Burma: photos of the impact, the impacted

More of PACT's photos from Burma are here.

PACT is on the ground in Burma, please help their relief efforts with your donation.

c

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

The houses are all gone under the sea.

ts eliot, from Four Quarters

Burma - help

The news from Burma, what little can get out, is appalling - it is now estimated that over 100,000 have died due to the cyclone. Rangoon is without power, many regions remain - days since the cyclone - still submerged, there isn't adequate drinking water and petrol is in short supply. Despite this, Rangoon's airport sits practically empty - most relief teams have not been issued permits and planes filled with disaster-relief experts and desperately needed supplies remain grounded, the Burmese government will not allow them to land.

Sarah Newhall (my step-mother) runs PACT - a global community building, aid organizing and community-level impacting organization of enormous reach and integrity. PACT also happens to have been working in Burma for over a decade, with a number of development projects already flourishing including HIV/AIDS prevention and micro-lending programs specifically in the delta areas hit hardest by the cyclone. While the access of most organizations remains, for the time being, blocked by the military government, PACT is in place and so uniquely positioned to truly effect change and implement the aid immediately.

Please contribute what you can to PACT's initiative and pass this post along to friends and colleagues so that they may do the same. (For PACT's tracking purposes, please mention this blog.)




(In Burma in 1997, I trekked outside government boundaries into Shan State; I spent time in a Palong village. The Burmese were to a man/woman/child: kind, hopeful, resourceful – they stole my heart. The tragedies they've known, perpetrated by their own people - ignored by the world, have wrought a nation of all-too-human souls. Demanding aid without implementers, the Burmese government has essentially charged us as global citizens to get step in. The Burmese people must know the world cares deeply, and right the wrongs of our historical inaction.)

By hand

"It is almost as if the decline of the idea of eternity
coincided with the increasing aversion
to sustained effort."

- Paul Valery





Too often I forget the back-story of the throw-away: "hand made".

(Fair Trade,
Organic,grain-fed,
locally sourced,
Unique, Authentic)



We're trying very hard to be good these days and to return to right values -
I've got to keep before me the journey of the piece and
the labor, expertise and generations that constitute its existence.

c - working on getting it, starting with blocks

dry

sheltered cow, kalimpong (india)

A roof of ones own,
in India.
Where the sacred is the everyday.

C - thinking now about cows

Book travel

Because there's not been a trip recently, I've gotten my geography locally...


This from a remarkable Books auction at Stair Gallery in Hudson (the little auction house that, almost weekly now, ROARS.)

Burma

Novice monks in front of monastery,
village beyond May Myo, Shan State Burma (1997)

Burma takes your heart.

In the fall of 1997, my Biman Air flight from Bangkok arrived in Rangoon's Mingaladon Airport a half-day delayed and full of backpackers. We were an earnest crew - un-linked but collectively buoyed by the budget traveler's hubris that, moving low to the ground, our presence in Burma wasn't in direct opposition to Aung San Suu Kyi's wishes. Mounting a noisy front against the enforced changing of currency at the airport, we vowed to get our few dollars directly into the hands of the common man.

More than the dollars (we had few, their impact would be spotty and sparse), we hoped our presence - as we fanned out on our Burmese adventures - would communicate a universal acknowledgement that yes, Burma still existed to the outside world and we - badly dressed + largely unemployed idealists, would bring their stories home with us.

At least, that was the hope.

I left Burma 4 weeks later smitten and saddened - with no idea where to begin helping the people I'd met and harboring the naive assumption that a kind people in a naturally blessed region couldn't possibly in our modern and connected era be saddled with the oppressive military regime for too much longer. Thus did I excuse myself from responsibility and look to the world and ASEAN to right the wrongs.


And now, of course, the world is again standing by - its attitude and actions stymied by the oil interests of enormous nations, the weighting of political stakes and an appalling inconsistency of our standards for what, in this world, can be called acceptable.

I have no authority to write about Burma but here some recent pieces (thank you R for forwarding "What Makes a Monk Mad")

From today's NY Times: You are no longer monks.

And, "What makes a monk mad"

things not bought

Cult Rev flyers, glove forms, gut-strung snow shoes and other items not soon seen in Circa Trade's inventory.

Round Top trip photos here

And actual inventory photos to come.



C

Round Top, TX

I'll fill in details tonight but the gist is: I went to texas and, on a strip of highway 237, found pieces for Circa Trade amidst antlers, figurines and really big grills.

Elsewhere on offer

What I offered.

A little while back, striving to introduce narrative-rigor into my choppy blog voice, I tried to write a piece for the travel site BootsnAll.com.

Drawing heavily from observations made here and doodly notes, I compiled something I'd hoped read as a loosely-joined series of lyrical a-lightings across the sub-continent. The editors of Bootsnall were not lyrically set-alit and beside taking a heavy editing hand to the piece, they also roundly told-me off for thinking myself bigger than narrative conventions.

Here's what ended up going live - my India grab-bag: Pieces of India on Bootsnall.

(Mea culpas made, I do challenge anyone to "write" India as something that could be consecutive...)

c - admittedly not that linear in the west either

Is this a fair use of the blog? Yes, I do think so - roundly self-promoting but travel-related after all and for the worthy end of a trip to Thailand...

Vote objectively but kindly, forward and in the spirit of competition, enter yourself.

More travel tales soon - a busy summer of Circa Trade shop and not enough on-the-road adventures. But now there's the fall and all the momentum that comes with it and stocks are, well, running low.

view and rate this entry in the Novice Monks, Lachung... by circatrade

Thanks to all readers - sign in for travel requests...

ctp

Morocco Photos

Morocco Photos

Photos from the Morocco trip

- a zoom tour of a country that requires less zoom, more wander.

C - perennially zoomer

Trivia

Publishing such a document (Bowles' diary) demonstrates
the way in which the hours of the day
can as satisfactorily be filled with trivia
as with important events.

- Paul Bowles on his Tangiers Diaries


Bus rest stop, Cafe El Atlas, Marrakesh to Essaouira -
- Now there's a troop of piping Berbers with a goatskin tambourine.
- My hair feels like a bush - no conditioner and matted from train and bus seats
- Back amongst the backpackers - wondered what Moroccan gone-ethnic looked like. Talked to aussie couple - 6 months west africa, german with 2 french girls. They're sitting on the deserted side of the cafe and obstinately not ordering.
- Should know better than to think every town on a map is romantic. They're tiny dustbowls.

Hotel Riad El Medina, Essaouira
- Sure once charming, horrible now. Clue from name - dumbly redundant ostentatiously claiming an entire quarter. That it's a riad I don't doubt but with crumbled and frayed nautical/grotto theme rooms, cot mattresses on cement platform, watered down fruit salad. Cafe au lait and baguettes keeping it from the brink.
- Tourists have over-run. The town's for sale. The fish market is full of tourists taking fish pictures.
- Overcast and my room is a cave. Point of beach visit not clear.

Marrakesh - various places
- My god this fruit salad is good
- I think some women pack their smallest shorts in anticipation of a muslim country. Maybe in fez I'll see them flogged.
- Some of the younger girls in the djellabas (no head cover) look so relaxed it could be a beach cover-up.
- They've set a single place for me at breakfast. That I'm writing about it as I'm sitting at it is sad.

Sefi Fatima (Berber barter market)
- Men kiss 5x here.
- Berbers descend with their wool blankets and rugs to buy rubber shoes, polyester tops, soap and tin teapots. Only vegetables retain the authentic.

Fez - train and arrival
- This tour guy may be legit and I may be mean but he should leave a single woman alone.
- Fez seems depressed - repressed? Packed in and layered - voices from below amplified so run the tap.
- Attar of roses. I don't know what that is but that sounds right. It's cloying.
- Nothing's not carved or crenelated here, or tiled.
- 4 kinds of breadstuffs - rolls and puffy crepes, sweet toast and a croissant. Interchangeable starches.

And so on.

C - all minutia, all the time

Lost

...that the more one was lost in the unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there..

- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities


I was lost twice in Marrakesh (in Fez I had a guide):
First, lunging alley-deep into the medina with a confidence unmatched by knowledge, skills. I was led home by a child who demanded DH 20.
Second time I was made lost by a fellow who said he'd lead me to the Berber auction. I found my way back amongst the tourists by true directions finally canceling the untrue ones.

I emerged unscathed, of course - but it wasn't the worst feeling. To be spun in circles brings a clenching and all of a sudden the future, just briefly, is rendered unsure.

C – in a land where even the unfamiliar's on a grid

Sunset at Jemmna al Fnna, Marrakesh

Place Jemmna al Fnna, early eve

Marrakesh is the great market of the south,
not only the feudal chiefs and their wild clansman,
but all that lies beyond of heat and savagery:
the Sahara of the veiled Touaregs, Timbuktoo...
here come the camel caravans...

-Edith Wharton, In Morocco
(Whom I almost wish had traveled to Algeria instead so I wouldn't feel inadequate. Ms. Wharton owns this country, with the slight advantage of being a guest of the Governor General wherever she went.)

The Place Jemmna al Fnna - handy during the day as a center point, assumes its true character at night.

Dusk and out come:
Henna ladies. I got hi-jacked - assaulted with flowers up my arm. I made her rub it off, which seemed harsh till she demanded money.
Snake charmers - ubiquitous.
Witch-doctors/healers with ostrich eggs, herbs, dust of ___ and potions. The popular ones make a big to-do of their powers and draw large crowds with their claims and diagrams of intestinal tracks.
The man with a tray of rubber dentures and a mound of teeth
The numbered stalls of the white jacket men who serve kabobs and fish



Orange and date men (pockets of calm)
Dancing West Africans - various colors and hats and rhythms
The Water Men in funny hats who became redundant around the time of bottled water and now would like you to take their picture.

High above, third floor of the Cafe France, the flash bulbs go off.

C - amidst and observing, trying to take pictures without paying

Balance

Dar Vedra (my riad, Marrakesh),
the courtyard 'neath my room

As riads sprout, an assessment:

The Europeans eagerness to buy such wonderful buildings (riads)
is matched only by the local Marrakesh's willingness to dispose of them.

- Tahir Shah, The Caliph's House

C - fan but wary of french invasion deux

Spanish ate French

grand choix en el medina

Moroccans are taught arabic and french in schools. They switch mid-sentence, they switch and you almost don't register it.

Some also speak Berber - of which there are 3 dialects.

A few, I'm going to guess more in the north, also speak Spanish. Morocco is close after all, a few kms.

I speak English, crummy but animated Spanish and gruesome french.

The sad part's been that my French might have had a fighting chance - given me a little go at navigating this country - but my Spanish ate it.

My Spanish eats every last French word that might live in me.

(Blind cannibalizing the blind)

C - je ne peut pas comprende usted.

Seaside medina

Essaouira, Morocco

Brighton-on-the-beach except with a souk.
Or, Fez's darkest alley except it's one that ends in a beach side cafe.

Odd this: that the ladies are taking the promenade in the djellabas and the men hovering by the fish shack are hooded.

Arrive at Essaouira this evening (from Fez -6 hours on a train then 3 this afternoon on a bus) and it's unsettling me.

My heart might still be in that dark alley, and can't reconcile the call to prayer going out over thatched beach umbrellas...

C – seaside

Fez: doesn't bite

a minaret, a lamp - fez medina

Now that I've left I can say that
many people (Marrakeshis) warned me against going to Fez.

I would get:
Kidnapped from the train station
Knifed en route to the medina
Dragged across the cobbles of the souk
Thrown across a mule
Made into tea

They dissed Fez big time - the two have been going at it for 1,000+ years.

Assumed defensive: antennae up, important papers(!) tucked in close, covered to ankles and wrists, mean to everyone genuinely trying to be helpful.

What I found was:
Absolutely nothing untoward.
In fact, felt safer (Marrakeshis take that) in the Fez medina for the simple fact that everyone there was going about their business. I was not on their list. They did not give a flying because they needed to buy a pound of lamb and pick up the re-soled slippers.

Not that the tourist trade has skipped over entirely (Marrakeshis would love that), but the medina's so big, so old and so essentially working that tourists - even groups of them - are absorbed in just as traders and berbers and heathen have been for centuries.

So - Fez is a yes.

C - no longer there

An olive and a loaf

Loaf vendor (off with dustpan vendor), medina Fez

You can make a respectable meal of a dish of spiced olives and a round loaf of bread in Morocco.
No one will look askance.

(Which is not to diminish a culture's justly famed cuisine, just to highlight its flexibility.)

That you can't have a beer in public is get-aroundable.

C - mint tea-toasting hors-d'oeuvre meals

Muezzin

Church bells and chanting processions and elephants held aloft.
I haven't traveled in a Muslim country in ages.
What I'd forgotten - but here you can't forget - is the call to prayer.

You (I'll speak for me) are a passer-through.
The faithful are called and the faithful gathered in.

It was a strange relief to hear it begin
allahu akbar...
and the veil drops
allahu akbar
and we turn back to tasks impermanent.




C - humbled