Former Rangoon University -- literally falling apart --

Those who destroy higher education destroy themselves.

http://moemaka.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3128&Itemid=1


How bloody awful -- talk about the destruction of higher education in Burma.

These pictures say it all, don't they.

I'm so glad at least I can see Chiangmai University in Northern Thailand about twice a year in its teak forest and with flowering trees depending on the season.

Last year I saw a beautiful ngu zat (pink cassia).

My friends Kyaw Aung Lwin and Kaythwe Khine started Moe Ma Kha (Don't kowtow to the sky), then went on to work in international radio.

Kyaw Aung Lwin is the excellent poet Maru. But they only appear once a year. I'm still using lunch box she gave me last summer, to pack chinpaun (fried rosselle leaves) in. This was before my old frig was replaced, so sea food I bought at waterfront went bad.

I translated a poem of the late Naing Win Swe that features the Moe Ma Kha plant(sort of a water weed in Moeii or Thaung Yin River).

Naing Win Swe was a communist in the jungle and his poem is about how the revolutionaries tortured each other, (near) drowning each other in the river as punishment -- a sort of water boarding -- it was the first poem I broadcast in 1997, and won me an immediate poetry audience inside Burma.

Yesterday I went to see Defiance, about Polish Jews hiding in forest, staring Daniel Craig and another actor, who were both speaking Polish sometimes in the movie, maybe not that well, my Polish is not good enough for me to tell, but his "Polish accented" English sounded very real.

I was in Poland in 1969-70 for eight months, mostly over the winter. Spring barely started in May.

Copyright Kyi May Kaung