Some pictures from December excursions

Here are some pictures taken when we visited several villages mid-December. The Burrs who supervise us in Hong Kong were here and were seeing first hand some of the projects. All three couples and them went. We traveled by van, boat, and jeeps to reach one site.!! One of the places we visited was south of Yangon and near the Andaman Sea. We saw the damage the tsunami had done there, walked out on a pier to a pagoda that once was part of the village but now is almost in the sea. A delicacy of the people is dried fish, which is being done here.

After walking out to a site, we came back and were given coconuts to drink the milk from.!

A classroom. Children sit on benches. Teachers have a blackboard. Not much else. They are taught to read and write English --- copy it, but don't have much understanding of it.

We were presented with a whole branch of red bananas --supposedly the most tasty. It took 10 days for them to ripen enough to eat them. And they are good!

There's usually some kind of formal ceremony before the water is turned on and here there are three of us cutting the ribbons. And then the water is turned on.

These people were waiting for the water to be turned on. We were a bit concerned about the kind of buckets they were using. Some were old paint cans. But the electricity was off (something that happens quite often) so here we weren't able to see the water turned on.

These boys were waiting for their turn to get a school kit. The majority of the children have this white "stuff" on their faces. It is made from the bark of a tree and we are told it is a mild cooling astringent that protects from the sun. I think they have fun putting it on.

It was a fun experience.

We went out to several villages the middle of December to inspect and open some water projects. While there we presented school kits to about 50 children who had been selected by their teachers as achieving excellence. All school children wear white tops and green skirts or longyis.

On Christmas day after Sacrament meeting we had a fried noodle lunch and then went in buses to a Catholic run Old Folks Home. About forty members and friends went and we sang four carols in four different rooms. In one of the rooms after we were done two men stood and sang a song to us. Good experience. Afterwards we went back to the church and had ice cream. A very different Christmas for us but we surely felt the spirit.

On Christmas day we met at the church for an enactment of the nativity story. We probably had more participants than observers but it was very nice. Mary and Joseph (their English names as well as the parts they took had their first child in October. It was fun to watch them enact the parts of the angels, shepherds, wise men.