CERS ANIMATIONS
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A Visit to Laya, Bhutan
After a very long lockdown of about three years, Howman Wong and Berry Sin were finally in Bhutan. However, as I lay awake in my sleeping bag listening to the rain pummeling the thin roof of the government guesthouse assigned to us for the evening, I became worried. Not about the floods that had recently swept away the famous Gasa hot springs, just a few metres below where we slept, but about the somewhat arduous hike that awaited us tomorrow.
NAMSEYLING PALACE & HER MAJESTY THE ROYAL GRANDMOTHER OF BHUTAN
My caution and hesitation now seem premature and unfounded. When first asked to use Namseyling Palace, once home to the late mother of the 92-years-old Royal Grandmother of Bhutan, I had reservations and doubts, feeling underserving. “I hope you will like Namseyling,” Her Majesty told me several times. At first, I wondered if I had heard Her Majesty’s message correctly. After all, she always speaks with such a soft and tender voice. It is like whispering into one’s ears.
FIELD REPORT
China Exploration & Research Society
POST-PANDEMIC & POST-COUP MYANMAR RANTING
“If you cannot change the situation, change your attitude.” That’s something I have shared with students many times before. So here I am, back in Mandalay, where CERS has our boat and houses. Sanctions? That’s a game the big guys play on the little kids. Remember Theodore Roosevelt; “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” his oft-repeated foreign policy message. And that remark is now over a hundred years old, and repeatedly acted upon, though not always successful anymore.
Kids are still kids here, playing after school into the evening, even into the darkness of night when supply of electricity is at times sporadic with blackouts. Our village, Thapatetann, is a weaving and pottery village at a confluence with the Irrawaddy. The weaving machines are running its “clicking clicking” sound all day, the potter’s wheels are still turning. Autumn dragonflies flapping their wings and little squirrels bounce among late season mango fruits on the tree. But intellectuals and educated people, or those pretending to be so, are angry and troubled. Angry with both nature and humankind, angry that Covid should descend upon us and troubled by an untimely military coup.