Yenangyaung 1

We travel deep into the Burman heartland, to Yenangyong, a small town hugging either side of a strip of rural highway: unpaved, packed dirt, with steady traffic carts, horses, ragged trucks, constant dust, and numberless stray dogs. 

We are welcomed warmly by local friends and relations, and that evening, the tent goes up outside their old shop and home, blocking part of the highway.  Through that tent will pass the Buddhist monks of the town's several monasteries: a donation of food.  The family prepares rice and coffee, pickles and sweets: enough to feed eight hundred.  A band from a neighboring town has been hired to play.

Early the next morning, not quite four a.m., the donation begins.  The tent is brightly lit, roped with colored lights, but the rest of the street is dark - dark and still. 

Out from that dark, the monks begin to come.  Lining up in the unseen distance, wearing their dark saffron robes, silent, faces held in practiced neutrality, but individual personalities still showing.

They come nearer, and the hired band begins to play: gongs and reeded instruments, drums and singers - a woman and a girl.  The beautiful, lurching, loud music of traditional Burma, with it's rhythm of ebb --- rush --- ebb --- rush --- ebb --- crash, each rush filled with its own internal rhythm.  The woman and girl wail, each song telling a sad song of love.

The first great vat of rice is uncovered, heaved by three men onto the stand, and the elder relations pair off at each station, beginning with the rice.  One scoops the rice with a special wooden measure - used only for this kind of donation - and another takes each monk's alms bowl, holds it out to receive the measure of rice, shakes the bowl to even the rice, and hands it back to the monk.  And then the next, and the next.  Another relation cries out "Welcome; It's a blessing!" to each monk; and another keeps count of how many monks have been served.  Further down the line, under the tent, more relations hand out the smaller items of food, placing them on the now-covered alms bowls of rice.  Some are too old and frail to hold their bowl, so another monk carries his and his own both. 

The line moves forward, and moves on.  One sees a small group of senior monks, abbots holding black fans indicating rank, on the opposite road, somehow coordinating the line, or perhaps only observing.  I cannot tell.  Later they will be invited into the donors' home to pray, intercede for the stroke-ridden uncle within, and eat a more elaborate meal.

Standing apart, senior nuns, heads shaved in the same manner as the monk in their pink and orange robes.  When the last of the hundreds of monks, stragglers now, has gone, the nuns begin their line, keeping five monks' space between the first of the nuns and the last, tardy monk.  It is almost six.

The nuns, like the monks, are mostly between five years old and perhaps thirty.  I am told they are, with few exceptions, orphans or from parents who could not feed them.  They are the sanctified poor, the least made holy, sheltered in monasteries, clothed in robes, fed by donation, educated through charity.  Most will leave their religious orders eventually to work or marry.  A few will remain to serve in monastic duties, and die penniless but revered.

The nuns today are fewer in number, and not quite two hundred will eventually come.  They receive the same measure as the monks.  What is left for the light of day will be given to the beggars, who already squat with their children, up on a small hill, waiting and watching.

I walk down the dark street and find that the monks' and nuns' line assembles not far away from the tent - not far into the darkness.

There, the nuns queue.  Towards the rear, a very young nun, perhaps not even five, breaks suddenly from the pack and lunges into the street, menaced by a stray dog almost as tall as she.  The dogs' teeth are bared, inches from her own face, and she forgets everything else, but turns to face a truck, loaded with lumber, bearing down on her, close, fast, its headlights showing her face, eyes and mouth all open in wide terror, legs frozen with fear, the dog still hard upon her.

My throat constricts and my legs tense to run.  But already an older nun has swooped in, grips the girl's shoulder, and heaves her back to safety, where she folds the frightened girl into her own robes, comforting and shielding her.  It all happens in two or three seconds.  The dust thrown up by the passing truck settles.

I weep.  They move on, up towards the donation tent.  A dog, a truck, and an orphan child, threatened and rescued.  Dogs; trucks: all that menaces in animal nature and in the world of humankind bore down on her, the nightmares of children made actual.  And just as suddenly she is saved and comforted.  May she be kept so.