Shan state villages and Myanmar areas. They are their parents’ social security.

The school has an excellent reputation for matriculation results.

Segregated classes. Walking on campus, girls shield their faces from distant boys. No social testosterone distractions. Zero gadgets.

They study Burmese, math, history, physics, chemistry, science, biology and Magic and Potions from 6-11, 1:30-6, 7:30-11 p.m. Sonorous voices echo daily.

They leave school one day a month. Don't let school interfere with your education.

                                    The Wild West Village - 2.5 hours south of Mandalay - pop 10,000

Horse drawn cart traps.
One traffic light. Two motorcycles is a jam.
Green for go.

Twenty minutes away on foot, an extensive traditional market covered in rusting PSP sheets is a delightful adventure  - returning to the source of community, dark-eyed local curiosity, street photography, laughter, and a floating babble of tongues inside a labyrinth of narrow uneven dirt paths.

Footprints on stone and dirt meander through forests and mountains of oranges, apples, bananas, red chilies, green vegetables, thin bamboo baskets of garlic and onions, farm implements, varieties of rice, clacking sewing machines, basic commodities, steaming noodles, cracking fires, snorting horses.

Sublime.

Blindfish heads whisper The Sea, The Sea. Silver scales reflect light.

A woman hacks chickens. Blood streams down circular wooden tree rings.

The gravity of thinking sits on a suspended handheld iron pan scale.

A white feather sits in the other pan. Balance.

Twenty-six varieties of rice mountains peak in round metal containers or scarred wooden boxes.

Horse drawn cart traps unload people and produce. Neck bells tinkle: Star light star bright first star I see tonight, I wish I may I wish I might get the wish I wish tonight. Well. Fed horses paw dirt.

Ancient diesel tractor engines attached to a steel carcass hauling people and produce bellow black smoke.

Old wooden shuttered shops with deep dark interiors display consumables, soap, thread waiting for a conversation, stoic curious dark eyed women, others laughing at the benign crazy traveler. 

A happy ghost-self sits in meditative silence, absorbing rainbow sights, sounds, colors, smells, feeling a calm abiding joy.