Category: Ed Wilkins’ Blog
-
This is the cheeky sequel of a two-episode series, the first being week 30, which in turn was a sly follow-on to week 29 – so for anyone with sufficient stamina and a home coffee-machine to stave off stupor, they must be read in order! So after knocking off five of my dirty dozen Yangon…
-
First up in the inaugural picture blog is thanaka. This an ochre coloured bark-paste which adorns so many of the Burmese faces and is always applied to the cheeks and quite often to the rest of the face, sometimes patterned (occasionally to a level any modern art critic would admire). You see it everywhere –…
-
Pondering as I tend to when faced with a blank page and looking for the inspirational heavenly thunderbolt to strike and get me past ‘Go’ (not helped by a yet-to-be caffeinated brain), I had one of those visionary moments. Indeed, I’m not certain why I didn’t think of it before especially as I’m a fair…
-
Blogs can easily become a process of self-indulgent navel-gazing, embellished without contradiction and, like the Christmas letter from the hedge-fund managing cousin with her Cambridge-destined children, full of successes achieved against tremendous odds. A sort of blog-heroine that only the writer ever reads and where most others get numbed by the serial drivel which alas…
-
There are many things that slip me by and snakes in the grass is one of them, mainly because except for the not-so-scary adder they don’t present a major public health hazard in the UK. Certainly, as far as I can remember how to deal with a green mamba snakebite is not part of the…
-
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…
-
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. And if anyone thinks they have missed a critical couple of weeks, I can reassure you that in…
-
A couple of noteworthy events (well to me anyway) happened very soon after I arrived in the New Year. I failed to mention them in week 20 so forgive the chronologically chaotic order of these pot-pourri of memories that form these blogs. Anyway, no sooner had I arrived and made my way to what is…
-
The hardest thing about writing a blog is making yourself 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,…
-
Time for a bit of history about MAM. Started by a husband-wife doctoring team (Frank Smithuis formerly of MSF and Ni Ni Tun) (right) nearly a decade ago when they took over a closing MSF facility in a desperately poor part of Yangon, it has grown despite numerous obstacles into a slick organisation fulfilling its…