"Meditation" and Food Donation

        Today, I had another field program called “Meditation and Food Donation.”    The bus ride was an hour long, so our tour guide shared some information with us.  First, gasoline used to be 500 kyat a gallon, which is less than 1 dollar, until the military government took over.  They raised the prices to 4500 kyat a gallon, which is equivalent to about $5.50.  The prices have fallen a lot recently, to about a dollar a gallon. 

          He also told us a story about Lady Aung San Su Ji, who was held under house arrest by the military for 18 years.  For four of those years, she saw no one.  They did this because she was supposed to become the President of Myanmar.  The generals went to a monk and asked him to tell them who would lead the country in the future, but the monk did not have the right to do so.  Instead, the monk blessed some water and told the generals that whoever they saw in it would be the future president.  The first general looked, but was not happy.  The other generals looked, and they, too, were unhappy.  They then locked up the Lady, because it was she that they had seen in the water.

          We arrived at the Meditation center and were showed around.  The group of us was anticipating that we would get to meditate with the monk, but the monk said that he did not have enough time.  It was very upsetting; I was so excited to get to meditate and relieve some stress.  Instead they told us to come back for a minimum of 10 days.  It was crazy.  It was basically just a plug for their center.  SAS was definitely misinformed. 

After that we went to a nunnery and met some of the girls studying to become nuns.  They were between the ages of 9 and 16, but there was one girl who was only 6 years old.  The head nun did not look any different from the oldest girls there, but she was in charge of the girls. 

Then began the food donation.  The SASers lined up by the food we were to donate, and the monks and nuns walked past.  We put the food in their pails and were surprised at how much they had.  They had so much rice and other things to go with it.   We later asked if that was considered a lot of food, and we were told that it was.  We had fed about 500 people in only 20 minutes.  We got to see the dormitories, where they fit in 150 monks!  We also saw a classroom and got to try the food that we had served to them.

-->