Impressions from Burma

Dear friends,

I am writting to you from Chengdu, in Western China. Tomorrow I will be travelling to Lhasa, in Tibet. I am looking forward to be in Tibet, I have dreamt since a long time of making this journey.

But this mail is not to tell you about Tibet. I want to share with you some of the impressions and emotions with which I left Burma a few days ago. When I arrived in Burma in late February I did not have an idea of what to expect. The information I had on the country was quite scarce. I knew of course that since many decades ago a military junta was running the country, and that violations of human rights were quite commong across the country.

Two months later, when I left Burma, I felt as if part of me remained there. As I boarded the plane many images and memories began to spring up to my mind, or rather I should say to my heart. For Burma is not only a country that appeals to your senses, it moves you in your heart, arising many feelings and emotions that I will have difficulty to explain.

When I look back into the past two months, the most vivid memories are the glances of the friends I made, or the people I encountered throughout the country. The eyes of the people in Burma are so expressive. Sometimes I had the impressions that what some people did not articulate in words, they made crystal clear from the way they stare at you. But it is not only with the eyes that the people of Burma embrace the strangers. I could feel that deep in their hearts there was a goodness, a healthy curiosity to know about other people. It is a kind of hospitaly rooted in the way they understand life and community. They have no formalisms, no mannerisms to express their hospitality. It is the small details, the tiny gestures which make these people such a great and fine people.

It is strange that as I sit here recalling the impressions Burma left on me, I feel almost no desire to talk about places, towns and landscapes. Somehow, it is as if the the true journey in Burma had been feeling the warmth of its people, including that of other fellow travellers also embraced by this atmosphere.

One day, as I was in a small town in Upper Burma having tea with a Budhist monk in a monastery, he looked at me deep in the eyes and asked me, with a gentle and smooth voice, to tell my friends and family about the people of Burma. His voice was soft-spoken, but the language of his eyes did carry a gravity, an urgency, as if they were asserting that "We Burmese people do exist, despite this military regime which rules by fear and terror. In spite of the lack of freedom our hearts have not lost their capacity to feel and hope for a better future".

In Burma there are hundreds of thousands of Budhist monks living in monasteries. They are very well informed people and know very well what is happening in their country. There is no free press in Burma, and the only radio and television is controlled by the military junta. However, the BBC and the "Voice of America" do have Burmese-speaking bulletins on short radio wave. This is the only reliable source of information in Burma. Almost every adult and old monk that I met has a small radio, and in the evening they always listen to the radio bulletins.

As I travelled Burma, I often wondered why the Budhist, being the most respected institution in Burma, do not lead a civil disobedience campaign to bring down the government. I did not dare put this question directly to any monk, but I soon found the answer. Indeed the monks had taken the streets following the general uprising of 1989, which the military crushed killing thousands of people across the country. Thousands of monks walked in silence in the streets of Mandalay and other cities for many days in 1990, rejecting to take any donations from the military and their relatives (monks go out of their monasteries twice per day in the morning to receive the donations of food and other basic itens from people). The military junta reacted with violence, arresting, torturing and killing many monks. After this, and seeing that the military did not even respect the most holy of Burmese institutions, people lost hope of any real change coming soon. This was fisteen years ago, and that chane has not come yet.

All the best for now my dear friends,

Mikel