ကမၻာ့အေရွ့ျခမ္းအာရွနိုင္ငံတခုမွ ကမၻာ့အေနာက္ျခမ္းအေမရိကကို နာရီေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ ျဖတ္သန္းခရီးႏွင္ခဲ့ၿပီး အေမရိကအေ႐ွ႔ပုိင္း၏ ေျမျပင္ေပၚ ေျခခ်ခိုလံႈလိုက္ရခ်ိန္မွာေတာ့ ၂၀၀၉ ၏ ပန္းစံုပြင့္ေသာေႏြဦးႏွင့္အတူ 

ေဖာ္ေရြေႏြးေထြးေသာၿမိဳ ့သူၿမိဳ ့သားမ်ားက က်မတို႔ကိုႀကိဳဆိုခဲ့ပါသည္။

       ထိုေဖာ္ေရြေႏြးေထြးမႈမ်ားေၾကာင့္ပင္က်မ၏မိခင္ေျမအေၾကာင္းမိတ္ဆက္ေျပာျပဖို႔ မတြန္႔ဆုတ္ခဲ့ျခင္းက  က်မအတြက္အခြင့္အေရးတခုျဖစ္ခဲ့သည္။ကမၻာ၏တျခားဖက္ျခမ္းမွအာရွနိုုင္ငံငယ္ေလးတခုက အေမရိကႏွင့္ ဘယ္ေရြ႔ဘယ္မွ်ကြာျခားေၾကာင္းေျပာျပခြင့္ရခဲ့သည္။ မတူျခားနားေသာယဥ္ေက်းမႈမ်ားအတြင္းမွမတူျခားနား ေသာတန္ဖိုးမ်ားကိုေတြ႔ရွိခံစားႏုိင္ခဲ့ျခင္းႏွင့္ ထိုုမတူျခားနားမႈမ်ားအေၾကာင္းကို စာမ်ားမွတဆင့္ေ၀ငွႏုိင္ျခင္း ကက်မအတြက္ ေက်နပ္ဖြယ္ျဖစ္သည္။

ဆရာဦးမိုးဟိန္း ကြယ္လြန္ၿပီ ဆိုသည့္သတင္းကို ဖတ္လိုက္ရသည့္အခ်ိန္မွာ အိမ္တြင္ က်မ တေယာက္ထဲ ရွိေနသည္။ “ဟာ” ခနဲ ေရရြတ္မိသံက အိမ္ထဲမွာ ဟိန္းထြက္သြားၿပီး ကိုယ့္အသံကို ကိုယ့္ဘာသာျပန္လန္႔သြားသည္။ သတင္းကိုဖတ္ရင္း က်မ မ်က္စိထဲတြင္ အင္မတန္ ျဖဴစင္ေအးခ်မ္းေသာ ဆရာ့အျပံဳးေတြ၊ အလြန္႐ိုးသားယဥ္ေက်းေသာ ဆရာ့စကားသံေတြကို တသီတတန္းႀကီး ျမင္ေယာင္၊ ၾကားေယာင္လာသည္။ “ႏွေမ်ာလိုက္တာ၊ ႏွေမ်ာလိုက္တာ” ဟု က်မ တေယာက္ထဲ တတြတ္တြတ္ရြတ္ေနမိသည္။

                                                        photo by Wathan

ေသာၾကာတစ္ရက္ အျပင္မထြက္ပဲ
စေနညေနဖက္ ဟိုဟိုဒီဒီေလွ်ာက္ေတာ့
လမ္းထိပ္က ခ်ယ္ရီပင္ၾကီး ပင္လုံးကြၽတ္ပြင့္ေနပုံက
မ်က္လွည့္ျပသလို ျဗဳန္းကနဲ။
 

အဲဒီညေနမွာပဲ
အရြက္မျမင္ရေအာင္ပြင့္တဲ့
အမည္မသိ အျဖဴေရာင္ပန္းေတြရဲ့
အံ့မခန္းစုံညီမႈကို ေငးေမာခဲ့။
 

တနလ္ာမနက္ထင္ပါရဲ့
ငါေလွ်ာက္ခဲ့တာ ဒီလမ္းမွဟုတ္ရဲ့လား
အပြင့္မဲ့ပန္းမ်ားနဲ႕သစ္ပင္က
မွင္တက္ေဝဝါးေစျပန္တယ္။
 

ငါတို႕ေရာ...

ဘယ္ႏွစ္ၾကိမ္ျဗဳန္းကနဲ ပြင့္ခဲ့ၾကျပီးျပီလဲ
ဘယ္ႏွစ္ၾကိမ္ ဝုန္းကနဲေၾကြခဲ့ၾကျပီးျပီလဲ
ေနာက္ထပ္ဘယ္ႏွစ္ၾကိမ္.....
ဘယ္ေလာက္မ်ားမ်ား ထပ္ဖူးၾကဦးမွာလဲ။

                                                                                                    Photo by Wathan

                                                                                                 Illustrated by Wathan

 ဧၿပီလ ကုန္ေလာက္မွာ ကြ်န္မတို႔ေနတဲ့ လမ္းထဲမွာရွိတဲ့ Mattress Factory Museum က တာဝန္ရွိတဲ့ အမ်ိဳးသမီးတစ္ေယာက္ ကြ်န္မတို႔ အိမ္ကို ေရာက္လာပါတယ္။ ကြ်န္မရဲ႕ ပ႐ိုဂရမ္ ဒါ႐ိုက္တာ ကေနတစ္ဆင့္ ကြ်န္မခင္ပြန္းက ပန္းခ်ီဆရာ ဆိုတာ သိလို႔ပါတဲ့။ ကြ်န္မခင္ပြန္းရဲ႕ Artworksု ေတြကို ၾကည့္ခ်င္တယ္လို႔ ခြင့္ေတာင္း ပါတယ္။ တကယ္ေတာ့ ကြ်န္မတို႔ကလည္း ျမန္မာ လူမ်ိဳးပီပီ ကိုယ္လုပ္ခဲ့ သမွ် ဘာမွတ္တမ္းမွ ထားေလ့ မရွိေတာ့ ျပစရာ မ်ားမ်ားစားစား မရွိပါဘူး။ ကြ်န္မခင္ပြန္း သယ္ခဲ့တဲ့ သူ႔ရဲ႕ျပပြဲ ကတ္တေလာက္ တခ်ိဳ႕နဲ႔ သူ႔ပန္းခ်ီ ကားေတြကို ႐ိုက္ထားတဲ့ ဓာတ္ပံုတခ်ိဳ႕ကိုပဲ ျပရေတာ့ တာေပါ့။ ကြ်န္မက မိတ္ေဆြေတြ e-mail နဲ႔ ပို႔ထားတဲ့ သူ႔ရဲ႕ပါေဖာင္းမန္႔ျပပြဲ ေတြက ဓာတ္ပံုတခ်ိဳ႕ကို Print out ထုတ္ၿပီးျပဖို႔ စဥ္းစားေပမဲ့ အမ်ိဳးသမီးက ကြ်န္မခင္ပြန္း ဓာတ္ပံု႐ိုက္ယူလာတဲ့ သူ႔ရဲ႕ Installation Show က ဓာတ္ပံုတခ်ိဳ႕ကို အေတာ္စိတ္ဝင္ စားေနပါ ၿပီ။ ရွိစုမဲ့စုၾကည့္စရာ ေလးေတြ ၾကည့္ၿပီးသြားတာနဲ႔ ကက္သရင္း(Katharine)က ဒီလို ေျပာပါတယ္။ “Mattress Factory Museum မွာ ေမလနဲ႔ ဇြန္လအတြင္း အေမရိကန္အႏုပညာရွင္ ၁၈ ေယာက္ရဲ႕ အင္စေတာ္ေလးရွင္း အႏုပညာ ျပပြဲတစ္ခု လုပ္ဖို႔ ရွိပါတယ္။ အဲဒီပြဲမွာ ပူးေပါင္း ပါဝင္တင္ဆက္ဖို႔ ဖိတ္ေခၚပါတယ္” မတ္လမွာ အေမရိကေရာက္ၿပီး ဧၿပီလမွာ ျပပြဲလုပ္ဖို႔ ဖိတ္ေခၚခံရတဲ့အတြက္ ကြ်န္မတို႔ အံ့ဩဝမ္းသာခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။ အဲဒီေန႔ကစၿပီး ဘယ္လိုအင္စေတာ္ေလးရွင္းမ်ိဳးလုပ္ရင္ ေကာင္း မလဲဆိုၿပီး အျပင္းအထန္ စဥ္းစားရပါေတာ့တယ္။ အိုင္ဒီယာထုတ္႐ံုမက ကိုယ့္အိုင္ဒီယာ ထဲမွာ ျပမယ့္ ျပကြက္အတြက္ လိုအပ္တဲ့ပစၥည္း ရႏိုင္မရႏိုင္ပါ ထည့္စဥ္းစားရတာမို႔ ေတာ္ေတာ္ စဥ္းစားရက်ပ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ျပပြဲအတြက္ ေခါင္းထဲမွာ အလုပ္႐ႈပ္ေနၾကတဲ့ တစ္ရက္မွာပဲ ထိတ္လန္႔ စရာကိစၥတစ္ခုနဲ႔ ၾကံဳပါေတာ့တယ္။

 Pittsburgh Snow Brings Childhood Memories

                                                          Photos by Than Htay Maung


As it was too cold to settle into the night’s sleep, I reminisced about a poem by the celebrated poet, Kyi Aye about a girl who could not sleep. And I looked out of the window. Here and there was snow, and snow, and snow. Everything, all white with snow. The black-and-white landscape of the night made me feel more lonesome. And I retired to bed, my mind wandering through all places that I have known.
The sound—I heard it soon as my back touched the bedding—the sound of water flowing. It could not be rain; I had just looked out the window. And there was nothing in the bedroom to spill and flow. Considering all this, I could only make one conclusion: it came from inside of me!
The sound was not like the sounds from a pleasant creek, nor was it harsh like those from the angry sea. It was not as forceful as those from a waterfall, either.  Just rhythmic with sporadic rapidity as when a stream passes an eddy. Sometimes it hissed as if it passed over an obstacle.
Suddenly, I realized that it was the sound of the creek in the little village where I grew up. Then, I began to forget the discomforts of a sleepless night.
The current is a little high as the inlet departs from the sea. The impact from the sea makes the creek agitated. The creek, as if it were girl, will not be pleased with the intrusion of the outside current that crashes in without entreaty. Yet, the girl-creek has to give in. With rushing currents the girl-creek responds with harsh stamping. The foreign water flows in. Though it might have been resistant, the little creek begins to wear a smile. She knows that the handsome incoming water brings in good things for the people. The sweet-talking stranger makes enticing rhythms in the sound of waves.  And the girl-creek melts.  It is for the good of her friends, the people.




The incoming currents flow in some twigs, even some trunks of fallen trees. They are valued by villagers for making fire.  Men and women alike come in boats to fetch the floating wood. It usually is a happy occasion. They come in groups: families, youngsters, a mother and her son, or a father with his daughter, or even some in boats large enough to collect a handsome amount. The collected wood is good for the whole year for a family and even earns some surplus for sale.
There is another gift that the creek brings in. It is very attractive to children. Its shape is round and it is dark brown in color. It is the offspring of a certain mysterious tree, the shape or color of which is unknown to the villagers.  Nor do they know the region where is grows.  However, they make a wonderful missile ["doe" in Burmese] for children in their game of pitch.  Children fetch such fruits, called “gon-nyin,” fervently whether they are shrunken or sumptuous.  Then, they give their gathering to the elders.
The elders then crack the hard outer covering, mince the sharp-smelling seed inside it, and conserve it in sugar that is boiled to a thick consistency.  Though of baseless belief, it is said to do good for girls. Each of girl-visitor is given some “gon-nyin-yo,” the medicinal jam.  It is fondly shared among families with a number of women folks. Sometimes in summer, I would buy “gon-nyin-yo” from hawkers passing my house in the city.
I don’t know what good it does to girls, yet I eat it with yearning for the days past when children ardently collected them in boats.  In fact, whether it be medicinal or not, it does give us some refreshment of fond memories.  In that way it is a kind of medicine.




Together with twigs, wood, and “gon-nyin,” the currents of the rainy season bring chunks of crude oil. The crude oil can be seen from afar as it has an oily film floating around it on the surface of the water.
While boating for “gon-nyin,” we children take a break, tying our boat to a protruding tree branch on the river. Though our hands and bodies rest our eyes did not. Soon as we catch sight of something that could possibly be a chunk of crude oil, we call out that we were the ones who saw it first.
Because most of the inhabitants of our little village make their living in fishery, most of us own boats. We heat the oil chunks in an old pot when the rains come. We apply oil to the boats that brought the oil in.  Thus the boats become more durable and protected.  Some use the oil for their houses as well.
Houses with oil-coated wooden walls can stand strong weathering, the oil we feed to the walls prevents them from rotting in the rain. Because it is so important to protect the walls we feed them more oil and whatever is leftover is used to polish the floor.
We use rags in applying oil to the floor.  We soak one end of the rag with oil and cover it with the end that does not have oil. Then we rub it against the floor, over and over again until the floor becomes bright and shiny. Lying on the polished floor, we had wonderful time listening to stories told by Grandma. It was so delightful that I find myself unable to compare it to any other time in my life. Grandma tells stories until she had no more stories she could think of.  So we play telling Grandma’s stories to each other.
We children sometimes put characters of stories in wrong places.  The half-bird, half-human mythical heroine of the much-loved romance, “Dwe-me-naw“  became the legendary lady who bore many sons and daughters, “Shin-mway-lun.”  Mr. Tiger went with Mr. Rabbit into the forest to fetch thatching that happened to be on the grounds where Mr. Rabbit (another Mr. Rabbit) competed running with Mr. Tortoise in our re-told tales.  Our beloved Grandma, who fell asleep while telling stories, woke up and chuckled at our absurdity.  She corrected our mis-tellings.
Lying on the cool floor, I gaze at the moon hanging in the fork of the palm tree, and say: “How beautiful is the Moon, Grandma!” I say it on each and every night the moon is full.  And each time, Grandma raises her head abruptly and says: “Oh! It sure is.”
Young and callow as I was, I can only now appreciate the value: the values of the cool floor I loved lying on, the boating trip to collect the raw oil chunks that were heated and applied on the floor, the stories Grandma told, the beautiful odor of scented wood from Grandma, and the moon that Grandma raised her head to.
These romantic attributes of life are the underlying qualities that put us where we are today.
Now in Pittsburgh, I lie down on a spring mattress and I glimpse the snowy landscape from the nearby window.  I can feel tenderness and warmth when my feet touch the carpeted floor.  And the room is scented electronically with the smell of a certain flower I know well.



However….
Underneath is not the oil-polished floor that I used to love.
Nor is the Moon resting at the fork of the palm tree branches.
And no bedtime stories from Grandma.
None of the lovely aroma of “karamek” the scented wood Grandma used for cosmetics.
And…
No more was the “sound and blissful” sleep that I used to know…
…but had not learned to value…
…until now.

Translated by Tharr Tett Toe                                                                                 www.sampsoniaway.org

အံၾကိတ္အာခံေနမိတာက
ရက္စက္ေသာအေအးဒဏ္
ညိႈ႕ငင္ဖမ္းစားျခင္းခံေနရတာက
ကေဝဆန္ေသာႏွင္း။

ရင္သပ္႐ႈေမာဖြယ္အျဖဴထဲ
အဝါေလးဖ်တ္ကနဲခုန္အဆင္း
လွပ္ကနဲခံစားမႈနဲ႕ဖမ္းယူ
စိတ္လႈပ္ရွားသူတစ္ေယာက္ရဲ့အေတြး
အေရာင္ေႏြးေႏြးေတြဆီသြား
ႏွစ္ခ်ိဳက္စြာစားသုံးရန္။

သမုဒၵရာျပာျပာရဲ့တစ္ဖက္
အဝါသက္သက္ထဲမွာေပ်ာ္ဝင္ရစဥ္
ေကာင္းကင္ေပၚကေဝ့ဝဲက်လာတဲ့
ေအးျမမႈေတြထဲတိုးေဝွ႔
ေပ်ာ္ေမြ႕ရင္ခုန္စြာ
(အဲဒီတုန္းကေတာ့) ကိုယ္ကအျဖဴရွာသူ။

အျဖဴနဲ႕အဝါ
ေနေပ်ာ္ရာပေဟဠိ
ပုထုဇဥ္ပီပီ ညိွယူရမယ္ဆိုေတာ့လဲ
အသည္းႏွလုံးရွိရာမွာပဲေပ်ာ္မွာေပါ့။

ကိုယ့္ႏွလုံးသားဟာ
အျဖဴအဝါ  ကြဲျပားေနေပမယ္႕
ေႏွာင္ဖြဲ႕ေသာႀကိဳးမ်ားက ရွင္ကြဲခြဲ
ဦးတည္ရာေတြလြဲေခ်ာ္
နတ္ေဒဝတာမ်ားေသာ္မွ
အဲဒီလိုဘျပည့္ပါ့မလား။

ပစၥကၡမွာေတာ့
အသည္းႏွလုံးျပဳတ္က်ေပ်ာက္ဆုံးေနသူတစ္ေယာက္
အျဖဴထဲမွာေလ်ွာက္
အဝါေနာက္လိုက္ေနရင္း
ကိုယ္ေရာင္လင္းေသာ နတ္မင္းတစ္ပါးပါးနဲ႕
ခရီးသြားလမ္းၾကဳံေတြ႕
ကိုယ္စီေပ်ာ္ေမြ႕ေသာအေရာင္ေတြအေၾကာင္း
ႏွစ္ေထာင္းအားရစကားဖလွယ္ႏိုင္မယ္႕အခြင့္အေရး
ေတြးျပီးရင္းေတြးေနရဲ့။

   February 14, 2010

                                                                                        ဓါတ္ပံုကို အင္တာနက္ကယူပါသည္။

I was sitting on the sofa one Sunday morning when the phone rang. I didn’t want to get up. I just wanted to do nothing. I finally grabbed the phone, and it was Ko Kyaw Shwe, a friend also lives in Pittsburgh.“I’ve been so busy with my work and personal problems, that this is the first chance I’ve had to call,” he said.
His voice was indeed tired. I asked him whether he was sick; “Unhappy,” he said. “I had sent a video camera to Burma with a trustworthy person. My younger brother took the camera and shot video at a relative’s ahlu (a ceremony to collect offerings for monks). He was arrested because he didn’t have license to take video. Now he is in detention center!”
Oh my God! I thought. In Burma people even don’t have the freedom to take video at a relative’s ahlu? “Is the situation really that bad, Ko Kyaw Shwe?” My voice shook.
“I must tell you, it’s worse than that,” he voice was trembling, too. “My village in upper Burma has 70 or 80 houses. We typically plant bean and sesame, and after the harvest, we have ahlu. My small village used to busy the whole year. But now, the village is a ghost town. The farms have been seized; land owners are landless. My other younger brother is included in those who have had their land confiscated.
“As you know up-country is so hot you can’t farm after 10 a.m. People get up early and go to farm as early as 3 or 4 a.m. Before the sun becomes a torch at 9 or 10 a.m., the farmers come back home. At about 5 in the evening, when the heat relents, they go back and farm for another four or five hours, then call it a day…That’s how our lives have been forever.
“But these days, army units have been posted at villages. The Union Solidarity and Development Association’s Swan Arrshins (who are backed by the military government) harrass the villagers. Now, women who go to the fields early or come home late are raped. Rebellious men who respond back are reported or waylaid. The villagers don’t dare go to the fields. The village has become as a cemetery.”
I murmured “Oh God!” throughout the whole phone conversation. What was happening in Burma? People used to help others, and make friends so easily. The villages used to reverberate with the rhymes of saing (Burmese orchestra) and drums. Burmese used to say that blood is thicker than water, but now they are bullying each other, filing complaints against each other, becoming informants and sending their fellow villagers to jail.
Most Burmese are poor and uneducated. They don’t realize that the government is playing “divide and conquer.” In this situation, people are oppressed by government-created loathing and suspicion. If people are fighting among one another, they have no time to consider the issues facing the nation as a whole.
The inability to associate freely prevents people from looking at the real situation and agreeing on a response. People are adrift in a sea of trouble.
As I learn more about what’s happening in Burma, I yearn to change life for the people there, and end my pleasant, lazy Sundays here in Pittsburgh.

Translated by San San Tin