Shan state

IMG_0093.JPG, originally uploaded by Not Lost.

Do you think they are interested in the referendum?

what are they discussing?

weigh my goods correctly please

give me some more extra

fine, I am a generous vendor..

how much do you make today

enough for the week

I will buy some frogs home to cook for my husband

Internet and Myanmar

In 2001 we did not have internet in Myanmar. Whenever I travelled outside Myanmar I envied the kids of my neighboring countries enjoying internet in their own languages.

" I will ask for internet in my country," I said.

" No way , your government will not give you internet," one of my expat friend told me.

" Why not, we need it for business and education , I think the world does not know how much we are deprived, " I said.

At a small business symposia in Yangon, I put up a presentation about the need and usage of internet for business and sent the whole presentation to Myanmar Times which they wrote an article in their publication. " Business community of Myanmar asks for internet ," was the title.

I left Yangon for a long holiday vowing that I would not stay in my country if there was no internet and no access to the world.

When I came back from my six months holiday I was pleasantly surprised to see Bagan Cybertech and internet services available. 

There were internet cafes sprung up later but we found that the kids were doing games instead of learning anything on internet. They are still weak in English and all the sites are in English. I always wanted to write educational articles in Burmese but I am weak in Burmese typing. Now I can use burmese fonts to type in Burmese and I am still practicing it.

I am surprised to see many Myanmar bloggers on the internet today and there is a community now enjoyed by Burmese all over the world and all of us can feel connected to our main land.

I am sad to see that there are now censorships and slow connections because of political blogs and the events that happened lately. May be we are not ready for the open society, I do not know.

There are also Myanmar women and model girls promotional videos and pictures , even a phuket tourism site advertising them and some Burmese in California are promoting them. 

It is all up to the user whether they want to use it for educational , business , politics or they use it for gambling , pleasure or for instigating riots and instability ,wasting our precious privilege to use internet.

I have done my duty to demand but I cannot be responsible for the results.

Internet is booming in China as well but they have hopes and they have employments.

They even are patriotic and nationalistic about their Tibet affairs and Olympics.

Is it the difference between us and China?

Constitution flower

We arrived back home and were surprised to see this plant in full bloom within one day. We named it our Myanmar Constitution Flowers!

The Oldest Constitution

We stopped at Philadelphia where the oldest constitution was written.

I VOTE!

A very Mingalar day for us Burmese! 

"You must vote!"  My American husband said, "I will drive you to DC to take this chance as a Myanmar citizen."

We drove six hours to DC. The embassy staff were very friendly and welcomed us warmly. It made us emotional to visit the embassy and meet the people there. There was no one else except myself to vote yesterday morning.

link to Goldbull

I am interested in this post by goldbull blog  about a question by a Burmese lady ( Thiri Thant Mon )  in London.

I remember that she was not happy with the answer of that financial times columnist in Burmese affairs.

" democratic social contract " is a new word for all of us Burmese to understand

the opposition is blind with all their hatred to the military  and their red che guevara style acts.

It is important that we educate the naive Burmese. ( nb: I am sorry to mention this word, I still think many Burmese back home especially from rural area are naive about what democratic government means, for them they were always governed by elders, kings, officers etc )

Prepare them to understand what Democracy means and what their duties are, what they can expect from their elected government.

Drink with us! - Patpong, Bangkok

Drink with us! - Patpong, Bangkok, originally uploaded by © Maciej Dakowicz.

Bangkok

City of angels

a Zoo of almost naked women at nana plaza

a Zoo of dancing girls on tables at pat pong

a Zoo of gay prostitutes showing their boobs at Phuket

a Zoo of european tourists hunting for kids

a Zoo of Chinese men hunting for virgins

A Zoo of long neck tribes from Myanmar at the border

A Zoo of karen kids with rifles at the border

A Zoo of refugees in villages at the border

A Zoo of foreign NGOs and journalists

enjoying every place Thailand offers!

market economy!

My experiences of market economy & Democracy!

The Thais arrived in Yangon

representing International companies

asked me to write bogus vouchers to make himself extra cash

offered us a trip to Disney land

not to see the factories nor to learn about trade

Thai executives came in droves

ordered for prostitutes which our husbands did not know where

they paid with company's expense

That was in 1994 soon after market opened

We are proud to say that Today 

Yangon has nightclubs and karaoke for international biz

human resources plenty at home 

just need license to operate

which police and army generously permit

burmese men do not need to go to Bangkok anymore

not even to Insein or Dala or secret places outside the city

everything in downtown on international hotels and clubs

do not look for a decent place to sing karaoke

you have girls sitting on your lap like Bangkok

why go to Bangkok

our girls are as pretty as theirs

we have gay entertainers like Thailand

we have young boys like Thailand

we have cultural as well as adventure tourism 

we are ready to compete with them in all sleaziness

welcome to Myanmar for tourists of the world

if you do not come our human resources will cross the border to BKK

Thai men are our examples of market economy

Thai men representing European firms

gave contracts to his partners for fun

for distribution and marketing arm

Made their deals in nightclubs and brothels

invite Burmese for biz trip to Bangkok

to enjoy sleazy night life with women

Thailand copy America

We copy Thailand 

America is Hollywood for us

Americans have freedom of sex

Rap and Hiphop is American style

DJ and soft porn on MTV

that our youngsters can copy

human resources we have 

nothing else needed to practice that

you can see our rap stars at our water festival

market economy of bribery and corruption

loosing moral values of all religion and culture

grab everything for your own

why bother the law

even in jail you can live like a King if you have money

kill for a neat sum to escape to border and enjoy life

Con Burmese generals and its people- take the cash- go to border

take rest at refugee camp

before retiring in a first world country

This is our wild wild West

American dream or capitalism

When it reaches Far East 

sans ( without ) its origin of moral values nor ethics

American Democracy I do not know

how it has reached Far East 

buying votes? swearing and fighting ?

threatening and killing?

liberal and communists?

corruptions again and definitely?

military coups?

insurgencies ? separatists?

Be careful of what you export

It lost its real values

by the time it has travelled half the globe

Just a warning !

Religious Buddhists?

I have seen Shan, Mon and Yakkhine people as the most religious people in my country.

In Yangon ( Rangoon as I knew before ) where I grew up, people generally go to meditation centers in summer holiday for a peaceful retreat. 

In daily life the merchants of Yangon downtown are quite religious and I find them very busy especially among the women entrepreneurs in Bogyoke market, real estate dealers, traders, brokers, gems dealers , including the wives of ministers and officials.

They all have their worries, to get their business deals go through, to have returns from their investments, to get the husbands back home from their small wives, to have promotions etc etc, never ending worries of making a living in a city.

I saw so many hand held counters sold in the market. " Why do you need a counter ? what are you counting? ," I asked a woman , a real estate dealer.

" I am doing over 1000 rounds of prayers with my beads and I need to keep a counter to note it. I vowed to do it to make my deal goes through so I can sell my house soonest to get back my investment. "

Thats cool, I noted in my mind--at least her mind will be occupied until things go through but I do not think that is anything to do with Buddha's prayers.

" I have to start from one again today, my son has played with it and my count is gone now," she said sadly.

We had a big shrine room in my mother in law's house in Yangon. The traffic to the room was very heavy , everyone went there to pray except me. One old spinster, my sis in law was there praying every day to have a job and she did get one, helped by my husband and she did went to USA and got a job in UN finally.

Another sis in law always busy praying to reach US and finally she did it . Today her family is in US though they were bitter about being poor in the rich world and her husband was scolding her daily until we sent her inheritance recently.

Another sis in law was always in the shrine room as well, with dried leaves spread out doing some weird things to clean her luck in her diamond trading. Today she is quite a rich and successful diamond trader in Yangon.

One year, I found her friends from the market and other men and women went around every Monday morning to nine Buddha statues in the city. It was like a tele-match they tried to reach every place within the morning praying at every stop.

The actors and actresses to get an academy award and the merchants to get rich. Today I found that woman quite rich and those actors got academy awards.

I am awed by the power of faith and power of Buddha's prayers and Buddha's statues. Their acts really give them their wishes come true. Actually it was their determination playing in its success.

I wonder of my own life, I am successful enough without doing what they were doing, without bothering Buddha , without being lost in my own greed and lust for wealth.

Buddha is my teacher, he lived thousand years ago and left with us his precious philosophy, his teachings are in my heart and I am blessed as being a good person on earth, I have always been successful in whatever I have done without praying blindly with my eyes closed.

I am not a traditional Buddhist. I regard myself as a true Buddhist.

My blogging habit!

" Why don't you write a book instead of wasting your time blogging," my husband said. I can try to write a book later and I might start today. Blogging is good that it has instant publication on internet and reaches the direct target. It gives me sense of satisfaction that I have done something good for my country. Books can take months and years to write and you still have to look for a publisher.


I am impulsive in my acts, never hide anything and always say things directly. Blogging is just what I like to do , instant writing and publishing of my thoughts. It may be intricate, it may be twisted and deep, but they are my thoughts with all the good intention of relaying good messages that will be beneficial to the society.

I started blogging with the intention of helping people understand themselves and to stop people from doing unfruitful things most of all harmful things. I feel the need to spread the news fast since things are happening so fast in the world nowadays.

Our country has been wronged by the global community, our country is still in an infant stage in foreign relationships and in building a proper democratic government.  Most of all , when I met the exile Burmese who were acting and saying like westerners , hiding their true Burmese origins just because they were among the westerners, I was compelled to get them straight. That was how I started my discussions at a group site. When September event happened , I was so moved emotionally, felt so tragic and sad like all other Burmese living abroad. I started blogging straightaway everyday in English and Burmese to reach the Burmese inside and outside the country.

The world is full of delusions and many people lost in the cycle. If you have to help people there is the whole world full of people that need help. My priority will be to help my own country, our own culture , Burmese Buddhist culture and our own pride and sovereignty-- 53 million and a precious culture we need to be proud of and to maintain. This will be my target for my efforts. To introduce my country to the world, to introduce the world to my country. If we all know where we are and if we treasure what we have, if we know what we want from the change, from the world, we shall succeed. 

Myanmar Generals

The Age of Impunity is SOooo Over, originally uploaded by political barbay.

Our duty to keep our country united

to fight against the insurgents

we are the rulers

we are the protectors 

of the Union of Myanmar

Bogyoke Aung San had formed

we inherit his visions

we will continue the tradition

Ne Win has been stupid

giving way to socialism

making all of us poor

time for us to prosper

we will learn market economy

our families first

others later after we get rich

forget about the sanctions

will not wait for the West

disregard their rules

we have our big brother China

Our neighbors will help us 

we will be their servant quarter

give them laborers for their factories

give them gas and electricity

our lives will be more than comfortable

better than in socialist days

we will still be the rulers

why must we give way to foreigners

power we have before

wealth we have today

Power and Wealth

this will be our achievement

Thanks to Aung San

Thanks to Ne Win

and last but not the least

Thanks to the Japanese Imperial Army 

Who put us to this position

we fought against the British colonist

for pure raw Burmese to prosper in our own country

instead of civil servants trained by them.

a kid

Saw Khee, 12 y.o., is a soldier with the Karen National Union (KNU) at their sixth brigade base camp in Wah Lay Khee, Burma, near the Thailand border. 6-7 years ago, both his parents and younger brother were killed in their village in the Pa-an District o, originally uploaded by photongo.

Give me education

Teach me to love 

Not to hate  Not to kill

treat the women right

with respect

earn a decent living 

to raise my kids

not to beat

control my lust 

and worship God

Not to pose with a gun for a Farang

who will use my photo to get aids

Thailand - Karen refugee camp

Thailand - Karen refugee camp, originally uploaded by chathew.

Take us all to a land of opportunity

where there are factories

for us to work

where they will give us benefits

where there is electricity and plenty of food

where there is education and health care

we are here for economic reasons

hoping to be adopted by the West

we do not want to be deported

back to our land where there is no factories

no foreign investments

no work

no food

no jeans to wear

no casinos to play

no night clubs to enjoy

no money at all

Rocket Launcher and Prayer Book

Rocket Launcher and Prayer Book, originally uploaded by JPHulme.

Do not neglect us

we pray to the same God

we like to move to where our God rules

where the modern world is

we are tired of fighting 

since 1948

the socialist days were golden for us

with black market economy

Thai generals dealt with us to do logging in our land

Thai tourism gave us money

to still wear rings on our necks

drug industry also was good in North

carrier fees across the border we got

today there are legal trading posts

Burmese soldiers are taking our tax away

drug lords are in cahoots with the generals 

Thai generals are signing gas deals with Burmese generals

We are left alone as insurgents and refugees

working on a fishing boat for a Thai boss

working at a Thai factory for imports to our country

working at a Thai brothel and tourist industry

working as a maid for a Thai police 

working at a massage parlor in Thailand

we can make a living but 

we hope to move to a better world

we hope to stop fighting

or else give us a free country

where people of our faith can invest us with money

The world is so wrong!

The world is so wrong 

When super powers try to be master of ALL

Tell others that they are wrong

Super religions try to save the world

Tell others that they are wrong

Worse of all for those who migrate and taste the first world Air

preach people back home that their environment was wrong

Get medals from their western masters

to bark and preach on behalf for their ideals

bureaucracy  democracy freedom equality

whatever the fashionable WORDS they will say

hoping to have an identity thirsty for recognition 

well!!

what do we do now?

go back thousands of years and uproot our culture?

to have Your Kind of Democracy?

Save your Own Soul

save your own life First

From Your Materialistic World

"don't worry- be happy!"

Democracy is to be built by yourself, among yourself!

Not to be adopted! from the West!

ဒီမိုုကေရစီဆိုုသည္မွာ တိုုးတက္ေသာ အသိညဏ္ဖြံ ့့ျဖိဳးေသာ ႏိုုင္ငံမ်ား

ေလာကဓတ္ပညာ ျပန္ ့ပြားေသာႏိုုင္ငံမ်ား

စက္ရုုံအလုုပ္၇ုုံ ႏွင့္ေျမပိုုင္ရွင္ ျခံပိုုင္ရွင္ ေငြေၾကးခ်မ္းသာသူတိုု ့ေပါမ်ားရာႏိုုင္ငံမ်ားတြင္

တရားမ်တမႈ၇ွိေသာ အစိုုးရ အမ်ား တင္ေျမာက္ေသာ အစိုုးရ တိုု ့တင္ေျမာက္၍ 

အားလုုံး ေပးသြင္းေသာ အခြန္ ဘ႑ာမ်ားကိုု အမ်ားကိုုယ္စား တရားမ်တစြာ သုုံးစြဲ ေပးေသာ 

အမ်ား အတြက္အလုုပ္အေကြ်းျပဳေသာ အစိုုးရ ကိုုတင္ေျမာက္ျခင္းျဖစ္ပါသည္။

Democracy is electing a fair government that will serve people to use the budget and wealth of the nation- In developed and industrialized nations where there are many educated class, middle class, rich land owners, rich industrial magnates where many are paying tax to the government.

ဒီမိုုကေရစီကိုု ကိတ္မုုန္ ့လိုု စားခ်င္ပါတယ္ လိုု ခ်င္ပါတယ္ ပူဆာေနလိုု ့မရပါ။

ဘာမွန္းမသိေသာမုုန္ ့ကိုု စားခ်င္ပါတယ္ ပူဆာေနသလိုု ျဖစ္ေနပါတယ္ ။

You cannot ask for Democracy like asking to eat a cake. It will be like asking for something that you do not know.

ဒီမိုုကေရစီဆိုုတာ မိမိပါတ္ဝန္းက်င္မွာ စတင္ ျပိဳးေထာင္ရပါမယ္။

 

မိမိလမ္းမိမိရပ္ရြာ ကိုု ပူးေပါင္း ျပီး တာဝန္ယူၾကရပါမယ္။

You have to start building Democracy among your community today.

You have to start taking responsibilities of your society today.

ျမန္မာေတြဟာ မသိဖါသာ ေနထိုုင္ အတၱဘဲၾကည့္ေနၾကရင္ ဒီမိုုကေရစီနဲ ့မတန္ပါဘူး။

ဒီမိုုကရစီကိုု ဒီေန ့လိုု ခ်င္ရင္ဒီ ေန ့ရေစရမယ္။

ဒီေန ့ဘဲ မိိမိေက်းရြာ မိမိတည္ေထာင္ၾကပါ။

You have to work together, you do not deserve Democracy is you are selfish.

စုုေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္ၾကပါ။

Jon told me this morning, " I do not think Burmese people understand what Democracy means, they are asking it like it is an American pizza or something good to eat,".

" Yes , I believe so, I myself did not know so well before and I am at the foremost of the population in western exposure and education."

We decide to educate the people, help them instead of punishing them.

farmers

DSCF1338, originally uploaded by sluj78.

Our farmers are still using cows to plough fields like thousand years ago.

if he is lucky nowadays he can use the thawlarkyi truck from China.

if he can afford the diesel price.

During socialist days they had an agricultural mechanization department 

and spent a lot in building dams at rural areas.

We did not see any improvement of our farmers, productivity and their lives.

logging

DSCF1344, originally uploaded by sluj78.

Which company is logging, exporting and putting the cash in their banks in Singapore?

there are roads

DSCF1357, originally uploaded by sluj78.

developing

DSCF1368, originally uploaded by sluj78.

developing

DSCF1379, originally uploaded by sluj78.

peaceful

DSCF1383, originally uploaded by sluj78.

Leave them alone!

They shall be left alone as long as they follow the rules, do not cause harm to others.

Let them build their own peaceful society.

Burma will always be here!

" Do not visit Burma " "Burma will always be here ", she said.

Are you dreaming in this modern world?  Our dear Lady?

every day counts -- every year counts, 

Burmese are migrating to get jobs, dying by suffocation in a smuggling truck!

Within twenty years China became economically strong , while we Burmese became refugees!

There is NO fairness in this world!

We will build ourselves without your Help!

Nepalese election has Maoists flags!

We need to eliminate the last thread of Red!

Before we put back the Greens where they belong!

We need to protect our ignorant majority

Educate them, teach them Technology

keep the country Intact

To full Democracy Step by Step

without Disintegration !

Happy Thingyan

a link to see happy people on earth at their water festival..

Cool!

Your mind is pure and clear when you do not feel greed nor anger seeing things. ( eyes)

Your mind is pure and clear when you do not feel greed nor anger hearing things.( ears)

Your mind is pure and clear when you do not feel greed nor anger smelling things. ( nose)

Your mind is pure and clear when you do not feel greed nor anger eating things. ( tongue)

Your mind is pure and clear when you do not feel greed nor anger having thoughts. ( mind )


When you master yourself to protect yourself from external stimuli you will not be disturbed by them-- you have achieved what many people have not achieved.

Dalai Lama said he did not loose his sleep over Tibet matters.
This is the Way for Wise people!

Lets VOTE

Time to Vote

Golden chance since 1990

Vote Vote Vote

You have duty to Vote

Time to Clear the Past

Time to Move ON

VOTE

water festival Myanmar 2008

shake shake shake

hop hop hop

sun fun water wet wild

everyone smiles

free spirit always live

there is always freedom for us

whoever is sitting above

no one can tame nor cage us

dance dance dance

wet wild sun fun

happy new year to all !

padauk flowers

Once a year the golden flower blooms

only once in summer in our new year

it blesses us with its golden beauty- bright against the green foliage

after the first drop of rain humidify the atmosphere

fragrant smell in the air - lifting the spirit of people

make all smile - ready for joy

Stop working -  prepare for fun

 kids or adults - throw water on everyone

a symbol of goodness

cool off  the summer heat

some may go wild some may act rude

but the new year ( thingyan ) spirit will be there

for any race or religions to share!


Happy Burmese New Year to the World!

311.JPG, originally uploaded by autan.

Go China! Go Beijing! Go Olympics!

Go China! Go Beijing! Go Olympics!, originally uploaded by tingley.

CHINA: Listen to the Dalai Lama

CHINA: Listen to the Dalai Lama, originally uploaded by tingley.