Suffering

(Burma 6:00 – promoted by buhdydharma )

I have been trying to stay current with what is going on in Burma.  That isn’t easy, of course, because of the difficulty of getting stories out of the country.  If caught trying to cover what’s going on, journalists can expect the same harsh treatment from the junta as any Burmese citizen.  But still, stories emerge.

One of these stories is posted in ABITSU, All Burma I.T. Students Union.  It is about a 15 year old novice monk who is in hiding from the junta.

By timesofinda.indiatimes.com : YANGON: Just two weeks ago, Yin Phoe Htoo’s life was governed by the austere but peaceful routines of the Yangon monastery where he has spent the past five years as a novice monk.Every morning, the 15-year-old would wake up at 4:00 am, eat breakfast at dawn, and then walk through the community in his saffron robes to accept alms from residents.

But since Myanmar’s deadly crackdown on pro-democracy protests that saw Buddhist monks lead 100,000 people onto the streets, Yin Phoe Htoo now lives in hiding at one of the homes where he used to seek alms of food or small coins.

He has shed his flowing robes for a T-shirt and the traditional lungi that most men in Myanmar wear.

“I want to become a novice again. I feel uncomfortable living with the family here,” he said, giving a false name to protect himself from military reprisal.

For now he has little choice but to hide. At least three monks were killed and hundreds more were beaten or arrested as security forces used baton charges, teargas and live weapons fire to break up the monks’ peaceful protests.

jamesboyce over at Daily Kos has written a diary today with a disturbing story out of Burma, from the Sunday Times Online, entitled “Secret cremations hide Burma killings:”

THE Burmese army has burnt an undetermined number of bodies at a crematorium sealed off by armed guards northeast of Rangoon over the past seven days, ensuring that the exact death toll in the recent pro-democracy protests will never be known.

The secret cremations have been reported by local people who have seen olive green trucks covered with tarpaulins rumbling through the area at night and watched smoke rising continuously from the furnace chimneys.

jamesboyce has also set up a blog entitled burma newsladder, trying to aggregate all stories on what is going on there.

But let’s go back to Yin Phoe Htoo, the 15 year old novice monk.  One person, one story.

“For many of us, especially the women, our hearts broke because we could not protect the monks. The armed forces were stronger than us,” one 57-year-old in the community said.

“Monks from Ngwekyaryan are very respected in our community. They used to offer free tuition every year for our children,” he added.

Yin Phoe Htoo has not suffered directly from any attacks but the presiding monk from his monastery has ordered all his novices to hide in residents’ homes or to flee to their home towns.

The woman sheltering Yin Phoe Htoo said she feared the novices would be arrested if they tried to return to their villages, saying she would rather care for them herself.

“I heard some monks were arrested on the way to their villages. I worry for these young novices, and no one can guarantee their wellbeing,” she said.

…

Despite his life of fear and hiding, Yin Phoe Htoo said he had no regrets about the protests that defied the military regime with simple prayers and chanting.

“The monks who led the protests strove for people. When I grow up, I will do the same. Our leading monks risked their lives to stand up for the people,” he said.

I’ve probably excerpted too much of this story, but I think it is important.  It’s so easy when we hear of tragedies, whether they be here in America (New Orleans) or far away (Darfur), to have a hard time wrapping our minds and hearts around such suffering, and unfortunately it is all too easy to immerse ourselves in this suffering for a day or even a week and then it fades, it fades away in the face of some new suffering or some new joy, always changing.

Yin Phoe Htoo is a 15 year old, he wants to get back to his life as a novice monk.  He wants to continue to help people, not have to be protected by those whom he has always served.  The communities who benefit from the monasteries only want their monks to be safe and to be allowed to continue to serve those communities.

Not so exotic, not so hard to understand, even as the mores and culture of these communities may seem exotic and unusual to us.

Suffering.  We can look at large numbers of casualties, deaths of human beings everywhere from Darfur to Iraq to Burma to New York City and New Orleans.  We can look at mass suffering and be overwhelmed by it.

Or we can look at an individual, someone perhaps we would like as a friend, who seems very interesting, who we’d like to speak with and exchange stories.  And then the place where the suffering occurred becomes secondary to the humanity of the one who has suffered.  The numbers who have suffered become less overwhelming than the sadness in our hearts towards a fellow human being — he might be me!  I might be him!  A connection is formed in the heart.

I have read of folks getting angry and getting into comparative suffering — how DARE you write about this suffering when that suffering is so much greater!

And of course you can get into that mind-set, it’s not hard to do.  It then becomes sort of a triage of humanity, though, and I have yet to be able to perform that in my heart.  So I get overwhelmed, sure, but I begin to see the connections in the suffering of human beings, begin to see the overriding injustices that in so many ways contribute to suffering in extremely disparate situations, from here in the US where we have so much freedom, so much comfort, yet allow fear and suspicion to keep us from outright opposition of our present regime, to Burma, where there is no freedom at all, yet they marched in opposition, and were cut down, and now a 15 year old has to hide, he doesn’t want to hide, he wants to help.  And yet he hides.

Social justice is a stodgy term, I think.  Perhaps it should be changed to Protecting Our Humanity, against fear and hatred and greed.  Perhaps then when we think of a 15 year old monk in Burma we are also thinking of a 15 year old boy in Darfur, a 15 year old girl in Iraq, a 15 year old girl in New Orleans living in a FEMA trailer, our children, all of them, we will make the human connection, we will keep them in mind for more than a news cycle.