Unless you’ve experienced it, and seeing the pics is definitely not an alternative, the Burmese New Year ‘Water Festival’ or Thingyan is an absolutely crazy time when you have to submit body and soul, but especially body, to the combined equivalent effects of being hosed down at a student ‘demo’ and being in charge of thirty children at a ‘Club Med’ holiday in the Mediterranean wearing a tee-shirt saying ‘please throw a bucket of water over my head’.
Not to break the habit of a Myanmar lifetime this blog is now five weeks late and so, if there is an avid reader whose life feels empty without reading this, then I’m truly sorry for you.
Now, when it comes to heat I have several levels; factor 50 heat, flip-flop road-sticky heat, and when it’s just too hot to do anything but find somewhere air-conditioned for the day ‘heat’, but with the promise of re-hydrating with water or preferably beer in the evening. Unfortunately, air-conditioned inspired cool-breeze luxury is not available in the clinics where I work although, like my blog readers, there are a few faithful fans! Read more »
Although blogs have an unerring tendency to focus on the important, unusual, or amusing, it’s the everyday mundane ones that I probably will remember most fondly when I do eventually draw an unhappy line under this wonderful chapter of my never-ending career and move on to greener pastures. Read more »
A couple of noteworthy events (well to me anyway) happened very soon after I arrived in Yangon in the New Year. I failed to mention them in week 20 so forgive the chronologically chaotic order of this pot-pourri of memories that form the blogs. Read more »
The hardest thing about writing a blog is making oneself do it. I’ve now been in Myanmar 24 weeks but in the last ten months have managed only 19 blogs. Two have been lost in the ether of laziness or more truthfully, the fact that I’d exhausted my capacity to say anything newsworthy or entertaining, and a further three are waiting to be written, this being the first. If I had the capacity to think ahead, I would have taken on board the need to make hay when the sun shines – and its incessant now – which in my simplistic of minds can be translated into committing newsworthy items to the keyboard and pressing the ‘saved document’ icon before it disappears in my amyloid encrusted brain cells that diminish with each refreshing Myanmar beer. Read more »
Architect, Edward Dale-Harris reports on making Compressed Earth Blocks- a more sustainable option to bricks. Not only do they keep the room cooler, the emissions from brick making are extremely high. Compressed Earth blocks also have a quicker drying time, making them more efficient and they use readily available materials- rather than costly cement which might have to be transported from elsewhere.
Will this be a worthwhile technique to apply in the Green Shoots Agritech Centre? Read more »
I felt the biggest challenge on 10 November 2017 would be the smooth running of our fundraising event in Brixton- however, that was until I had to parallel park outside the venue!
A few months in planning, the fundraising event was to unveil the designs architect firm Squire & Partners had been working on for a brand new Agri-tech training Centre for Green Shoots in Cambodia. Read more »
I realise now that if you write a blog, you tend to gravitate to the same old topics which can be a tad tedious for readers but is comfortable home territory for the author who, if like me, starts and finishes penning these without any idea as to what he’s going to tap out on the keyboard. To assist me in this, I need the stimulant of a few espressos at the local coffee shop in the Myanmar Plaza. Avid readers will remember it is my go-to place for Western coffee and other delicacies. So, outside of doctoring, my comfort topics are undoubtedly accommodation, dress, and food, which, so as not to change the habit of 16 weeks, is where I start today. I am now happily ensconced in my third flat since first arriving nine months ago and, I have to say, this is the equivalent to a Mayfair penthouse by previous Myanmar standards.
Trifle late with the blogs so you, whoever you poor souls might be, have three to catch up on as quickly as I can write them. So here I am back in Yangon, refreshed after a 6-week break summer back home being a retired but not too inactive pensioner, returned, reinvigorated and ready for action, a phrase I realise suggests a place in the six-nations team or serving in Afghanistan, neither of which have ever been in my grasp or indeed dreams and are certainly not pencilled in on my bucket list. But back in the thick of things in the clinics (picture) I am and thoroughly enjoying the challenges again. Read more »
The week before I started repeatedly checking the weather forecast. Organising an outdoor event in October has its drawbacks- and on Thursday it went from being clear skies to overcast. Soon, rain was to follow. However, that was not going to come in the way of Green Shoots and Bandstand Beds joint fundraising picnic, A Taste of Asia on the Common, at the community run vegetable garden in South London. Read more »