'Why are you here? The Great Lady told you not to come, so why are you here?"
This question was asked of us by a venerable Buddhist monk from the Jumping Cat Monastery at Inle Lake, Burma (also known now as Myanmar). He couldn't understand why tourists had ignored the pleas of Aung San Suu Kyi, the country's incarcerated, democratic leader, for westerners not to help prop up the military regime with tourist dollars. Instead, here we were -- professors, families, students and staff from an American cruiseship -- happily snapping away for our holiday albums.
At the Jumping Cat Monastery, enticing a cat to jump through a 30-centimetre hoop is no mean feat. I managed to copy the monks' technique as they unceremoniously deposited the cats in front of hoops, tickling their chins to tempt them through. They had originally trained one pair of wild cats, and now the animals' prolific offspring performs daily for gawking groups of tourists.
Buddhist monks here rely on donations to sustain their lifestyle but, apparently, don't balk at questioning donors about their political ethics. Last September, when poverty reached an all-time high in Burma, the monks' humanitarian spirit finally overcame their peaceable religious precepts when they led an unsuccessful uprising against the government.
A year before the uprising, my family and I were travelling around the world with the four-month Semester At Sea university program. We had taken our two sons, Rupert, 14, and Fergus, 11, out of school in Canada to expose them to inequities but also the beauty of other cultures.
Burma was our most politically unstable port of call, with its history of human rights abuses, a dictatorial military junta in power and the Nobel Peace Prize-winning leader, the "Great Lady," under house arrest.
The ethical dilemma -- to go or not to go -- had perplexed the faculty and students on the MV Explorer as we debated our way toward Burma.
World leaders and celebrity activists have counselled tourists against visiting this former British colony. So, what were 1,000 democratically inclined professors, staff and students doing snapping away at idyllic panoramas and exotic pagodas, in a police state where just talking politics could get whole families jailed?
We saw little evidence of the militia's stronghold during our sojourn in the pastoral paradise of Inle Lake, although we did have a four-man armed escort to get there. Soldiers pointed guns out of car windows, gesturing all humbler traffic, including oxen, out of the way on our VIP procession to the lakeshore.
Smog made the lake ethereally misty, an unfortunate byproduct of the slash-and-burn farming visible throughout the hillsides.
With wages often just a dollar a day, sweatshops are prominent at Inle Lake. It's a lucrative centre for silk and lotus weaving, which was invented here 90 years ago to provide ceremonial robes for monks. It involves a painstaking manual separation of every filament of a lotus stem, then complicated entwining and weaving to make stiff, linen-like cloth.
Probably the most positive contribution we made to the community was donating US$300 to Mine Thauk Village Orphanage School. That will hopefully make a difference to the 40 students, aged five to 17. Some had parents in distant villages who, not being able to afford to educate their children, sent them to the primitive boarding school where they live in close-packed dormitories and see them just once a year.
The school, built by European businessmen, is funded by private donations. Semester At Sea had visited twice before, helping to provide solar power, television and video games.
Houses at Inle Lake are rickety structures on stilts, with rudimentary electricity, subject to daily power outages, and ancient television sets showing government channels via huge satellite dishes.
Sparse furniture adorns these simple abodes, but the are relatively clean and cool, even in the sweltering afternoon humidity. The "kitchens" are primitive ranges created from earthenware pots over open fires. Beds are motley covers on the wooden floors plus a few hammocks without mosquito nets. The hole-in-the-floor toilets empty directly into the lake, which also serves as bath, laundry and pool for both kids and livestock. Floating vegetable and flower gardens cover the lake around each of the 50 villages at Inle. Crops for subsistence and market grow on innovative man-made islands created from weeds and mud, staked to the lake bed with immense staves of bamboo.
On our last day in Burma we toured the ludicrously cheap Scott Market. Street kids, scantily clad and painfully thin, followed us. We discovered later they had been ousted from makeshift homes at the train station.
Were these rural and commercial communities carrying on their age-old pursuits oblivious to politics, exploiting tourism opportunities in their black market economy?
"We all ignore politics," one local said. "It is nothing to do with us. We live our lives, just getting on with everything."
We may never know whether our tourist dollars supported the totalitarian regime. But I felt the people we met were happy we were there -- for material gain and for entertainment.
So, was the perfection of our guided tour of idyllic Inle and the city of Yangon contrived? We can only suspect people were jumping through hoops just like the cats for our benefit.
-- CanWest News Service
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