CNN World's Untold Stories: The Forgotten People

Decades after Myanmar's (formerly Burma) military junta forced the Rohingyas into exile, their suffering still continues. Trapped in displacement camps, they survive on starvation rations in constant fear of abuse. "My people are rotting," despairs one refugee. The Bangladesh government classes the Rohingyas as illegal immigrants. According to the UNHCR, guards at the displacement camp are accused of forcing refugees into prostitution, extortion and stealing food. Thousands more live in slums along the Naj river without the basic protection of the U.N. "We survive by collecting leaves and boiling them," says one woman. "No-one cares about us."

Source: CNN website

Click here to watch Part 1

Click here to watch Part 2

CNN World's Untold Stories website

Poverty - Photo Essay by James Nachtwey

Darfur, 2004 - An internally displaced woman cared for her son, sick with hepatitis E at the city hospital in Mornei, West Darfur, which was refurbished and run by MSF France.
@ Picture by James Nachtwey


Photo Essay on Poverty by James Nachtwey, pls click:
Start Slide Show@www.viiphoto.com

Myanmar - Free Burma Rangers

Video from website: Free Burma Rangers


Flwg from BBC: Nurses on the Front Line:

Nurses On The Front Line follows a group of nurses into hostile territory – and lifts the lid on one of the world’s least reported conflicts


The Karen people of Eastern Burma have endured a 60 year old conflict with the country’s military government. The European Parliament has condemned the Burmese government’s activities as ‘ethnic cleansing’. But the conflict in the mountains of Eastern Burma the size of Switzerland between the army and the Karen Resistance has gone largely unreported by the world’s media. Under cover of dense jungle and airtight press restrictions, the military government has driven an estimated 150,000 thousand of Karen and their ethnic cousins the Karenni into neighbouring Thailand. Those unwilling or unable to leave are ‘internally displaced’ – scattered through the forest, tormented by landmines and malaria.

But the Karen have not been wholly abandoned. A band of medics and aid workers– the Free Burma Rangers – deliver basic health care to Karen and Karenni civilians. Many of the Rangers are Karen themselves, trained by outfits such as Medcins sans Frontieres and American medical experts. All are volunteers, seeking a way to help their embattled people. Some have been inspirted to lend their support by bitter personal experience. An example is 34-year-old Paw Htoo – one of the nurses featured in the first programme. Thai-trained Htoo told us she joined the Rangers when government soldiers murdered her husband. But the FBR – funded by churches and private individuals – also includes foreign volunteers from the US and elsewhere.

Over four years our ….On the Front Line filmmakers went on four mercy missions with the Free Burma Rangers. In the two films we see the nurses delivering medical aid in the heart of the war zone. Theirs is not a military operation. Their purpose is simply to deliver medical care and humanitarian aid to beleaguered Karen communities. But with the forest riddled with mines and Burmese soldiers, they are every bit as dangerous as any armed incursion and secrecy on locations and even of the precise composition of the FBR missions was a condition of the filming. Such is the concern, even our crew cannot be identified in the programmes or the credits.

In the first film, going back to the very first filming mission, the Rangers establish a makeshift treatment centre deep in hostile territory. They do not lack for patients – typhoid, diarrhoea, dengue fever and malaria are rife in the region. Then they get an emergency call – a young man has stepped on a mine. The Rangers amputate, but are unable to prevent infection from setting in. The victim is distraught, knowing that for the rest of his life he’ll be a burden instead of a help to his family. “When it happened I asked the others to shoot me,” he said. “Now no one can do anything for me. From now on I won’t be able to do anything”.

The second programme follows Maw Naw, a recent recruit to the Free Burma Rangers. He finds more evidence of the army’s campaign to demoralise the Karen and depopulate their mountain homelands: a burned-out village. The Rangers can’t be everywhere at once. In their absence the villagers must be their own doctors. Maw Naw meets a man who claims to performed amputations on seven land mine victims – without anaesthetic and using a small pocket-knife. Incredibly, he says all his patients survived.

In another part of the forest, Maw Naw and the filmmakers witness the evacuation of a village. A Burmese Army patrol is spotted and the villagers flee their huts for the forest. The exodus is eerily calm – this is nothing new for the Karen. Indeed they say this is the third time in a year that they have had to leave their homes. Other refugees tell harrowing tales of forced labour, nocturnal attacks and rape.

The film ends with Mwa Naw and the crew witnessing a brief gunfight between Burma Army and Karen guerrillas. This time, all of the Karen fighters return. But their numbers are rapidly dwindling – as is Karen resistance as a whole. The Free Burma Rangers are doing their best – they estimate they have treated some 300,000 people and delivered humanitarian aid to twice that number. But many believe that without further outside assistance the Karen will follow several of Burma’s other minority groups into oblivion.


More info: BBC World

peeling onion

Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way.

When pestered with questions, memory is like an onion that wishes to be peeled so we can read what is laid bare letter by letter. It is seldom unambiguous and often in mirror-writing or otherwise disguised.

Beneath its dry and crackly outer skin we find another, more moist layer, that once detached, reveals a third, beneath which a fourth and fifth wait whispering. And each skin sweats words too long muffled, and curlicue signs, as if a mystery-monger from an early age, while the onion was still germinating, had decided to encode himself.

Then ambition raises its head: this scrawl must be deciphered, that code cracked. What currently insists on truth is disproved, because Lie or her younger sister, Deception, often hands over only the most acceptable part of a memory, the part that sounds plausible on paper, and vaunts details to be as precise as a photograph: The tarpaper roof of the shed behind our building shimmered in the July heat and in the still air smelled of malt lozenges ...

The onion has many skins. A multitude of skins. Peeled, it renews itself; chopped, it brings tears; only during peeling does it speak the truth. What happened before and after the end of my childhood knocks at the door with facts and went worse than wished for and demands to be told now this way, now that, and leads to tall tales.


Peeling the Onion by Gunter Grass




Picture by dineanddish @ Flickr.com

great understanding

"Great understanding is broad and unhurried;
Shallow understanding is cramped and busy."


Chuang Tzu



Picture by rovinglight@flickr.com

James Nachtwey - TED Prize Winner 2007

Trailer from the film "War Photographer"

For the past three decades, James Nachtwey has devoted himself to documenting wars, conflicts and critical social issues, working in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, Israel, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, South Africa, Russia, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Romania, Brazil and the United States.

Nachtwey has been a contract photographer with Time since 1984. However, when certain stories he wanted to cover -- such as Romanian orphanages and famine in Somalia -- garnered no interest from magazines, he self-financed trips there. He is known for getting up close to his subjects, or as he says, "in the same intimate space that the subjects inhabit," and he passes that sense of closeness on to the viewer.

In putting himself in the middle of conflict, his intention is to record the truth, to document the struggles of humanity, and with this, to wake people up and stir them to action.


Listen to a powerful talk by James Nachtwey as he shares with the world about his decades as a war photographyer.
Click: James Nachtwey @ www.ted.com

Photo Essay by James Nachtwey@Time.com

Inspired Talks by World's Greatest Thinkers n Doers

James Nachtwey's HomePage

DVD - War Photographer @ Amazon.com

"Inferno", Photo Book by James Nachtwey @ Amazon.com

""I have been a witness, and these pictures are

my testimony. The events I have recorded should

not be forgotten and must not be repeated."

-James Nachtwey-

the surrealist

"Alone, the Surrealist wanders the streets without destination but with a premeditated alertness for the unexpected detail that will release a marvelous and compelling reality just beneath the banal surface of ordinary experience."


peter galassi





Pic by mandalaybus@Flickr

Zen No Sho

Llyoyd Nick in the Foreword to Zen No Sho:

"The mind of pure spirit flows through the ink onto the pressed rice paper stretched on the floor, quietly forming the leaves of the table of Moses, the vast hidden encyclopedia of insight, the notes of transcendent symphony. All to instruct us to a quieter and higher place.

When the last stroke is complete and spoken, a breath of air leaves like the soul leaving at the time of expiring. It has spoken, has been created, has left its mark. We have received the wisdom of the ages, the word of our own god, the sound of our inner being. For a split second, we are in tune with the universe. The image travels through the limits of our universe in our mind and into our limitless unconsciousness. Knowledge, sacred and profound, pure and mystical, pierces us like the arrow of Theresa of Avila. We have just experienced the joy of life's ode and the unveiling of its glorious and benevolent secrets."


Zen No Sho

unmoved

Picture: Wat Arunratchawararam or Temple of the Dawn, Bangkok @ www.sacred-destinations.com



When all is whirling around you,
there is one that stands unmoved.


aml2007

is there room in yr mind?

Once, there was a young monk who was very anxious to become enlightened.
He studied and practised relentlessly in a number of monasteries for many years.
His mind was full of desire to be enlightened, full of the methods he had learned, and full of anxiety.
After visiting many monasteries, he was told of a very wise and accomplished old monk, who was highly respected by all who knew him.
So the young monk went to stay with the old monk, hoping to learn from him the correct and the fast way to enlightenment.
He imitated the old monk in every possible aspect. But after three years, nothing happened.
Then, one day, the young monk learned that the old monk was gravely ill and probably would die.
The young monk became very upset and thought, "I have spent three years here and he hasn't taught me any way to reach enlightenment. If he dies, how will I find anyone to teach me?"
So the young monk went to the master with a knife. He pointed the knife at the old monk, who lay seriously ill on his mat.
The young monk said to him, "Reverend master, for three years I have served you, hoping you would tell me the way to enlightenment, but you have not done so. Now you are very ill and this is probably my last chance. You must tell me the way to enlightenment now, or I will kill you."
The old monk looked at the young one and sighed, "My dear brother, even if I have something to teach you, where is the room in your mind to receive it?"


Teachings of Dr C. T. Shen, Chuang Yen Monastery

after the rain

"The period of greatest gain in knowledge and experience is the most difficult period in one's life."

HH The Dalai Lama



Pic: Aizu Wakamatsu stands tall with a rare circle rainbow overhead, taken on 1JUN07 by grinchwsig@flickr.com

real wisdom

Those who possess real wisdom seldom speak, for language invariably misrepresents "truth", while those who only pretend to wisdom are quick to proclaim it to others. Wisdom consists in knowing when to speak and when to keep silent, when to elaborate and when to be brief.




Notes to The Dhammapada, Glenn Wallis


The Dhammapada, translated by Glenn Wallis

The Gethsemani Encounter

A dialogue on the Spiritual Life by Buddhist and Christian Monastics, Spring 1996

HH Dalai Lama in his tribute to Thomas Merton:
"As for myself, I always consider myself as one of his (Merton) Buddhist brothers. Since my meeting with him (in 1968), so often when I examine myself, I really follow some of this examples. And so for the rest of my life, the impact of meeting him will remain until my last breath."

Final Reflections by Diana Eck:
"The diversity of streams of traditions, the richness of traditions that has flowed from these two teaching sources - Buddhism and Christianity - present us with many varieties of monastic life. We see here that they are really living traditions. Thomas Merton wrote: Living is not thinking but the constant adjustment of thought to life, life to thought, in such a way that we are always growing, always experiencing new things in the old, old things in new. Life is always new."


The Gethsemani Encounter @ Amazon.com

HH Dalai Lama visits Gethsemani

Merton & Buddhism: Realizing the Self (New Book @ Amazon.com)

mindful living in silence

If you are able to breathe and smile when your sister says something unkind,
that is the beginning of love.

You do not have to go some place else to serve. You can serve right where you are
by practising meditation and smiling.

We want to go out and share what we have learned.
But if you do not practise mindful breathing to untie the knots of pain in ourselves -
the knots of anger, sadness, jealousy and irritation -
what can we teach others?

We must understand and practise the teachings in our DAILY lives.



Thich Nhat Hanh

and so what do we learn?

Sometimes we laugh,
Sometimes we cry,
Sometimes we fall.

I don't know where you are,
or how you got so far from me.
Coz people make mistakes
Sure, it makes your heart break.

There is nothing left to say,
No promises to fake,
We all make mistakes,
People make mistakes.


Source: Lyrics from ZenCast

frame of reference

What is your frame of reference?



Pic by Ctd 2005 @ Flickr

the Highest Relinquishment

seclusion... dispassion... cessation... relinquishment...


The highest relinquishment: the knowing, but not holding...



Wings of Awakening,
Thanissaro Bhikkhu

pic@aml2007

Free Aung San Suu Kyi!!

Free Aung San Suu Kyi

Latest News: BBC News on Aung San Suu Kyi

flow

“Calligraphy is indeed a painting of the mind:
the degree of enlightenment is expressed in the flow of ink.”


John Stevens - Sacred Calligraphy of the East


Picture: All Rights Reserved pic@aml2007

mind n brush

Kokoro tadashikereba sunawachi fude tadashi--

"If your mind is correct, the brush will be correct."



Zen Master Fukushima Keido@Hendrix College 2001