Travel Gems

In Yangon, the car horns never stop, the heat silently smothers your sanity, golden pagodas pierce the sky and if you don’t watch your step you will fall through the sidewalk. One night I played with street children.
On a concrete divider in the middle of downtown Yangon in between a late-night convenience store and the Shangri-La Hotel, barefoot Burmese children played with our cameras, cell phones, sketch pads, and pencils. One of us danced with them, tossing their tiny bodies around as they flung their heads back and cried with laughter.
They had gradually approached us as we sat down in a circle on the concrete ground. We were made up of tourists, expats, Burmese teens and artists. We had met that night to pass out food to the needy. After an hour of doing so we sat down to drink beers, smoke cigarettes and talk.
A tiny girl with dirty hair looked at me and motioned for food. I took her into the convenience store and told her to pick anything she wanted. She picked out a plastic bear filled with little chocolate balls. The cashier scolded her in Burmese.
A little boy of six held a sleeping baby as he sat cross-legged in the middle of the group, beaming at all of us.
Sometimes the rowdier ones played in traffic for more attention or because that’s what they always did.
When it was time to go we carefully slid out of their grasps and left them in the middle of the city in the middle of the night. They grinned and waved at us, knowing no other life.
These are the children my parents mentioned when I wasn’t eating my dinner. To be confronted by these children you’ve been raised to believe in is to split into two halves: one says you owe them everything! The other: you owe them nothing. And this repeatedly tears at you and you try to keep yourself together as you contemplate the injustice of the world and its echo in your heart.
And then you try to do something about it and you feel a sick pride forming in your gut. You push away at it like it’s a sick, demented animal that frightens you. And then you chide yourself for letting yourself think like that- for pretending you had any nobility- for believing, even for a moment that there was any nobility in the world. You feel foolish because even as you chide yourself, you know there’s still hope. There has to be.
So give your night, or day, or week to someone or something. Maybe you think I gave the wrong way. I hope you do it better. Gems are buried everywhere in Myanmar.