A Song for Myanmar

(This story is dedicated to the youths of Myanmar who risked their lives during the 1988 uprising. Many perished on the streets of Rangoon and in the jungles of Thai-Myanmar border. Many eventually relocated to third countries and some discovered love and soul mates along the way. The story was written in the winter of early 2012 when the secretary Clinton made a historic trip to Myanmar. Since then, further changes had taken place in the political landscape of Myanmar and sadly history may be repeating again with the 2021 military coup, birth of PDFs and the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine reversing the course of Glasnost. Some of the narrative in the story may seemed a bit outdated but the general theme and the characters in the story still ring true.) 

I follow the Moskva

Down to Gorky Park

Listening to the wind of change:

Those are the opening lines of one of Maung Ba Oo’s favorite songs, “Wind of Change” by the German band “Scorpions”. Of course, it is preceded by the famous “whistle” chorus. Supposedly the band’s front man Klaus Meine wrote this song during his visit to Moscow in 1989 in a tribute to the Perestroika and Glasnost fever that was sweeping across the Russian landscape under Mikhail Gorbachev at that time. He said he was following the river Moskva heading down to the famous Gorky Park while listening to the wind of change all the way long. How befitting? It was an instant hit and also became a song that Ba Oo had immensely enjoyed while wondering when he could sing a similar song for his country too.

Buddhism teaches that “Nothing is permanent”. He sincerely hopes that it applies true to the recent changes in his motherland Myanmar which is formerly known as Burma. It has been long overdue. The winds of change took place in the rest of the world quite a while ago starting from the collapse of the Berlin Wall to the end of the communism, to the fall of many dictatorial regimes in the Eastern Europe and capping with a recent Arab Spring in 2011. And for once it seemed Myanmar too was heading in the same direction with the democracy movements in 1988 that he had participated. Many had thought Myanmar would be joining the rest of the world during the last few days of the cold war. But the uprising was brutally crushed and subsequently things became even worse than the former socialist cum military regime of 1962-88. Yet the glimmer of hope had always been the resilience of his countrymen and women led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the activist, who was put under house arrest for close to 16 of the last 23 years. For most of the Myanmar people, she is simply known as “The Lady”. But the current crop of Myanmar generals who had formed a civilian government a year ago seemed more reform minded than before leading to a recent shift of political winds in Myanmar. Are we finally witnessing a “Myanmar Perestroika”? Is the “military dictatorship” in Myanmar entering its final chapters? He is cautiously optimistic that a new era may be ushering in. Will he be able to hum his favorite song “Wind of Change” all once again? And how about his own intimate moments of that era? Suppressed memories of the past two decades escaped to the realms of the present day. But a little synopsis of recent changes in Myanmar has to come first to give a perspective to those who are unfamiliar with the country.

Moscow, Russia.

For starters, the nightmare began in 1962 when General Ne Win came into power following a military coup. Since then and till 1988, there were many instances where the citizenry came up protesting his dictatorship but none ever came close to toppling him and his sham socialist government till 1988 at which point people thought they had finally seen the dictatorship at its deathbed. But they were inexperienced, fractious, disunited and perhaps euphoric. Or the military was more brainwashed than they had believed. Another coup by the army ended the uprising by brutally shooting down thousands of protesters. Daw Su (Aung San Suu Kyi), the daughter of the national hero General Aung San who fought against the British imperialism, was one of the main opposition leaders if not the main one. But she had just returned to Myanmar the previous year from decades long stay in overseas after getting married to an English man and raising a family in England. She hadn’t laid down her roots deeply yet in a sense. But she decided to continue fighting for the people of Myanmar instead of returning to her cozy family life in the west. She paid dearly for that decision. For the next 23 years, she and her political party were constantly harassed by the military government led by successive generations of generals. She was put under house arrest by the ridiculous laws that could only exist in a country like Myanmar. She was offered a permission to leave the country at any time should she desired. But she knew that she would never be allowed back once she had departed Myanmar. So, she put up with the hardships and stayed on. She was almost assassinated at one point. Her sons grew up without a mother during those times and her husband passed away from cancer in her absence. Of course, all those sacrifices didn’t go unnoticed. Where many other opposition leaders faded away or retired one after another, her star kept on shining year after year. The whole country adored her. She was offered countless awards from the international community including a Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. She had inspired a whole generation of world’s leaders. Yet the military government remained unfazed throughout those years. Sanctions from the west didn’t flinch them. United Nations was powerless despite repeatedly sending special envoys. As years passed it seemed Myanmar was going to witness the leader waste away by simply growing old. Or so most thought till the early 2011.

The military held a rigged election in November 2010. Surprisingly the new civilian government led by a former fourth tier general, U Thein Sein, had broken away from the shadow of the past generals and had introduced reforms, albeit in baby steps. They first released Daw Su followed by a few other political prisoners. They had given more media freedom allowing citizens to criticize the government, again in Lilliputian natures. But those meant a lot in the tumultuous short history of modern Myanmar given how repressive the previous regimes were. Granted there still are thousands of political prisoners behind the bars. They have a track record of breaking promises and cheating the international community. They had played the bad cop, good cop scenario before (for example between General Khin Nyunt and the other hardliner generals) fooling the rest of the world. But the single most difference this time is U Thein Sein’s public recognition of Daw Su and the admission that he had talked to her and that he was willing to work with her for the benefit of the country during the recent ASEAN Bali conference. Previously Daw Suu was treated as if she didn’t exist and most often referred to as “that woman” in the official media. Of course, the equal credit goes to Daw Su. Gone are the early days of her party which had publicly asked for a Nuremberg style court martial of the former military leaders for their handling of 8888 affair where many protesters were shot to death. That had made the hard liners in the military very queasy and provided no room for the moderate military leaders to maneuver or negotiate. This time she had kept a firm stance but a low profile. She had remained mum about her former staunch demands such as the present government be dissolved or her party be handed over the power to form a new government since it won the election in 1990 the results of which the former military regime had nullified. And despite her many years of detention, she remained magnanimous and offered her availability for discussion on national reconciliation at any time. For the record, U Thein Sein’s government still has a long way to go from achieving the state of a truly reformed institution or a real Perestroika before he can be bestowed with the title Gorba Sein! And the constitution based on which this civilian government was elected still had many flaws.

But encouraged by such a shift in the political winds, the Obama administration and the United States had taken a huge gamble in deciding to reward Myanmar in their carrot and stick strategy. They didn’t want Myanmar to become a China’s minion either. First came the East Asian and Pacific Affairs Assistant Secretary Kurt Campbell’s visit to Myanmar followed by the nomination of Derek Mitchell as Special Representative and Policy Coordinator for Myanmar in mid-2011. But the most profound policy shift came in November 2011 when President Obama announced that he will be sending the secretary of state Hillary Clinton to Myanmar. That was huge since USA didn’t even have an ambassador anymore in Myanmar. In protest of the oppressive military regime, the United States had long downgraded its representation in Myanmar by recalling its ambassador in the 90s. Its highest diplomatic officer in Myanmar had been a Charge d’Affaires. Economic sanctions had been put in place and the State Department had banned issuing visit visas to the high-ranking Myanmar government officials. The last time a high-ranking US government official such as a secretary of state visited Myanmar was fifty-five years ago by the then secretary John Dulles. So, this was historic. Finally in the first week of December secretary Clinton visited Burma for three days meeting with both U Thein Sein and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. The graceful pictures of the world’s two most famous women hugging each other affectionately were plastered in the front pages of all the major newspapers and will ever be enshrined as wall posters at many Myanmar households. And Secretary Clinton was followed by a flurry of visits by other notables that included British Foreign Secretary William Hague, which was another first in the past fifty years and the billionaire activist George Soros within the past few weeks.

Understandably there are many doubters given the bad rap of the military regime. Some worried that the west and the opposition were giving in too soon and too much. But for  Ba Oo, this is the right path to be pursued. Look at how many decades Myanmar had lost already due to internal infightings? From the rice bowl and the most educated of the south East Asia to one of the world’s poorest countries in fifty years. Do we want to waste another twenty years remaining in a stalemate? A change of course is direly needed. He wants to be cautiously optimistic while standing fully behind Daw Suu. And he wants to be able to whistle his favorite song again, just like he was in England in the 90s. A walk down the memory lane became inevitable.

Following the 8888 uprisings, like many young students and intellectuals who had participated in the movement, he ran away to the Thai-Myanmar border with a dream of forming a student army when military started the crackdown. But life in the jungle was much tougher than expected for a city slicker like him. He then was a freshly minted idealist medical doctor who had graduated from the Institute of Medicine, Rangoon just the year prior. Revolutionary fever rather disappeared quickly when one had to battle malaria, soaking monsoon rains, constant hunger, lack of funds, political bickering among the fellow freedom fighters and a vastly outnumbered and out armed Myanmar Army in the jungles along the Thaungyin River (Moei River) and the Karen Hills on a daily basis. He very soon learned the bitter truth about the fatal flaw in their strategy too. It was that they would never be able to liberate the nation in this armed struggle format. The last straw was when his close friend platoon medic Tun Myint of ABSDF Regiment 102 was killed by a friendly fire in the Battle of Naw Ta. He swallowed the pride, admitted to himself that he is no Che Guevara and decided to quit then. He gave up the arms, slipped into Thailand via the Three Pagoda Pass, applied for a political asylum through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and was eventually relocated to England. He also decided to resume and focus on his medical career there.

It was the Christmas weekend of 1991 in England. By then he had passed the arduous Professional and Linguistic Assessment Board (PLAB) exam, suffered through the initial hardships of an immigrant doctor, earned his stripes and had finally secured a job working as a senior house officer at Cumberland Infirmary in Carlisle, a city in northern England. A lot of changes were taking place in the Eastern Europe then. The communism was in its last flicker. The Berlin wall had come down reuniting the two Germanys. Solidarity movement leader Lech Walesa had just become the president of Poland.  Perestroika and Glasnost were common household words. Gorbachev was more famous than Madonna. Befittingly the German band “Scorpions” had released its power ballad “Wind of Change” which became very popular at the discos especially as a song for the last dance. It became one of Maung Ba Oo’s favorite songs too.

Those days, the National Health Service (NHS) of England provided free accommodation to its junior doctors who were singles. Usually, it would be a tiny flat (apartment) with 3-4 bed rooms, a shared common area, a kitchen and a few bath rooms. Maung Ba Oo’s team was on call for that Christmas weekend of 1991. Everyone except the on-call persons had left the hospital for the holidays. His house officer for the past three months was a German girl named Kristin with whom he had grown quite close to. Unlike in the USA, UK teams were small and remained the same for 4-6 months whereas the team changes every month in USA. No wonder the house officers (interns) and the senior house officers (residents) often became quite close. Living in the hospital accommodation provided a college dorm atmosphere and improved the camaraderie too. In many nights it would not have been unusual to find a houseman knocking a couple of doors at 10 o’clock to start up an impromptu party. Half of the party goers were student nurses from the nearby nurses’ residences. Such were the days.

The workload at the hospital had been light that day and both finished work in the wards quite early in the evening. The Casualty (British term for the ER) looked promisingly empty. They had expected a quiet night and decided to return to their rooms. Kristin who lived in a different flat had invited Ba Oo to come over to her place after dinner to watch a few classic Christmas flicks. He decided to bring along a bottle of wine. That night somehow his shower took a couple of minutes longer than the usual and he was also found to be suddenly searching for his cologne bottle which he had otherwise used only about once a month. Snowflakes were coming down on his way across the lawn that divided the two flats. As expected, none of her flat mates were there, visiting their families during the holiday season. They had the living room and the TV all to themselves. Kristin must have just come out of the shower too. Her brunette hair looked still wet. She complimented on his cologne and asked what brand it was. He was quite embarrassed since it seemed too obvious and also since he couldn’t remember the name of his own cologne. She looked very casual in jeans and a simple blouse. She took out a plate of Liverwurst Pate’ and some crackers. Ba Oo opened his Pinot Noir and they both plunked down on the living room sofa after settling the drinks and the food on the table. As usual, the movie “It’s a wonderful life” was on the TV. Both of them had watched the movie before and knew the story line. So, they paid only a casual attention to the movie and started chatting. By then they had somewhat gotten to know each other’s personal lives after working together for the past three months. She had a boyfriend in Germany and planned to return to Germany for good within the next few months. She met her boyfriend after the German reunification and he was from former East Germany.

Hence the fall of Berlin wall had a special meaning to her. But she had also claimed that similar to the country’s reunification hiccups, the relationship had been more challenging than she had expected. They hadn’t met each other for a few months and she didn’t want to elaborate further. As for Ba Oo, he couldn’t tell much. He pretty much felt like a vagabond at that point, not knowing anybody in England. He didn’t know where he would end up eventually, returning to Myanmar if the political situation improved or move to America or to try to stay put in England. He had not been able to reach any of his family members for a few years. She was quite familiar with Myanmar and also of his past life as a student rebel, a topic that came up quite regularly in the conversations. She was more optimistic than him on reforms coming to Myanmar very soon, just like in her boyfriend’s country.

The topics were much more varied that night. They talked about the colleagues at the hospital, some light hearted gossips about other people, own hobbies, the site of the next hike they should go, food, music and movies while emptying the bottle of Pinot Noir between the two of them. It was getting close to midnight. Both had become a little tipsy. She would drift and leaned on his shoulder time and again. Next the song “Wind of Change” popped up in their conversation. Turned out it was one of her favorite songs too. Ba Oo mentioned that once his country become free and democratic, he would rewrite the lyrics as “I follow the Irrawaddy, down to Mandalay, listening to the wind of change”. Then he imitated the famous whistle. She chuckled and accused him of plagiarism but suggested they play the song as she had a CD of the album. She said it was a nice song for a slow dance. Somehow Ba Oo blurted out, “Then why don’t we dance to the song now?” Before he knew what he was doing, Ba Oo had turned off the light and was standing in the middle of the living room waiting for her to join him. Then suddenly the fear set in. What if she had taken this as an unwanted advance? This rejection was going to be quite painful. But to his pleasant surprise, she slowly got off the sofa, turned down the volume and joined him for the dance. She put her left hand on his shoulder and he had his right hand on her waist. In no time both were moving in harmony to the tune of music in near darkness. The only light came from the faint night lamp in her bedroom nearby. She rested her head on his shoulder with eyes closed. Her hair with a sweet citrus fragrance from the recent shampoo was brushing his face. Soon both bodies were locked in an embrace. She was warm and soft. He caressed her shoulders. She gently lifted up her face. Instinctively, he kissed her lips softly and found no resistance. They were sweet and warm. She responded in earnest. Two hungry hearts had met their equals. He held her even tighter. He kissed her passionately as if there were no tomorrow.

Outside the snow fall had become thicker. The crescent moon didn’t provide much of its usual silver-coated rays to ignite the night or bathe the room they were in. The whole world seemed to have stood still except for their heaving breaths. Even the music sounded mute. Occasionally they could hear the distant chime of the church bells. Finally, the song came to an end. Yet no one let go the other and they just didn’t care. Everything seemed to have drifted away in a slow motion. It was serene. The night was long and a journey had just begun.

An essay that makes a mom cries – with tears of joy!

It was our visit to Burma in 2012 @ Aye Mar’s parents home in Magway. Hannah sitting on the curb with a blue jacket.

( This post was first written around 2015 when our daughter Hannah was in seventh grade.)

Our daughter Hannah is in seventh grade now but has been taking accelerated English classes. Part of the required course work is having have to write a weekly journal for 2 pages. She has been wonderfully flourishing in this challenging environment.  I have been reviewing her essays weekly and it has been a joy to read those.  Sometimes I come to realize that she is more mature than I have given her the credit, based on her expression and the trail of thoughts in her essays.  But this particular one struck Aye’s heart. One day she asked about the houses we lived in Burma as she had to write something about a home that one’s parents or grandparents used to live at. I told her that my parents never owned a house as we were government civil servants and used to live in government subsidized apartments.

 Fortunately, Aye’s parents owned a home in Magway for decades and nowadays one of Aye’s sisters and family live there. Hannah has been there  twice and has some memories of her visits. With that and Aye filling in the rest, she came up with the following journal entry. That made Aye nostalgic, reminded her of the childhood and the deceased parents who lived in that house till they passed away. Aye’s mom and dad built that house in the early years of their marriage and Aye grew up in that house her whole life till she went away for medical school. Tears welled up in Aye’s eyes and Hannah got worried.  Aye had to reassure her that those were the tears of joy, a parent’s joy from her child’s scholastic accomplishment. I hope, we have provided our daughter a similar environment so that she can always look back to the place she grew up, a home! 

The home in America Hannah grew up at for her whole life till she left for college.

HOME:

In the winter of 2012, my family and I travelled to Myanmar (Burma). Both my parents were born and raised there. The picture shows my late grandmother’s house when we visited her in the city of Magway where my mom grew up. Looking back, the visit was extremely sentimental, being it the last time my mom seeing her mom at her childhood home. Grandma had passed away since. The house was never extravagant and fancy since my mom’s family was not that well to do financially but it will always be strong enough to hold the memories made inside of it. When asked what was her best memory associated with the house, my mom gave a simple clear answer. She told me that there used to be an unfinished part of the house upstairs that acted like a balcony and in the summers my mom would sleep there under the stars with her sisters. The sky would be clear, with the moon shining brightly, while the light of a thousand stars would sparkle above.  That part of the house has since been given walls and a roof for extra living space, but my mom still remembers the warm summer nights spent gazing at the sky. The rest of the house is as simple as the balcony was. There is a “living room” with cement floors and a couch. There is a plain bedroom where my grandma used to sleep in. On the upper floor, there is an attic like room with three beds that my mom and aunts used to sleep in. However my favorite area in the whole house is the kitchen. If you wanted to know what was for dinner, you would step in the kitchen where an aroma of smells and tastes would invite you. During my stay, I would often watch my mom and relatives cook, feeling in awe of all the possible creations that could be made with a handful of people and ingredients. Our dinner table was always full of multiple dishes.

During our stay in Magway, my family and I did not stay at the amazing house shown in the picture. However, we went there every day, each of those days cherished forever. To a normal looker, that house is just a house. But to me, that house is much more. It is the place my mom grew up in and left to seek a new adventure in America. It is the place she comes back to with her family to see her rest of the family. It is the place that I instantly fell in love with at one glance. It is the place where my grandmother spent her last seconds in this life. It is not a house, it is a home.

တခါကတဘဝ

တခါကတဘဝ (၁)-

ဆေးကျောင်းပြီး လှိုင်မြစ်ကမ်းနားမှာ တနှစ်ခွဲဆေးခန်းဖွင့်ပြီးပညာရေးကင်းရှင်းခွင့်လျှော်ငွေ ၃ သောင်း ကိုကိုယ့်ဖာသာရှာခဲ့ပါတယ်။ အဲဒီခေတ်က တလ သုံး လေး ထောင်အသားတင်ကျန်ရင် မဆိုးလှ/အောင်မြင်တဲ့ဆေးခန်းလေ။နိုင်ငံခြားထွက်ရင်အခွန်ကင်းရှင်းကြောင်းထောက်ခံစာထုတ်ပေးအောင်မြို့နယ်ရုံးမှာအခွန်ဆောင်ခဲ့စဉ်ကချလံပါ။ မှတ်မိသလောက်လဘ်မထိုးခဲ့ရပါဘူး ဆရာဝန်ပေါက်စငွေမရှိမှန်းသိလို့လဲဖြစ်လိမ့်မယ်။ဇူလိုင် ၁၉၈၉ ကတဲ့။ ဆေးခန်းပိတ်ဖို့ နိုင်ငံခြားကိုနောက် ၃-၄လမှာထွက်ဖို့ သေခြာသွားချိန်မှာပေါ့။

ဆေးခန်းနံမည်က “သူရိန်” တဲ့။ ၁၉၈၈ မေ မှာ အလုပ်သင်ဆရာဝန်ပြီးတာဆိုတော့ အရေးအခင်းဖြစ်ချိန်မှာဆေးခန်းက ဖွင့်ကာစ။ ည၈နာရီ ကာဖျုးထွက်တော့ ဖွင့်ကာစဆေးခန်းလေးအရှိန်ရအောင် ၇:၄၅ ထိလူနာကြည့်၈နာရီမှာမီးပိတ် အိမ်မပြန်ဘဲ ဆေးခန်းမှာဘဲ ညအိပ်ပစ်ခဲ့တယ်။ နို့မို့ အိမ်၈နာရီအမှီရောက်ခြင်ရင် ၆:၃၀ လောက်ဆေးခန်းပိတ်ရမှာမို့လို့လေ။ လူနာစမ်းတဲ့ကုတင်ပေါ်မှာဘဲ အိပ်ယာခင်းလေးဖြန့်ပြီးအိပ်ပေါ့။ အဲဒီခေတ်က လှိုင်မြစ်ကမ်းပါးရပ်ကွက်တချို့က နဲနဲ ကြမ်းတယ်။ ဆေးခန်းက နှစ်လမ်းလောက်ဘဲမြစ်ကမ်းနဲ့ ဝေးတော့တာ။ အင်းစိန်လမ်းမကြီးကနေဆို အတွင်းကို တမိုင်လောက်ဝင်ရတယ်။  ညတယောက်ထဲရှိတုံး ဓားထောက်ဝင်လုမှာ နဲနဲတော့ကြောက်ပေမဲ့ ငယ်တုံးဆိုတော့ သိပ်ကြာကြာမတွေးပါဘူး။ နဝတခေတ်နောက်ပိုင်းမှာတော့ အဲဒီရက်ကွက်တွေအကုန်ဖျက်ပြီး တိုက်တွေဆောက်တာ့တာပေါ။ ခုခေတ် ဘုရင့်နောင်လိုနေရာမျိုးဖြစ်မယ်ထင်တယ်။ အဲဒီခေတ်က လှိုင်မြစ်ကမ်းနား က လူနေမှုစနစ် ပီပီပြင်ပြင်အဖြစ်မှန်ကို ဖတ်ချင်ရင် မင်းဒင်ရဲ့ “သက်ခိုင်” ဝတ္ထုတွဲကြီးကိုဖတ်ကြည့်ပါ။ ကုခဲ့တဲ့လူနာကတော့မျိုးစုံဘဲ။ တခါတလေ “ဆရာ ဂေါ်လီထဲ့လား” လာမေးတဲ့ သကောင့်သားတွေလဲရှိခဲ့တယ်။ တော်ပါသေးရဲ့ ကိုယ့်လက်ထဲမှာ ဆေးကို allergy ရှိပြီးanaphylactic shock ရတဲ့လူနာမရှိခဲ့လို့။ ဒါမျိုးကကံဘဲ ဆရာဝန် အရည်ချင်း နဲ့မဆိုင်ဘူး ။ ဖြစ်လိုက်လို့ လူနာဆုံးပါးလို့ကတော့ အဲဒီဆေးခန်းနဲ့ဆရာဝန် နံမည်ပျက်ပြီ။ 

ညပိုင်းဆေးခန်းထိုင်, နေ့ခင်းမှာ ငှက်ဖျားသုတေသန ဌာနမှာ research medical officer ဝင်လုပ် , ရတဲ့အချိန်ပိုလေးမှာ( ည ၁နာရီ ၂နာရီထိ)  နိုင်ငံခြားထွက်ဖို့စာဖတ် စနေ တနင်္ဂနွေမှာ အင်္ဂလိပ်စာ ကျုရှင်တက်နဲ့ အတော်လုံးခြာလိုက်ခဲ့ပါတယ်။ အေးမာကတော့ အဲဒီအချိန်မှာ မကွေးမဲထီးလမ်းက သူ့မိဘအိမ်မှာဘဲ ဆေးခန်းလေးပြန်ဖွင့်ပါတယ်။ အဲဒီခေတ်က အစိုးရအလုပ်ဝင်ဖို့လဲမလွယ်, ခုလို ပုဂ္ဂလိကဆေးရုံတွေမရှိ ဝင်လုပ်လို့မရ, နိုင်ငံခြားလဲတန်းထွက်လို့မရတော့ ဆရာဝန်ပေါက်စ အားလုံးလိုလို GP ဖွင့်ခဲ့ကျတယ်။ မြို့ကြီးတွေမှာ ဆေးခန်းတွေပေါလို့နယ်လောက် လူနာမများပေမဲ့ နိုင်ငံခြားထွက်ဖို့ စကထဲက မှန်းထားတဲ့ ဘဦးက အင်္ဂလိပ်စာ, ဆေးစာ ပြင်ဆင်မှုကောင်းအောင် ရန်ကုန်မှာဘဲ ဆေးခန်းဖွင့်ဖို့ ဆုံးဖြတ်ခဲ့ပါတယ်။ 

အေးမာရဲ့ မိဖတွေပိုင်မကွေးမြို့ မဲထီးလမ်းတိုက်။ သံဘာဂျာ တံခါးနောက်က အခန်းလေးဟာ တချိန်က အေးမာရဲ့ဆေးခန်း။

တခါကတဘဝ(၂) –

ထိုစဉ်က(၁၉၈၉) နိုင်ငံခြားထွက်တာခုလိုမလွယ်လူသိမများသေးပါ။ စနေတနင်္ဂနွေ ဘန်ကောက် ဘုရားဖူး စျေးဝယ်ထွက်တယ်ဆိုတာ မရှိပါဘူး။ နိုင်ငံခြားတရားဝင်ပေးထွက်တဲ့နည်းကတမျိုးဘဲရှိပါတယ်။ အလုပ်ထွက်လုပ်မှ အလုပ်ခန့်စာရှိမှ ပါတ်စပို့လျှောက်လို့ရပါတယ်။ အဲဒါအတွက်ယုံလောက်ဖွယ်ရှိတဲ့ letterhead စာရွက်တခုနဲ့ခုလိုအလုပ်ခန့်စာအတုရေးရပါတယ်။

Great Queen Street ဆိုတဲ့လမ်းလဲ လန်ဒန်မှာ တကယ်မရှိပါ။ UK ရောက်တော့မြေပုံမှာတခါ ရှာကြည့်ဖူးတယ်။ 

နိုင်ငံခြားနဲ့အဆက်သွယ်ရှိသူတချို့ကတော့ ဟိုက ရုံး letterhead စာရွက်တခုကိုခိုးပြီးပို့ပေးလိုကိရင် ဆူးလေဘုရားလမ်းပေါ်က electric typewriter ရှိတဲ့တဆိုင်မှာ ကိုယ်စီထားတဲ့စာကိုသွားရိုက်ခိုင်းရင် အကုန်ကျသက်သာပါတယ်။ အဲလိုအဆက်သွယ်မရှိခဲ့လို့ ဒီစာကို ၅၀၀၀ ကျပ်နဲ့ပွဲစားဆီကဝယ်ခဲ့ရပါတယ်။ အဲချိန်က 1US$=40 Kyats ပေါက်ချိန်ပါ။ ကိုယ်လဲ UK ရောက်ရော Health Authority က letterhead ယူ, ကိုယ့်ဖာသာစာစီနောက်ထွက်မဲ့မြန်မာပြည်ကသူငယ်ချင်းတွေကို ပို့ပေးခဲ့တဲ့ တရားမဝင်မှုတွေကိုလုပ်ခဲ့ပါတယ်။ စာထဲမှာပါတာတို့အလုပ်ခန့်သူဘိုနံမည်တို့က အားလုံးအာကလာပေါ့။ သိရင် အလုပ်ပြုတ် GMC ပြုတ်မဲ့ကိန်း။ အဲတုံးက မျက်ကန်းတစ္ဆေမကြောက်ဆိုသလို အနောက်နိုင်ငံသားတွေရဲ့ စာအုပ်ကြီးတိုင်း တိတိကျကျလုပ်မူတွေကို နားမလည်လို့။ ခုခေတ်လို email လေး Google လေးနဲ့ချက်ခြင်း ထောက်စစ်လို့မရတာလဲပါတာပေါ့။

တခါကတဘဝ(၃)-

ထိုစဉ်က မြန်မာ ပြည်မှ UK ကိုစျေးအပေါဆုံးနှင့်ရောက်လိုလျှင် ဆိုရှယ်လစ်ရုရှားမပြိုကွဲစဉ်က သူ့ National airline Aeroflot သို့ Bangladesh airline Biman ၂ခုဘဲရှိပါတယ်။ service ညံ့တာလဲမပြောပါနဲ့။ Aeroflot က ရန်ကုန်ကအတက်မှာ မင်္ဂလာဒုံစျေးကဆွဲတင်လာပုံရတဲ့ သီးမွှေးငှက်ပျောသီးအနွမ်းတွေဝေတာမှတ်မိတယ်။ လေထဲရောက်တာနဲနဲကြာမှ ဘိုစာစကျွေးတယ်။၁၉၈၉ နိုဝင်ဘာမှာမြန်မာပြည်ကခွာခဲ့တယ်။ ကျောင်းတုံးက ဘိုရူး နိုင်ငံခြားရူးတဦး ဖြစ်ခဲ့ပေမဲ့ အဲတုံးကတော့နိုင်ငံခြားမှာအပြီးနေမယ်လို့ ယတိပြတ်မဆုံးဖြတ်ရသေးပါဘူး။ အိမ်မှာနေလို့မကောင်းလို့ ဝေးရာလွင့်ခြင်တာလဲပါတယ်။

မြန်မာပြည်အထွက် အေရိုဖလုတ် လေယဉ်လက်မှတ်။ ထွက်ခွာနေ့ ၁၅ နိုဝင်ဘာ ၁၉၈၉။ ခုခေတ်ဗိုလ်ချုပ်တွေနဲ့ပါတီမကျခင်ထဲက ရပ်စကီးတွေနဲ့ ကိုယ်တွေကအလုပ်ဖြစ်နေခဲ့တာ။ 

တခါကတဘဝ(၄)-

ကိုယ့်ခြေထောက်ပေါ်ကိုယ်မရပ်နိုင်ခင် အိမ်ထောင်မပြုချင်ဘူးဆိုတဲ့အစွဲကြောင့် နိင်ငံခြားမထွက်ခင်ဘဝမရေရာသေးခင်အိမ်ထောင်ပြုဖို့မကြိုးစားခဲ့တော့ Aye Aye Mar ကမြန်မာပြည်မှာကျန်ခဲ့တယ်။ သူက နကိုထဲက နိုင်ငံခြားမထွက်ခြင်သူ။ TNO တယောက် ၃-၄ နှစ် နိုင်ငံခြား မှာ training ယူ အလုပ်လုပ်ငွေစုပြီးရင် ပြန်လာကောင်းလာမယ်ထင်ခဲ့တဲ့သူ။ ဒါပေမဲ့ TNO တယောက်အင်ဂလန်မှာ PLAB မအောင် စာမေးပွဲတွေကျအလုပ်မရနဲ့ပြန်လာရရင်၂ယောက်လုံးတော့ဒုက္ခဘဲဆိုပြီးသူကအစိုးရအလုပ်ကောက်ဝင်ထားလိုက်တယ်။ အဲတော့ဖေါင်ကြီးတက်ပြီး lesson တွေထဲ့တာခံခဲ့ရတယ်လေ။ လာလက်ထပ်စဉ်မှာသူက ဖေါင်ကြီးပြီးလုပြီးစလေး။ သူ မကွေးဆေးရုံမှာလုပ်နေပြီး မင်းဘူးတိုက်နယ်ဆေးရုံကို မလွင့်ခင်လေး။

သင်တန်းဆင်းလက်မှတ်ထိုးသူကတော့ အဲဒီခေတ်က ဖိမ့်ဖိမ့်တုန်ရာထူးရှင် ကလေးတွေအခါ် ဂျိုကုပ်ဖျင်တွန့်

တခါကတဘဝ(၅) –

အိမ်ထောင်ကျပြီးသော်လည်းအလုပ်မှပေးမထွက် အကပ်အဆက်အသွယ် မရှိတော့ဟိုးချောင်ဂလောင်ဆင်းရဲလှတဲ့ မင်းဘူးနားက ရွာသာယာဆိုတဲ့ တိုက်နယ်ဆေးရုံလေးမှာပို့ထားခံရတဲ့ Aye Aye Mar ယောက်ကျားနောက်လိုက်ဖို့အလုပ်ပေးထွက်ဖို့အသနားခံစာတင် ဟိုပေးဒီပေးလိုက်ပေးရစဉ်ကစာတချိုံ့။ အဲဒီတုံးက အရမ်းဆင်းရဲတဲ့ဒေသတဲ့။ ဘယ်လိုမှ GP လုပ်ပြီး ပိုက်ဆံမယူရက်တဲ့အခြေနေမို့ GP မဖွင့်ခဲ့တော့ဘူးတဲ့။

တခါကတဘဝ (၆)

ကျောင်းအပြီးနဲ့ UK မထွက်ခင်ကြား ၂နှစ်လောက် မြန်မာပြည်မှာ GP လုပ်, စာဖတ်, research MO ဝင်လုပ် ၃ခုလုပ်ရင်း လှုပ်ရှား ရုန်းကန်ခဲ့ရတဲ့ အဖြစ်တွေကိုတော့ အင်္ဂလိပ်လို အရှည်ကြီး သတ်သတ် ရေးဘူးတယ်။ “ Ghosts of Tagu” ဆိုပြီး ။ နောက်မှ Ba Oo’s Pen မှာဖြစ်ဖြစ် ပြန်တင်ပါအုံးမယ်။ UK မှာနေခဲ့တဲ့ ၃-၄,နှစ် ကာလဟာ ဘဦး အတွက်အလွန်အမှတ်ရဖွယ်ပါဘဲ။ ရောက်ပြီး PLAB မအောင်ခင် တုံးက ရုန်းကန်ခဲ့ရတာတွေကရေးရရင် နောက်တပုဒ်ရမယ်။ ဒါပေမဲ့ PLAB အောင် ၂-၃ပါတ်တွင်း အလုပ်ရပြီးနောက်တော့ တော်တော် ပျော်ဖို့ကောင်းပါတယ်။ နိုင်ငံခြားကို ပထမဆုံးရောက်ဘူး, အလုပ်ရတော့ ဝင်ငွေလဲရှိလာ , ကားတစီးကောက်ဝယ်, အိမ်ထောင့်တာဝန်လဲမရှိသေးတော့ work hard , play hard life style ပါဘဲ။ အမှားတွေလုပ်ပြီး သင်ခန်းစာရခဲ့တာ လဲမနဲဘူး။ US နဲ့မတူတာက အဲဒီခေတ်က UK ဆေးရုံတွေက ဆေးရုံပိုင် housing တွေရှိတယ်။ အထူးသဖြင့် အိမ်ထောင်မရှိသေးတဲ့ junior doctors နဲ့ student nurses ဟာ ဆေးရုံ accommodation မှာနေကြတယ်။ နယ်ဆေးရုံ လေးတွေမှာဆို junior doctors တွေအတွက် single accommodation က free။ တပါတ်တခါ free house keeping တောင်ပါသေး။ အဲတော့ ဆေးကျောင်းအဆောင်နေခဲ့သလိုဘဲ လူစုလို့လွယ်တယ်။ အလုပ်အားရင် စုပြီး hiking ထွက်လိုက်, ပါတီလုပ်လိုက်နဲ့။ mid 90s လောက်မှာတော့ NHS က health authority အစား trust တွေလုပ်, privatize လုပ် တော့ ငွေအရှုံးပေါ်တဲ့ housing တွေကိုဖြုတ်, ချရောင်းတော့ နောက်ပိုင်းJunior doctors တွေ hospital housing မရတော့ဘူး။ နောင်မှာ UK နဲ့ MRCP ကျေးဇူးကြောင့် US ကူးချိန်မှာ residency program ကောင်းကောင်း university program တွေရခဲ့တယ်။ US ရောက်ကာစ က လာမိတာမှားပြီထင်ပြီး UK ကိုလွမ်းခဲ့ပေမဲ့ ရေရှည်သုံးသပ်ကြည့်တော့ UK ကခွာခဲ့တာဟာမှန်နေပါတယ်။ ဘဦးတို့ခေတ်က foreign graduate ကို UK မှာ consultant မဖြစ်အောင် , specialist training ( US ဆိုရင် fellowship ပေါ့) မရအောင် system ကပိတ်ကိုပိတ် ထားတယ်။ နောက်ပိုင်းလာသူတွေမှပွင့်သွားတာ။ UK စလာရာ မှာအဆင်ပြေအောင် ကူညီပေးခဲ့တဲ့ sponsor ပေးခဲ့တဲ့ ကျေးဇူးရှင်ကတော့ ကို(Dr)ဇော်လင်း-မ(Dr)တင်ထားစိန်တို့ဖြစ်ပါတယ်။ PLAB အောင်အပြီး first job ရှာချိန်မှာ လူတခါမှမမြင်ဘူးဘဲ recommendation letter ရေးပေးဖို့သဘောတူခဲ့တဲ့ Peterborough က consultant ဆရာ ခင်မောင်မြင့် ကျေးဇူးလဲမကင်းပါဘူး။

တခါကတဘဝ (၇) –

လူလွတ်ဘဝ အင်္ဂလန်မှာ ရောက်ကထဲကအလုပ်လုပ်ရင်းစာမေးပွဲတွေဒလစတ်ဖြေ လိုက်တာ ၁၉၉၃ ဇန်နဝါရီလောက်မှာ ဖြေစရာမကျန်အောင် အောင်သွားခဲ့ပြီ။ MRCP ပြီးပြီ။ PLAB အောင်ပြီးသားတောင် English တိုးတက်အောင် သွားတက်တဲ့ class ကပါလိုက်သေး။ အဲတုံးက 85batch တွေတော့စ MRCP ပြီးနေပြီ။ 86 တွေမပြီးသေး။ 87 batchမှာတော့ကွီးအရင်ဆုံး MRCP ပြီး( ဤကားအရှက်မရှိအသလွတ်ကျော်ငြာဝင်ခြင်း). အဲဒီခေတ်က GMC ကfull registration ပေးတာလဲ အရမ်းကျပ်ထားတယ်။ Conjoint exam ဆိုတဲ့ LRCP,MRCS အောင်ရင် GMC က British graduate နဲ့တန်းတူသတ်မှတ် ပြီး full registration တန်းရတယ်ဆိုလို့ အဲဒါ လဲဝင်ဖြေလို့အောင်ပြီးပြီ။ FMGEMS/FLEX ( ခုခေတ်USMLE 1,2,3) အကုန်ပြီး အမေရိကားထဲ အင်တာဗျုးတွေဝင်ပြီး ၁၉၉၃ဇူလိုင်မှာစမဲ့ အမေရိကန်residency အလုပ်ကလဲလက်ထဲ မှာ သေချာလက်ကိုင် ရထားပြီ ဆိုတော့ ၁၉၉၃ မတ်လထဲမှာ ပြည်တော်ပြန်၍ မိန်းမတောင်းသည်ပေါ့။ ပြသနာကတော့ အာမေးကအဲချိန်မှာ in service ဖြစ်နေလို့ ချက်ခြင်းမလိုက်လာနိုင်ခဲ့ဘူး။ ၁၉၉၅မှထွက်ခွင့်ရတယ်။ ကြားထဲမှာ ၁၉၉၄ မှာတော့ တော့ခဏ ခွင့်နဲ့ USA ကို လာလည်တယ်။ Abscond မလုပ်ရဲတာနဲ့ အသားနားခံ ထွက်ခွင့်တောင်းမယ်ဆိုပြီးခွင့်ကုန်တော့ပြန်သွားတယ်။ ကွီးကအဲဒီအချိန် ၁၉၉၃-၉၆ နယူးယောက်မှာ residency လုပ်နေတယ်။ USA မှာအခြေကျလို့ တမိသားစု လုံး UK သွားလယ်တဲ့ ၂၀၁၄ ကျမှဘဲ အေးမာက UK ပထမဆုံး ရောက်ဘူးတော့တယ်။

တခါကတဘဝ(၈)

New York မှာ ၃နှစ် residency 1993-96 လုပ်ခဲ့တယ်။ ကြွက်တွေ ပိုးဟပ်တွေနဲ့ တိုက်ခန်းတွေမှာနေခဲ့တယ်။ Mug လုပ်ခံရလို့ မျက်နှာ ဖူးရောင်တာလဲခံရဘူးတယ်။ လက်သီးဘဲထိုးခံရပြီး ဒါးနဲ့မထိုးခံခဲ့ရတာကံကောင်း။ Empire State Building မှာအေးရဲ့ ပိုက်ဆံအိတ်လဲ ခါးပိုက်နှိုက်ခံရဘူးတယ်။ UK လို နိုင်ငံက စကားတခွန်းပြောတိုင်း please ၂ခါထဲ့ပြောတာနားယဉ်ခဲ့ရကနေ brash attitude New Yorkers တွေနဲ့တွေ့လို့လဲ culture shock ရခဲ့တယ်။ လင်မယား ၂ယောက် ပလတ်စတစ် ပုလင်းခွံတွေကို recycle မှာပြန်သွင်းပြီး $2-3 လောက်ပြန်ရရင်လဲပျော်ခဲ့ဘူးတယ်။ HIV လူနာကို central line အထဲ့မှာ needle stick injury ရပြီး ကိုယ်များ (+) ဖြစ်မလားလို့ ၂-၃ လလဲစိတ်ညစ်ခဲ့ရဘူးတယ်။ residency ပြီးတော့ ကွီးက fellowship ဆက်တက်ချင်တယ်။ အင်ဂလန်မှာ၃-၄နှစ်လုပ်ပြီးရက်နဲ့ အနစ်နာခံပြီး USA မှာ ဟောက်ဆာဂျင် ပထမနှစ် တစ်ကပြန်စတာရော, ဟိုးမြန်မာပြည်ကထွက်ကထဲကရော specialist ဖြစ်ချင်လို့ထွက်လာတာလေ။ Residency ဘဝက research လုပ်လို့ Nephrology journal လေးတခုမှာလဲ paper ထွက်ပြီးသား။ လက်ထဲမှာလဲ Yale university က nephrology fellow offer ရပြီးသား။ ဒါပေမဲ့အဲ့ချိန်မှာအိမ်ထောင်ကလဲကျပြီ။ trainee ဘဝနဲ့ဆို တချိန်လုံးstay/visa မသေချာတော့စိတ်တထင့်ထင့်။ trainee ဘဝဆိုတော့ stipend ဘဲလခလိုရတာဆိုတော့ဘာမှလဲစုပြီးဆောင်းပြီးသားမရှိ။ မြန်မာပြည်ကထွက်လာတာသာ၇-၈ နှစ် ရှိပြီ ဘဝကမရေရာ။ ကျောင်းပြီးကာစ မြန်မာပြည်ကညီမတွေကလဲ US မှာကျောင်းလာ တက်ချင်။ အေးကလဲ မြန်မာပြည်က ရောက်လာကာစ USMLE course ကျုရှင် တွေတက်ဖို့ငွေလိုတယ်။ သူက ဟိုးမင်းဘူးနားက တိုက်နယ်ဆေးရုံက အလုပ်ထွက်လိုက်လာတာဆိုတော့ စာမေးပွဲအတွက် ပြင်ဆင်ထားမှုအရမ်းအားနဲနေတယ်။ ကိုယ့်ဖာသာဖတ်ဖြေရင် ဘယ်လိုမှ အောင်ဖို့မလွယ်ဘူးဆိုတာ နှစ်ယောက်သား သဘောပေါက်လာလို့။ အဲလို ဆိုတော့ ရပြီးသား fellowship ကို လက်လွှတ်ပြီး green card လျှောက်ပေးမဲ့ ဆရာဝန်ရှားပါးနယ်မြေက လခပိုများတဲ့ GP/Internist အလုပ်တွေဘဲဘဦး ပြောင်းရှာခဲ့တယိ။ ဒီလိုနဲ့ လူဦးရေ ၆၀၀၀ လောက်ဘဲရှိတဲ့ မစ်ချီဂန်က Lapeer ဆိုတဲ့ရွာသာသာ မြို့သေးသေးလေးကို လင်မယား နှစ်ယောက် ရောက်လာခဲ့တယ်။ အလုပ်စစဉ် July 1996 က ဆေးရုံက မြို့ကသတင်းစာထဲမှာ ကျော်ငြာထဲ့ပေးခဲ့တာလေး newspaper cutting လေးပြန်တွေ့လို့တင်ပေးလိုက်တယ်။ စာသားက ဘယ်လိုစီ လိုက်လဲမသိ Rangoon University က ဘွဲ့ရခဲ့သူဖြစ်နေတယ် LOL. ၃ နှစ်အနဲဆုံးလုပ်ပါမယ်လို့ ခံဝန်ချက် ထိုးခဲ့ရတယ်။ တိုက်တိုက်ဆိုင်ဆိုင်မှတ်မှတ်ရရ – ၁၉၉၆ ဇူလိုင်-ဩဂုတ် မှာ USA က summer Olympics ရဲ့အိမ်ရှင်နိုင်ငံ ဖြစ်နေလို့ ဘဦးရဲ့ ဓာတ်ပုံနဲ့ကပ်ရက် သတင်းက အိုလံပစ်အကြောင်း။

Newspaper clip on my arrival announcement.
At Battery Park in NYC. Just before boarding the ferry to Statue of Liberty.

တခါကတဘဝ(၉)-

၁၉၉၉မှာ GP လုပ်ပေးတာ၃နှစ်ခံဝန်ချက်လဲပြည့် green card လဲရပေမဲ့ dilemma အကြီးကြီးပေါ်လာတယ်။ အလုပ်ဘဲဆက်လုပ် ငွေရှာတော့မလား ကျောင်းကထဲကဖြစ်ချင်ခဲ့တဲ့ အထူးကု training ( fellowship )လမ်းကိုပြန်ဝင်ဘို့ကြိုးစားမလားဆိုတာပေါ့။ fellowship ပြန်သွားရင် sacrifice လုပ်ရမှာတော့မနဲဘူး။ ရတဲ့နေရာသွားရမယ်ဆိုတော့ မိန်းမနဲ့တခါထပ်ခွဲနေရမယ်။ အာမေးကအဲဒီနှစ်မှာဘဲ residency training ကို Flint ဆိုတဲ့ မစ်ချီဂန်မြို့မှာ ၃နှစ်ရလိုက်တော့ ရွှေ့မရဘူး။ အဲဒါလေးရအောင်တောင်မနဲကြိုးစားထားရတာ။ ကလေးလဲမယူရသေးဘူး။ fellowက ဟောက်ဆာဂျင်အကြီးစားလိုပြန်ဖြစ်သွားတော့ ခိုင်းဖတ်ပြန်ဖြစ်မယ် အလုပ်များမယ် လခက stipend ဘဲပြန်ဖြစ်သွားမယ်။ New Yorkမှာ research paper လုပ်ထားခဲ့တဲ့ Prof ကထောက်ခံပေးလို့ fellow position ကတော့ University of Minnesota မှာရသွားတယ်။ လင်မယား၂ယောက်တိုင်ပင်ကျပြီး fellow လုပ်ဖို့ဆုံးဖြတ်လိုက်တယ်။ အဲတုံးကအသက်ကလဲနဲနဲငယ်တော့မဆင်မချင်လုပ်ခဲ့တာခုမှပြန်တွေးပြီးအသဲထိတ်တယ်။ Minneapolis နဲ့Flint ကမိုင်၆၀၀လောက်ဝေးတယ်။ သောကြာညနေအလုပ်ပြီးရင် ၁၂နာရီစာလောက်ညလုံးပေါက်ကားမောင်းပြီးမိန်းမဆီလာတယ်။ စနေမနက် ၆-၇နာရီလောက်အိမ်ရောက်ရင်ထိုးအိပ် ညနေ ၅-၆နာရီလောက်ထ, စနေညနေမိန်းမနဲ့နေ, စနေညပုံမှန်အိပ်ရာဝင် တနင်္ဂနွေ မနက် ၇နာရီလောက်မှာ Minneapolis ကို ၁၂နာရီစာကားပြန်မောင်း တနင်္ဂနွေညပုံမှန်အိပ်ပြီး တနင်္လာနေ့အလုပ်ပြန်ဝင်ကိုယ် oncall မကျတဲ့အပါတ်တွေမှာ တလ ၁-၂ခေါက်ပြန်လာတယ်။ သောကြ်ာနေ့ညလုံးပေါက်ကားမောင်းချိန်မှာ မနက်၂-၃နာရီလောက်မှာ ငိုက်ပြီး လမ်းဘေးချောက်ထဲကား ၃-၄ခါဆွဲသွားဘူးတယ်။ ၂ခါလောက်လဲတခြားကားနဲ့ accident ဖြစ်မလိုဖြစ်ဘူးတယ်။ Fellow ပြီးလုမှာ director ကခေါ်တွေ့တယ်။ Academic လိုက်ချင်လား practice သွားမလားပေါ။ Academic သွားချင်ရင်ရေခံမြေခံကကောင်းတယ်။ Department head Dr Hostetterက ASNရဲ့ president ။ Harvard/MGH မှာ Dr Brenner အောက်မှာလုပ်လာတော့ တနိုင်ငံလုံးမှာ connection တွေအများကြီး ဒါပေမဲ့ကိုယ်ကလဲလိုအပ်ချက်တွေတော့ပြည်စုံရမှာပေါ့။ နောက်၂နှစ် department မှာ research fellow ဆက်လုပ်ပြီးရင် ဘယ်academic program ကဘဲဖြစ်ဖြစ်ကွီးကို as a faculty/assistant professor လက်ခံလာစေရမယ်တဲ့။ ဒီတခါတော့ကွီး selfish မဖြစ်နိုင်တော့ပါဘူး။ အသက်က ၃၇ရှိပြီ အိမ်ထောင်ကျတာ ၈နှစ်ရှိပြီ ခုထိကလေးမယူနိုင်သေးမြန်မာပြည်ကထွတ်လာတာ ၁၁နှစ်ရှိပြီ ခုထိ apartment မှာနေကြရတုံး။ အဲဒါတွေအားလုံးစဉ်းစားပြီး thanks but no thanks လို့ director ကိုပြော clinical fellowship နဲ့စခန်းရပ်ပြီး private practice ကိုပြန်လာခဲ့ပါတယ်။

တခါကတဘဝ (၁၀)-

နောက်ဆုံးတော့ ၂၀၀၁ မှာကွီး clinical fellowship ကို အပြီးဖြတ်ခဲ့ပြီး မိန်းမရှိတဲ့မြို့ပြန် private Nephrology practice တခုမှာစဝင်လုပ်ခဲ့ပါတယ်။ ၂၀၀၃ မှာ အခုနေတဲ့မြို့ကိုပြောင်းခဲ့ပါတယ်။ အိမ်လဲ ဝယ်လိုက်နိုင်ပါတယ်။ ၂၀၀၂ မှာတော့ သမီးလေး Hannah လောကကြီးထဲကိုရောက်လာချိန်မှာတော့ ကွီးအားလုံးပြည့်စုံသွားပြီလို့ တသက်တာမှာ ပထမဆုံးစခံစားရနိုင်ပါတော့တယ်။ တခုဘဲစိတ်မကောင်းတာတော့ ကလေးယူချိန်မှာ လင်မယား၂ယောက်လုံးက အသက်၄၀နားကပ်နေတော့ Hannah အတွက်နောက်ထပ် sibling မရတော့တာပါဘဲ။ အဲဒါကလွဲလို့ကတော့ သူကံကောင်းပါတယ်။ training ပြီးသွားပြီဆိုတော့မိဘ၂ယောက်လုံးကနဲနဲပ်ုအားပြီးသူ့ကို ပိုအချိန်ပေးနိုင်ခဲ့ပါတယ်။ ခုဆိုရင်သူ ကောလိပ် တက်ဖို့ အိမ်ကထွက်သွား တာ တနှစ်ခွဲရှိသွားပါပြီ။ သွားကာစကတော့ ဟာတာတာ ကြီးပေမဲ့ ခုတော့ နဲနဲ ကျင့်သားရလာပါပြီ။ ဒီနိုင်ငံမှာတော့ကောလိပ်ပြီးရင်လဲ အလုပ်ကိုင်နဲ့သူ့ဖာသာခွဲနေဖို့များ ပြီး အိမ်ပြန်လာဖို့နဲပါတယ်။ ဘဝဆိုတာဒီလိုပါဘဲလေ။ အသက်တွေလဲကြီးလာပါပြီ။ နောက်၅-၆နှစ် လောက်ဆိုရင် ကျွန်တော်တို့ သက်ပြည့်ပင်စင်ယူတော့မလားလို။ လွန်ခဲ့တဲ့ ၃-၄ နှစ်လောက်ကစပြီး မြို့နားမှာ ဘုန်းကြီးကျောင်းလေးဖြစ်လာတော့ ကျောင်းအတွက် ဝေယျာဝစ္စ နဲနဲ အချိန်ပေးဝင်ကူညီ ကုသိုလ်ယူပါတယ်။ အေးကတော့ ဥပုသ်နေ့တိုင်း ဥပုသ်စောင့်ပြီး နေ့တိုင်းလိုလို zoom ပေါ်ကနေ ဝတ်ရွတ်တရားထိုင်တဲ့ အဖွဲ့နဲ့ ကုသိုလ်တွေယူနေပေမဲ့ ဘဦးကတော့ ညဏ်စင်နုသေးပြီး ရှုတ်ထွေးလှတဲ့ လောကီကိစ္စတွေမှာ နစ်မြောတုံးဘဲ။ အတူနေတဲ့အမေကလဲ၈၆ နှစ် ဆိုတော့မကြာခင်မှာသူအထူအထအကူညီပိုလိုလာတော့မယ်။ Life is what happens to you while you are making other plans တဲ့ John Lennon က သူ့သီချင်းထဲမှာဆိုခဲ့ပါတယ်။ It is so true my man Johnny boy. ၁၉၈၉ မြန်မာပြည်ကထွက်လာထဲက အဖြစ်အပျက်တွေ ဘာမှ မကြာသလိုရှိပေမဲ့ ၃၃နှစ်ရှိပါပြီ။ တွေ့ ဆုံကြုံကွဲ ခဲ့ရသူတွေလဲမနဲတော့ဘူး။ ဒီနောက်ဆုံး ၂နှစ်အတွင်းမှာ ကိုဗစ်နဲ့ နွေဦးတော်လှန်ရေးကြောင်း မုန်တိုင်းထန်နေခဲ့ပေမဲ့ ဒီမုန်တိုင်းလဲတချိန်တော့ စဲမှာပါ။ အသက်ကြီးလာတော့ တခါတလေ this too shall pass လို့လဲ မြင်လာမိတယ်။ ပံ့ပိုးတာကတော့ ဆက်ပံ့ပိုးမှာပါ။ အားလုံးချမ်းမြေ့ကြပါစေ။

I’d rather continue calling you a friend, Hlaing! (Part -III) (သူငယ်ချင်း လို့ဘဲ ဆက်ရျ်ခေါ်မည် လှိုင် အပိုင်း -၃)

PART- III 3 January 2010: Conference Room @ Dolphin Restaurant, Yangon:

As usual, Nyi Naing got tied up with a sick patient at the last minute and arrived late for the Saya Gadaw Pwe (Homage paying ceremony to former teachers). It was the class reunion and Saya Gadaw Pwe of his batch, 1988, IM-1. Twenty years after completion of internship, they were meeting for the first time again. The teachers were seated on the stage and the (former) students were sitting on the carpeted floor. Maung Maung Lay who was acting as the MC had just finished his opening speech and came to sit next to Nyi Naing.

“What made you late Saya Nyi? The liver transplant patient again? Someone was looking for you all over earlier.”

“Yes, even the fools are right sometimes. It was indeed the liver transplant patient whose bilirubin level bumped up this morning. Anyway, who was looking for me?”

Maung Maung Lay didn’t answer but gave a wicked look at Nyi Naing and lightly pointed his finger to the opposite direction. There sitting was a lady in blue dress and though it was close to fifty feet away, Nyi Naing wasn’t going to be mistaken. This is someone whose image is forever imprinted in his mind.

“Hlaing? From America? I didn’t realize she was attending the reunion”.

Maung Maung Lay said: “Me neither. It was a last-minute development. When she e mailed me two weeks ago, I was very surprised too. I didn’t know how she got my email address, perhaps from my magazine’s web page. But she requested me not to tell you. And she asked if you have a family now. What’s going on?”

“Nothing. We all are responsible adults and she is a married woman. I told you that I met her family in England a few years ago”.

Maung Maung Lay didn’t reply. As the MC, his next task was to briefly introduce each classmate to the audience. It was necessary since most looked completely different from how they looked during the student days. Without an introduction, most wouldn’t recognize one another. Not everyone was practicing medicine either. Maung Maung Lay himself had become a successful businessman in the field of publishing. His media empire includes publishing a few journals, a newspaper and running a popular media webpage in Myanmar.

Nyi Naing had become an associate professor of Surgery at YGH. A few years ago, he and Sayagyi Winston Hla successfully established the first liver transplant program in Myanmar and had just transplanted the third patient two weeks ago. This had been all over the news. The country’s Secretary (1) made a visit to hospital in cheering up the patient and to congratulate the transplant team. Minister of Health called Nyi Naing twice a week to get a progress report on the patient which he had to relay to the Secretary (1). They were given an open budget for the transplant program. Such a program is considered to be the only bright spot in an otherwise impoverished country and the government had used it to the hilt as a propaganda tool in uplifting the prestige of the nation. It was a team effort and was a long arduous preparation though. Nyi Naing and Sayagyi Winston Hla practiced the surgical technique on numerous pigs before they attempted on the humans. Nyi Naing was sent for extensive overseas training just for this project. He was at the famed liver transplant unit of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Hong Kong for eight months and another four months in Australia. They couldn’t afford any margin of error. Had the first patient died, the ministry was to shut down the program. Luckily all their hard work and efforts paid off. All three patients so far had been doing very well. It was the show case project of the nation and Nyi Naing’s name had been mentioned weekly in the news. Sayagyi Winston Hla had just retired and Nyi Naing had been tipped to be promoted to the post of full professor in further expanding the liver transplant program with a view to train the next generation of Myanmar surgeons. His star was rising fast.

Nyi Naing’s train of thoughts was suddenly interrupted as the name Hlaing Myat Thu was announced by the MC Maung Maung Lay. It turned out that Hlaing was an interventional cardiologist in Virginia these days. Saya Gadaw Pwe was followed by the get together luncheon. Most ignored food. Everybody was so excited and busy, moving, jostling, hugging, joking and trying to catch up the past twenty years, especially for the classmates who were visiting from overseas. Nyi Naing made an effort to go greet Hlaing who was surrounded by so many classmates. They didn’t get much private time to chat. Turned out she was flying to Pagan that night but returning to Yangon in three days’ time. She was staying at the Traders Hotel instead of her parents’ home. Makes sense if one’s spouse is a foreigner Nyi Naing thought. They exchanged cell phone numbers and Nyi Naing again had to leave the function early. This time it was an urgent call from the OR where his assistant needed help in operating a trauma patient who had a severe laceration of liver and bleeding to death. Being remained single with no regards for making money in the private sector, he was available for the hospital on a 24/7 basis which was very unusual for professors. But surgery was his life. That’s why he was so adored and respected by his peers and the trainees. He had been voted the best teacher by the house officers for three years in a row. Very few knew that he was engaged once but he broke off the engagement when he realized that he couldn’t truly commit to his fiancé when someone had already occupied his heart permanently with no rooms left. It was a mess.

7 January 2010: @ Dining Room, Traders (Shangri-La) Hotel, Yangon.

It started out with a text message in the morning. At first Nyi Naing couldn’t recognize the sender. But the subsequent text cleared thing up. It was from Hlaing who was back in Yangon following her Pagan trip. She wanted him to meet up for dinner at the hotel and had also asked to free up at least 2-3 hours out of his schedule so that they could chat and catch up. She said it was the only time she could see him since she was to fly back to America the next morning. Luckily it wasn’t Nyi Naing’s OR day. After shuffling his schedule at the last minute, Nyi Naing texted back an affirmative. A smiley face icon came back instantly.

Again, the dinner conversation was full of surprises. Nyi Naing learnt that May is in high school now and Hlaing is divorced from Robert. She didn’t delve much into details about her divorce but mentioned that she had no regret for the decision. On her iPhone, she showed Nyi Naing the pictures of May and she from their globe-trotting trips. It seemed both were adapting quite well to the single parent family life. Nyi Naing was pleased to learn that May liked Burmese cuisine. He remarked that Hlaing should have brought May during this visit to Myanmar. It was then Hlaing dropped another bombshell.

“That is exactly what I was thinking Naing. I was thinking of returning to Myanmar with May for good but wanted to come check out first before I pull the plug and later regret. I am concerned I may disappoint her. That was one of the main purposes of this last-minute trip to Myanmar.”

Nyi Naing’s jaw dropped. “You are thinking to come back? I mean, not that I don’t want you to. In fact, I’ll be the happiest person to see that happens, but I thought it won’t be very realistic. It will be very hard for both of you but especially for May to adapt.”

Hlaing continued. “I am glad to learn that you want to see me coming back Naing. Yes, it seems daunting. But the timing seemed right. As you can see, apart from May, I don’t have any attachment anymore in west. I am not seeing anybody steady after my divorce. And recently I was hearing a lot of good things about Myanmar’s transformation. DASSK is released from the house arrest. Multinational companies are thinking to come back for a second round of investments. With such an environment, I was thinking that I might be able to practice cardiology here in the private sector. Moreover, I feel a moral obligation to some of the people that I deserted abruptly two decades ago.”

Nyi Naing dared not ask whom she was referring to when she mentioned desertion since her elderly parents were still alive. But he asked the following.

“And what do you make of it now that you had been here for a week.”

Hlaing gave a disappointing look. “I am sad to say that it is not going to work out. You are right, it is not realistic. I had high hopes before this trip but it may have been because I was dreaming from afar and never returned to Myanmar in the past twenty years in learning the real situation on the ground. After being here for a week, I came to the conclusion that the timing is not right yet. There still is a big culture gap. The outlooks on life are so different. Let alone May, even I am not sure I can adapt. The promised transformation in the political climate doesn’t seem genuine or deep enough, at least for now. And I don’t think my private cardiology practice without any local connection will flourish. There is no meritocracy or open competition here. Everything depends on personal connections and whom you know in the hierarchy. And if I have to practice medicine the way it is in the current day Myanmar, my conscience won’t allow me to sleep well at night.”

Nyi Naing chuckled. “Well, you gave me high hopes at least for the past thirty seconds.”

Hlaing returned a mischievous smile. She finished up her glass of wine and said. “I don’t want to dash your hopes. I think I might have an alternative. But for now it is still a top secret on a need-to-know basis. So, shall we continue the conversation in my room? I don’t want other people in the dining room eavesdropping on my secret project”.

7 January 2010, @ Room number 858, Traders (Shangri-La) Hotel:

Nyi Naing didn’t know if it was Hlaing talking or the wine talking. To be honest, both of them were a little tipsy after finishing a bottle of the local wine, Ayetharyar, which was the product of a vineyard near Taunggyi. And that was how Nyi Naing had ended up in Hlaing’s hotel room. Hlaing stepped out from the bathroom after freshening herself up. She changed her evening gown too. She was in a lose cotton pants and a pink T-shirt. In those, she looked much younger than forty-five. Perhaps the temperate climate in west had been kind on her skin. And the daily Zumba at the gym seemed to have maintained her toned shape. She sat down on the sofa and gestured Nyi Naing to come sit next to her. When he did, she rested her head on his shoulder with eyes closed. Her flowing hair with a sweet citrus fragrance from the recent shampoo came to lie on his chest. Then she started talking.

“I actually stopped by at Singapore for three days on my way to Yangon. I liked what I saw. May should be able to adapt in Singapore too. A good friend of mine who was a co-fellow during our fellowship training is now a well-respected cardiologist there and he was more than happy to find me a job should I desire. He thinks with my training from UK and USA and with his connections, he can find me a job within one week. His wife was a good friend of mine too when they were in America. Since I had not checked Myanmar out at that time, I gave him no promises. But now with what I had seen in Myanmar, I think the best option would be to move to Singapore instead. But on one condition.”

“What is that?”

Hlaing lifted her head up from Nyi Naing’s shoulder and turned around facing him. Then she spoke softly, “Will you move to Singapore with me then? You have served in Burma selflessly for the past twenty years and that should be enough. You should not feel guilty about leaving the country now. Someone with your caliber should have no trouble finding a job in Singapore. And even if you can’t find one right away, we’ll have my income”.

“But Hlaing, but”

She silenced him with a finger over her lips. “It’s alright. You don’t need to answer this to me now. For tonight I have some other ideas.”

With that she leaned over and started kissing him on the lips. Nyi Naing’s mind was foggy. He was in a trance state both from the unexpected question of Hlaing and the stirring passion rising inside his body. How long has he waited for this moment? Perhaps too long.  They both were free and consenting adults. So, what did he have to care? He started returning her kisses in earnest. She held him back tight. His hands ran down her back under the T-shit. After a few minutes, Nyi Naing stood up. He walked across the room to close the window blinds. Then he turned off the ceiling lights leaving only the faint night light to glow. As he turned around, Hlaing was standing up.  In this half-lit darkness, her naked silhouette was like a master piece sculpture of a Greek goddess from the Louvre Museum. Mesmerized, Nyi Naing lifted her up and gently laid her down on the bed. He started kissing her lips to toes. With each kiss she shivered. The room became full of labored and frenzied breathings. It seemed like an eternity but finally they let out a moan together and collapsed on to one another.

8 January, 2010 @ Departure Lounge, Mingaladon airport.

Hlaing was fidgety. In fifteen minutes, her flight would be boarding. She clutched her iPhone tightly checking every minute for this “ping” that announces an incoming message. Nyi Naing was called back to hospital at 3AM by his assistant for a patient who required an emergency esophageal transection from uncontrolled variceal bleeding. Supposedly it would be a four-hour procedure and Hlaing’s flight being at 8 AM, Nyi Naing had told her ahead that he would not be able to send her off to the airport. But he promised to call or at least send a text. As he was dressing to leave the hotel room, he also mentioned that the Professor whom he went to get liver transplant training in Hong Kong had taken up a department chair position at Singapore General Hospital and he was in touch with him to present a paper on the Myanmar Liver Transplant Program’s experience. The professor was so impressed by the initial abstract and the outcome data that he told Nyi Naing about his willingness to take him in anytime should Nyi Naing wanted to come work with him in Singapore. Sounded very encouraging. Finally, and for the first time in the past twenty-five years, may be the two lovers can be together. Or are they?

Then she noticed the unmistakable ping. There it is. Even without checking the screen, Hlaing could tell how the text would be phrased. It would be either

“Tha Nge Chin Htet Ma Ka Lo Khor Chin Bi Hlaing” (i.e., I’d rather be more than friends Hlaing).

Or “Tha Nge Chin Lo Bei Set Yway Khor Chin Thi Hlaing” (i.e., I’d rather continue calling you a friend Hlaing).

She closed her eyes momentarily. She didn’t know whether she had the courage to read the message now. Should she wait till she lands in America or should she just delete it? Or ……

Rasputin, Wazi Pait, Nicholas II and Kyin Soe!

ရပ်စပြူတင် ဝဇီပိတ် နစ်ကိုလပ် နှင့်ကြင်စိုး

အနောက်နိုင်ငံသားအများစုဟာ အဆောင်, လက်ဖွဲ့, မှော်, ယတြာစတဲ့ ထုံးတမ်းတွေကို မယုံမလိုက်နာပါဘူး။ ထိုပညာများကို တတ်ကျွမ်းဖြန့်ချီမည့် ဘာသာရေးဆရာ, ဝိဇ္ဇာ, ဘိုးတော်တွေကိုလည်း ဆည်းကပ်လေ့မရှိဘူး။ ဒါပေမဲ့ ထူးဆန်းစွာနဲ့ ၂၀ရာစု အစ ရုရှားပြည်မှာတော့ ရပ်စပြူတင်ဆိုတဲ့ အခါတော်ပေး ဘာသာရေးဆရာတဦးဟာ လွန်စွာ တန်ခိုးထွားပြီး ထိုအချိန်က ရုရှားဘုရင် နစ်ကိုလပ်(၂) က နိုင်ငံအုပ်ချုပ်မှုတွေမှာ သူ့အကြံညဏ် တွေကို ယူခဲ့ပါတယ်။ ဘုရင့်အပေါ် အတော် ဩဇာ ငြောင်းခဲ့ပါတယ်။ နှစ်တရာကျော် ပြန်သုံးသပ်ချိန်မှာတော့ သမိုင်းဆရာတွေက သူ့ကို mystical feature but လူလိမ် အခွင့်ရေးသမားလို့ဘဲသတ်မှတ်ခဲ့ပါတယ်။ ဘယ်လောက် mystic ဖြစ်လဲဆို ရပ်စပြူတင် ဟာ ပီယဆေးအောင် ပျိုတိုင်းစွဲ ဖြစ်ပြီး ဘုရင်မ နဲ့တောင် အီစီကလီဖြစ်သလို ကောလဟလတွေထွက်ခဲ့ပါတယ်။

အဲဒီကာလက ရုရှားသမိုင်းကို ပြန်သုံးသပ်ရရင် ဘုရင် နစ်ကိုလပ် ဟာ ရုရှား ဇာမင်းဆက်ရဲ့နောက်ဆုံး ဘုရင်ပါ။ သူ့လက်ထက်မှာ ပြည်သူလူထုရဲ့ မကျေနပ်မှုတွေများ ပြီး နောက်ဆုံး ၁၉၁၇ ဗော်ရှီဗစ် တော်လှန်ရေးကြီး ပေါ်ထွန်းပြီး ဘုရင်စနစ်လုံးဝအစပြတ်သွားခဲ့ပါတယ်။ ခုခေတ်မြန်မာပြည်ကြီးမှာ ဗုဒ္ဓဘာသာ စစ်စစ်ရဲ့ လုပ်ရပ်တွေမဟုတ်တဲ့ ယတြာချေ, လမ်းရေဆေး, ဘုရားဆင်းတု ကို ကျောပေးပြီး ၇ထပ်ကိတ်မုံ့ကို ရှိခိုးနေတဲ့ မင်းအောင်လှိုင်တို့ လင်မယားနဲ့ အခါတော်ပေး အလဇ္ဇီ ဝဇီပိတ်ဆရာတော် ဆိုသူတို့ရဲ့ပုံတွေကို မြင်ရတော့ ဘဦးစိတ်ထဲမှာ နစ်ကိုလပ်နဲ့ ရပ်စ်ပြူတင် ကြင်စိုး-ဝဇီပိတ် တို့ကို သွားနှိုင်းယှဉ် မြင်ယောင်မိတယ်။ ဘာလို့ ရပ်စပြူတင်ကို ဘဦးကသိနေရတာလဲဆိုတော့ ၁၉၇၉-၈၀ ဒစ်စကိုသီချင်းတွေ ခေတ်စားစဉ်က Germany က “ Boney M “ ဆိုတဲ့အဖွဲ့ရဲ့ Rasputin ဆိုတဲ့သီချင်းက အတော်ပေါက်သွားခဲ့တော့ နှိက်နှိက်ချွတ်ချွတ် သိတတ်ချင်တဲ့ ဘဦးက Rasputin ဆိုတာဘာလဲဆိုတာကို ရှာဖတ်ထားကြည့်လို့ပါ။

အော်ဇာတ်သိမ်းခန်းလေး ပြောဖို့မေ့သွားလို့။ တော်လှန်ရေးအောင်မြင်ပြီး ဘုရင်စနစ်ကျဆုံးချိန်မှာ ဘုရင် နစ်ကိုလပ်နဲ့ သူ့တမိသားစုလုံးဟာ firing squad နဲ့ သေနတ်နဲ့ပစ်သတ်ပြီးသေဒဏ်ပေးခံခဲ့ရပါတယ်။ ရပ်စပြူတင်ကတော့ သူ့ကို မနှစ်သက်သူတဦးက ဓားနဲ့ထိုးသတ်လို့ ဘုရင်မသေခင်တနှစ်လောက်အလိုမှာဘဲ သေဆုံးခဲ့ပါတယ်။ အင်း ကြင်စိုး နဲ့ ခေါဘဏီ စုံတွဲ ဒါမျိုး ကမ္ဘာ့သမိုင်းတွေ ဖတ်ရှုလေ့လာရဲ့လားတော့မသိ။

New Year Eve 2021 Wish

I have witnessed my fair share of hardship in life, may it be career or monetary or health or relationship wise. Mostly those pales to what we, especially for the citizens of Burma, have been going through during the past two years. But I am afraid the worst is yet to be over. A year ago, I thought the worst was over with the development of COVID vaccines and 2021 was to be a better year till this idiotic thugs Min Aung Hlaing & Co. came up with a different idea and staged a military coup followed by the widespread blood shed that is still ongoing. As hard as it is to predict when the military collapses, my faith remains unshaken that the people of Burma are to prevail for they are on the right side of the history. Let’s hope that this will be in 2022 and more importantly let’s work together that it takes place in 2022. But life is more than politics. I also have non-Burmese friends who look at 2022 from a different perspective understandably. On this new year eve, I wish my friends who are not engaged in Burmese politics a happy and healthy 2022 like many of us want it to be. Brother Lennon had said “Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans”. That’s dope bro and me wishes it’s that simple. But for my fellow Burmese, I’d rather quote one by the wise master Yoda who said, “No longer certain, that one ever does win a war, I am. For in fighting the battles, the bloodshed, already lost we have. Yet, open to us a path remains. That unknown to the Sith is. Through this path, victory we may yet find. Not victory in the Clone Wars, but victory for all time”. Yes, open us up a path in the midst of the chaos my lord! To those who gave up their lives for this cause, I promise your sacrifice would not be forgotten or wasted! And to those who had allowed me work along with, it has been an absolute privilege and honor. Onwards to the victory for all times in 2022 my fellow comrades!

သူတို့တွေ ခုချိန်ဟာ ခရစ္စမတ် ဆိုတာမှသိကြပါ့မလား ( Do they know it’s Christmas?)

၁၉၈၄ တုံးက အီသီယိုးပီးယား အငတ်ဘေး ရန်ပုံငွေရှာဖို့အနေနဲ့ ကမ္ဘာကျော် rock stars တွေ ( အများစုကအင်္ဂလန်ကပါ US ကနောက်နှစ်မှလိုက်လုပ်တယ်) ဒီသီချင်းကို တဦးကိုသီချင်းတကြောင်းဆီဝိုင်းဆိုပြီး ထုတ်ခဲ့ပါတယ်။ အားလုံးက အခကြေးငွေမယူဘဲ ကူညီခဲ့တာပါ။ သီချင်း ရည်ရွယ်ချက် ကောင်းတဲ့အပြင် စာသားနဲ့ တီးလုံးကလဲ ကောင်းလို့ အရမ်းပေါက်သွားတဲ့သီချင်းပါ။ 

ဒီနှစ်မှာတော့ ရွာတွေမီးရှို့, ဗုံးကြဲ, လက်နက်ကြီးနဲ့ပစ်ခံရလို့ အိုးအိမ်ပစ်ပေးနေရတဲ့ စစ်ဘေးရှောင်တွေ, CDMလုပ်လို့ အလုပ်လက်မဲ့ဖြစ်ပြီး တိမ်းရှောင်နေရသူတွေ, ငြိမ်းချမ်းစွာ ဆန္ဒပြမှုကို ရက်ရက်စက်စက် ပစ်ခတ်ဖြိုခွဲခံခဲ့ရလို့သား သမီး အကို ညီမ မိဘ ဆုံးရှုံးခဲ့ရသူတွေနဲ့ ပြည့်နေတဲ့ ဘဦး တို့ မြန်မာ ပြည်သူတွေအတွက် လဲ ဒီသီချင်းဟာရင်နင့်စရာနဲ့ အလွန်ဘဲ ထိမိလှတယ်လို့ ဘဦးခံစားမိပါတယ်။ ပြည်ပမှာ နှင်းမှုံကြားထဲ ခရစ္စမတ် သီချင်းသံတွေနေရာတကာကြားပြီး မိသားစုတွေ ပြန်ဆုံ တဦးနဲ့တဦး လက်ဆောင်ပေးတာတွေမြင်ရတိုင်း ကိုယ့်မြန်မာပြည်သားတွေကိုလဲ အဲဒီလို ငြိမ်းချမ်းမှုတွေနဲ့ ပြည့်ဝစေလိုပါတယ်။

အဲဒီတော့ဘာလုပ်ရမလဲ။ ဆုတောင်းရုံနဲ့တော့ မရပါဘူး။ ဒီ မကောင်းဆိုးရွားမှုတွေကိုယူဆောင်လာသူ စစ်အာဏာရှင်တသိုက် ပြုတ်မှဖြစ်ပါမယ်။ ဒါမှလဲ နောင်တချိန် ငြိမ်းချမ်းတဲ့တနေ့ ခရစ္စမတ်ပွဲတော်ကြီးကို ကျွန်တော်တို့တတွေအားလုံး သီချင်းတွေလွတ်လွတ် လပ်လပ်ဟစ်ကြွေးပြီးခံစားနိုင်မှာဖြစ်ပါတယ်။ အပြုတ်တိုက်ဖို့ ကူညီနိုင်တဲ့နည်းလမ်းတွေကတော့ ကိုယ်သန်ရာသန်ရာပေါ့။ လက်တွေ့ဝင်တိုက်သူတွေကတိုက်နေကြပြီ။ ကိုယ်ကမတိုက်နိုင် မတိုက်ရဲရင် ရံပုံငွေပံ့ပိုးပေးနိုင်ပါတယ်။ ဘယ်လှုရမှန်းမသိရရင်ဘဦးကိုမေးပါ ညွှန်ပြပါမယ်။လောလောဆယ် ဘဦးတော့ ကိုယ်တိုင်မကောက်ပေမဲ့ ဘဦးတို့ Michigan က Freedom Fighters 2021 အဖွဲ့ကလူတွေနဲ့ချိတ်ပေးပါမယ်။ ဖေဖဝါရီလကုန်လောက်မှာ စဖွဲ့ တဲ့ဒီအဖွဲ့ဟာ ခုထိဆို ဒေါ်လာ ၂သိန်းကျော် ဖိုး မြန်မာပြည်ကို ပို့ပြီးခဲ့ပါပြီ။ အစက CDM, နောက်တော့ ဖေါင်းဒိုင်းပေါ့။ ဈေးရောင်းပွဲ ၅ခါ အပြင် အပါတ်စဉ်လဲ on the ground အဖွဲ့တွေနဲ့ချိတ်ဆက်ပြီးလှုနေပါတယ်။ NUG ရဲ့ overseas fundraising programs ( OFP) တွေ, ခုလောလောဆယ် ကာကွယ်ရေးဝန်ကြီးဌာနက တော်လှန်ရေးမိသားစု membership program ဆိုပြီး တလကိုဒေါ်လာ ၅၀ ခန့် pledge လုပ်ဖို့ အကူညီတောင်းလာတဲ့ program တွေလဲရှိနေပါပြီ။ ပေါ်ပြူလာမဖြစ်လူသိမများပေမဲ့ advocacy လုပ်နေတဲ့ အဖွဲ့တွေကိုမှလှုချင်ရင်လဲ ဘဦး ကိုယ်တိုင် advocacy လုပ်နေတဲ့အတွက် အလှုခံသူများကို ညွှန်ပြပေးနိုင်ပါတယ်။

လွန်ခဲ့တဲ့နှစ် ၄၀ နီးပါးက ရိက္ခဏ္ဓရ ကပ်ဆိုက်လို့ ရန်ပုံငွေရှာ သီချင်းထဲကလို မြန်မာပြည်သူတို့တတွေ ခရစ္စမတ်အချိန်ရောက်တာမှ သတိပြုနိုင်ပါ့မလား လို့ ရင်နာနာနဲ့ Christmas Eve မှာ ဘဦးတွေးနေမိပါတယ်။ Happy holidays လို့ မပြောရက်ပေမဲ့ May Peace Prevail on Earth, especially in Burma လို့ ဆုတောင်းပါတယ်။ နောက်က လက်တွေ့လဲလိုက်ပါမယ်လို့ ဂတိပေးပါတယ်။ 

Combat effectiveness of present day Myanmar Army( ယခုခေတ် မြန်မာ စစ်တပ်​၏ တိုက်ရည်ခိုက်ရည်)

သွေးထွက်သံယို ဓာတ်ပုံတွေပါလို့ မောင်မင်းကြီးသား ဇူကာဘန်းက ဘန်းမှာစိုးလ်ု့ ဖွဘုတ်မှာတိုက်ရိုက်မတင်ဘဲကိုယ်ပိုင် ဘလော့ဆိုက်မှာတင်ပါတယ်။ တြုတ်မလင်ကိုကြောက်လို့မဟုတ် ပိတ်ခံရရင်အလုပ်ရှုပ်လို့ပါ။

ခုခေတ်မြန်မာစစ်တပ်ရဲ့ တိုက်ရည်ခိုက်ရည် ညံ့ဖြင်းပုံကို social media မှာမကြာခဏမြင်တွေ့နေရပေမဲ့ ခုတော့အထောက်အထားနဲ့ ပြလို့ရပါပြီ။ Bad mouthing, army bashing လို့တန်ပြန်ပြောလို့မရတော့ပါဘူး။ ဘဦးဟာmilitary training မရှိဘူးတဲ့ သာမန်အရပ်သားပါ။ History channel မှာ major battles တွေကို review လုပ်ပြတာတွေကိုတော့ သမိုင်းဝါသနာပါသူအနေနဲ့လိုက်ကြည့်ဘူးတာလေးလောက်နဲ့ပြောပါတယ်။ ပိုတတ်ရင်ပြင်ပေးနိုင်ပါတယ်။

တိုက်ပွဲတွေပုံသဏ္ဌာန် က အမျိုးမျိုးရှိပါတယ်။ Ambush ချုံခိုဖြတ်တိုက်ခံရရင် ကိုယ့်ဖက်ကတပါန်းရှုံးနေပြီ။တချို့တိုက်ပွဲတွေကျ ရန်သူ့နေရာလဲအတိကျသိတယ်။ ရန်သူကလဲကိုယ်လာတ်ုက်မယ်ဆိုတာသိတယ် -အချိန်အတိကျသာပြောမရတာ။ အဲတော့ ကတုတ်တွင်းနက်နက်တူး မိုင်းကွင်းချပြီး defend လုပ်ဖ်ု့စီစဉ်ထားတယ်။ဒါပေမဲ့ ကိုယ်ကလဲ အဲဒီစခန်းမျိုးကို မသိမ်းမဖြစ်လို့ assault လုပ်ရတာမျိုး( ဥပမါ Normandy invasion, မာနယ်ပလော, မဲသဝေါ, စီစီပန်တာဝံ နဲ့ ဒီနှစ် အလောဘွန်စခန်းကို ပြန်သိမ်းဖို့ကြိုးစားမှုမျိုး)။ ဒါမျိုးက အထိအရှ များမယ်ဆိုတာ သိပြီးသား ။ အကျဆုံးခံပြီး စစ်တို့ရဲ့သဘောအရတိုက်ရတာဘဲ။ နောက်တမျိုးကတော့ ၂ဘက်လုံး မထင်မှတ်ဘဲ ရင်ဆိုင်ဆုံမိလို့ သူပစ်ကိုယ်ပစ် ခဏပစ်ပြီး ၂ဘက်လုံး ပြန်ပစ်တာမျိုး။

ဒီရက်ပိုင်း လေးကေကော် မှာဖြစ်တဲ့တိုက်ပွဲမှာ မြန်မာစစ်တပ်ရဲ့ လုပ်ရပ်ဟာ အတော်ချာတယ်ပြောပါမယ်။Ambush လုပ်ခံရတာလဲမဟုတ်ဘူး။ ကတုတ်ကျင်းတူး စောင့်နေတဲ့ တပ်စခန်းလဲမဟုတ်ဘူး။ လူနေတဲ့မြို့တမြို့မှာ ရောက်နေ, ခိုလှုံနေတဲ့ CDM, NLD နဲ့ NUG ရုံးတချို့ရှိလို့ ထိုလူတွေကိုဝင်ဖမ်းတာလို့သိရတယ်။ ဒါပေမဲ့obviously it is in a KNU controlled area. ဘေးနားမှာ လက်တကမ်းမှာ KNU တပ်တွေရှိတယ်ဆိုတာ ကလေးကအစ ခွေးကအစသိပြီးသား။ဘယ်စစ်တပ်, ဘယ် operation မှာမဆို ဘာလိုချင်တာလဲ defined goal ထားရမယ်။လူဝင်ဖမ်းရုံဘဲဆိုရင် အငိုက်ဝင်ဖမ်းပြီး မိနစ်/နာရီပိုင်းအတွင်း အမြန်ပြန်ထွက်ဖို့စီစဉ်ရမယ်။ ကိုယ့်ရည်မှန်းချက်ကမြို့သိမ်းဖို့မဟုတ်ဘူးလေ။ မြို့သိမ်းရင် လိုအပ်မဲ့ တပ်အင်အားကတမျိုးလေ။ 

ဝင်ပြီးရင်လဲ exit route ထွက်လမ်းက အစထဲက ရွေးထားပြီး အဲဒီလမ်း​ကြောင်းကိုလဲ ကိုယ့်လူတချို့ကနောက်ချန်နေခဲ့ပြီး ထိမ်းထား မယ်။ အင်အား ၁၀၀ ပါရင် ၁၀၀လုံး မြို့ထဲဝင်သွားလို့မရဘူး။ ခုဖြစ်သွားတဲ့ပုံစံကြည့်ရတာ ဘာမှအဲလို စီမံချက်တွေရှိပုံမပေါ်ဘူး။ Operation/တိုက်ပွဲတခု မစခင် မြေပုံကြီးဘေးမှာ ဝိုင်းပြီး ရန်သူ့နေရာနဲ့အင်အား , ကိုယ့် strategy တွေကို ရုပ်ရှင်ထဲကလို မဆွေးနွေးကြဘူးလား။ ပုံမှန်က အပြင်မှာလဲလုပ်ရတယ်ကြားပါတယ်။ ကော့ကော့ ကော့ကော့နဲ့ ရန်ကုန်မြို့ထဲက ပီဒက်တွေဝင်ဖမ်းတဲ့ပုံနဲ့ မြို့ထဲကို ဝင်သွားပြီးမှ ထွက်ပေါက်အပိတ်ခံလိုက်ရပြီး ဝိုင်းတိုက်ခံလိုက်ရတဲ့ပုံပေါက်နေတယ်။

သိရသလောက် ၁၉၉၀ နောက်ပိုင်းမှာ မြန်မာစစ်တပ်ဟာ စစ်တိုက်တဲ့တပ်မဟုတ်တော့ဘူး။ ဝတွေ, EAO တွေကိုငြိမ်းချမ်းရေးယူလို့ရသလောက်ယူ, နယ်စပ်တွေမှာ ဘိန်းစိုက်, methamphetamine ထုတ်, သစ်ရောင်း, သယံဇာတရောင်းတာတွေကို ငါ့လာမတိုက်ရင်ပြီးရောဆိုပြီး မျက်ကွယ်ပြု, ဗိုလ်ချုပ်တွေနဲ့ ခိုနီတွေနဲ့ပေါင်းပြီးတိုင်းပြည်ကိုရောင်းစား, ဦးပိုင်ဆိုတာထောင်ပြီး စစ်တပ်က စီးပွားရေးဝင်လုပ် နေခဲ့ကြတော့ ဘယ်သူမှတကယ်စစ်မတိုက်ဘူးကြတော့ဘူး။ လက်နက်မရှိတဲ့ ပြည်သူတွေကို အကြမ်းဖက်အနိုင်ကျင့်တာလောက်ဘဲလုပ်တတ်တဲ့ သူခိုးဂျပိုး thug တွေနဲ့ ဖွဲ့ထားတဲ့ တိုက်ရည်ခိုက်ရည် လုံးဝမရှိတဲ့ လက်နက်ကိုင်ထားသူ လူတစုဖြစ်သွားပြီ။ တပ်ဖွဲ့စည်းပုံ အင်အားတွေကိုလဲ လိမ်ပြပြီး ရာရှင်ထုတ် ရောင်း စားကြတယ်။စစ်တပ်ကိုဖျက်သူဟာ တကယ်တော့ သူတို့ဗိုလ်ချုပ်တွေကစပြီး တဆင့်ခြင်းပါဘဲ။ ဗိုလ်ကြီး, ဗိုလ်မှုး, ဒုဗိုလ်မှူးကြီး တွေကလဲ ကိုယ်ပိုင်ညဏ်နဲ့မသုံးသပ်ဘဲမှားနေတာကို ဆက်လိုက်လုပ်ကြတယ်။ ငါလဲ ဗိုလ်ချုပ်ဖြစ်လို့ငါ့အလှဲ့ရောက်ရင် ဝါးစါးထောမယ်ဆိုပြီး အမှန်တရားကိုသွေဖီလုပ်နေတာ တပ်မတော်ကြီး ကိုယ့်သေတွင်းတူးနေတာဘဲ။ 

လွန်ခဲ့တဲ့ ၄-၅လက မြန်မာ စစ်တပ်ထဲကနေ စိတ်ကောင်းရှိတဲ့ သူရဲကောင်း ဗိုလ်ချုပ် တယောက်များ ဖေါက်ထွက်လာမလားလို့ ဖိလစ်ပိုင်က General Ramos လို reformist ဗိုလ်ချုပ် တယောက်များပေါ်မလားလို့ မင်းလောင်းမျှော်သလို တချို့ကမျှော်ကြတယ်။ ကျွန်တော်အဲဒီတုံကတခါ post လုပ်ဘူးပါတယ်။ ကျွန်တော်ကတော့ မထင်ဘူးလို့။စစ်တပ်မှာ ဗိုလ်ချုပ်တွေ ဘယ်လိုရာထူးတက်တယ်ဆိုတာ ကျွန်တော်ပြောပြ မယ်။ တပ်ထဲဝင်ကာစမှာ DSA တက်ခါစမှာ ဒုဗိုလ်ဖြစ်ကာစ မှာ နဲနဲ ကိုယ်ကြီးပြင်းလာတဲ့ ပါတ်ဝန်းကျင်ပေါ်မှီပြီး အမြင်ကြည်လင်တဲ့ အရာရှိငယ်တချို့ ရှိနိုင်သေးတယ်။ ခု နိုင်ငံတော်စစ်တောင်စီထဲမှာ ပါတဲ့ ဗိုလ်ချုပ်တချို့ဟာ ကျွန်တော်နဲ့ အသက်တူ ၁၉၇၉မှာ ၁၀တန်းအောင်တဲ့ DSA ၂၅/၂၆ သမားတွေပါ။ ဒါပေမဲ့ အဲဒီအရာရှိငယ်တွေ ရာထူးတွေတက်လာချိန်မှာ ၂လမ်းကွဲသွားတယ်။ ပထမ တစုက ငယ်စဉ်က ခံယူချက်မျိုးကျန်ရှိနေသေးတော့ ရာထူးတိုးခံရမယ်စဉ်းစားတိုင်း သူတို့ဖိုင်တွေပြန်လှန် ကြည့်ခံရတိုင်း ဘေးချန်ခံခဲ့ရပြီး admin ဖက်တို့ အရပ်ဖက်တ်ု့ ပို့ခံရပြီး ဒုဗိုလ်မှူးကြီး, ဗိုလ်မှူးကြီး, ညွန်မှုးလောက်နဲ့ career အဆုံးသတ်သွားတယ်။ နောက်တစုကတော့ ခံယူချက်တွေ အမြင်တွေလုံးဝ စစ်တပ်က ပုံသွင်းတဲ့အတိုင်းပြောင်းသွားတယ်။ ခံယူသွားတယ်။ တပ်မတော်သည်သာ အသိဆုံး အမှန်ဆုံး ပြည်သူထက်မြင့်မြတ်ဆုံးစသည်ဖြင့် brain washed လုပ်ခံလိုက်ရ တယ်။ အဲလိုလူတွေကဘဲ တဆင့်ခြင်း ဗျုဟာမှုး, တိုင်းမှူးစသည်ဖြင့် တဆင့်ခြင်းတက်လာပြီး တကယ်တပ်လက်ကိုင်ကျောထောက်နောက်ခံရှိတဲ့ ဗိုလ်ချုပ်တွေဖြစ်လာတယ်။ ဒါပေမဲ့ အဲဒါကြောင့် အဲဒီ level ရောက်လာတဲ့ ဗိုလ်ချုပ်တွေထဲမှာ reform minded တွေမကျန် တော့ဘူး။reform minded စစ်ဗိုလ်တွေက ဗိုလ်မှုး level လောက်ကစပြီး ဘေးပို့ခံထားခဲ့ရပြီလေ။ ဒါကြောင့်သူရဲကောင်းပြည်သူ့ဖက်တော်သား ဗိုလ်ချုပ်တယောက်ထွက်လာဖို့ ကျွန်တော်ကတော့ မမြင်ဘူး။ ခုချိန်မှာတော့ သူတို့ ကျရှုံးတော့မယ်, သေတော့မယ်ဆိုတာ ပိုမြင်လာပြီး စိတ်ပြောင်းမဲ့လူရှိရင်တော့မပြောတတ်ဘူး ဒါပေမဲ့ကျွန်တော်ကတော့မထင်သေးဘူး။ တော်တော်ထပ်သွေးထွက်သံယို ဖြစ်ပြီးမှ စစ်ခွေးတွေ အရှုံးပေးမယ်ထင်တယ်။ 

ဒါပေမဲ့ ဒီလို ချာတူးလန်စစ်တပ် တချိန်မှာတော့ ရှုံးမှာပါ။ ကျွန်တော်တို့တောင့်ထားဖို့ဘဲလိုတယ်။

( disclaimer- ဘဦးမိဘများသည် ငယ်စဉ်က DSA တွင် အရပ်သားဆရာအနေနှင့် အလုပ်လုပ်ခဲ့သဖြင့် ဘဦးသည်DSA campus ထဲတွင်ကြီးပြင်းလာပြီး cadet training ကို အတန်အသင့်သိရှိသူဖြစ်ပါသည်)

I’d rather continue calling you a friend, Hlaing! (Part -II) (သူငယ်ချင်း လို့ဘဲ ဆက်ရျ်ခေါ်မည် လှိုင် အပိုင်း -၂)

June 1990: Departure Lounge@ Mingaladon Airport, Yangon:

“I Hope I can join you very soon Hlaing” Nyi Naing said.

“Me too. I hope to pass the PLAB exam soon enough that I can bring you over there shortly” Hlaing said.

Hlaing had taken a bold step in sitting for the Professional and Linguistic Assessment Board (PLAB) exam in UK. It was quite unusual those days for a single woman with no relatives or a support system in UK to attempt the PLAB. All she knew was an elderly English couple whom her dad had acquainted while he was working at Myanmar Embassy in UK during the late 60s. They kindly gave her a sponsorship and a promise to help her out during the first few months. After that she would be on her own, sink or swim. Due to the restricted foreign currency exchange rules, it was quite costly to purchase air tickets or pay for the exam fees from Myanmar those days. With that and the uncertainty of passing the exam, Nyi Naing couldn’t take a chance like Hlaing. His parents were not well off and they needed his help in sending his younger siblings to college. They spent all of their earnings and savings in sending Nyi Naing to medical school and now it was his turn to work and return the favor. Business at his GP practice in Hlaing Township had just started to pick up and he couldn’t afford to throw in the towel at that point. Those days PLAB was notorious for its high failure rate especially for the Myanmar candidates since they were unfamiliar with the exam format, being isolated from the world during the preceding two decades. Every foreign medical graduate needs to pass this test if he or she wishes to work or be trained at British hospitals. It is an equivalent to USMLE exam in USA. But this was the strong willed Hlaing, one who had always yarned to visit the west again. Nyi Naing just had to accept her decision. He was hoping that in another year or two, he could close his GP practice and try to join Hlaing in UK. He needed that much time to polish his English skills too.

“Will you promise to write me every week?” Nyi Naing asked.

“Of course, Naing.”

“Pinky promise Hlaing?”

“Yes, pinky promise, now would you kiss me for the last time Naing?”

Before he could say anything, she dragged him to a little corner at the balcony, hugged him tight and gave a warm kiss on his lips. As quick as the kiss was, she broke off suddenly and asked him to leave before she boarded the plane. She said she had never cried in public and didn’t want this to be the first time and she might if she saw Nyi Naing waving goodbye. Realizing that he too would perhaps do the same when her plane took off, Nyi Naing accepted the suggestion and started walking away. As he was leaving, he ran into Tun Oo who was entering the terminal. He gave a polite greeting and asked where he was heading. Turned out that Tun Oo was to be on the same flight, planning to sit for the PLAB in UK like Hlaing. Nyi Naing wished him good luck in the exams and made a quiet exit. He trusted Hlaing and yet his heart was heavy for no reasons. Next and for the first time, he decided to close his GP that evening and went to a bar with his best friends Soe Than and Maung Maung Lay. In the end he sobbed like a baby that night though he was too drunk to be ashamed of.

December 1991: @ Thuyain GP Clinic. Kamaryut Railway Station Road, Hlaing Township:

Nyi Naing got off the trishaw and trudged into the clinic building. He was more than two hours early and no patient was there yet. Not even his front desk helper Maung Zaw Lin. But that was by design. He didn’t want to meet anybody while he was reading Hlaing’s letter one more time.

The past one and a half year had been tough for everybody. Hlaing was very stressed in UK. She failed PLAB twice already and was to take the last and the final attempt very soon. Her finances were tight. She was writing less and less frequently to Nyi Naing and whenever she did, she sounded defeated. She said there were so many new things to be acclimatized. Weather was harsh. She was lonely yet phone calls to Myanmar were very expensive. She had to work part-time as an aid at a nursing home to make ends meet while studying day and night for the exam. The only thing in her favor was that she didn’t need much polishing in her English. In the meantime, Nyi Naing’s father suddenly passed away from a stroke. He had three younger siblings who were still in school. It became impossible for him to leave Myanmar, at least for the next few years. He couldn’t leave his mom and the younger siblings high and dry. Moreover, government jobs were becoming very attractive and easy to come by since many doctors resigned while others left for abroad as long as they were financially capable. Ministry of Health (MOH) then came out with a new policy that, unlike before, the newly appointed assistant surgeons (AS) would be assigned only at the teaching hospitals during the first two years. Only later they would be sent to the districts. MOH felt that the change would benefit the rural hospitals better since they would be receiving a seasoned AS than one who had just come out of internship. But that inadvertently opened up a door for those who were smart and willing to work hard. During that first two years, if one could pass the MSc entrance exams, he or she would be considered a post graduate (PG) trainee and hence would not be sent out to the districts. The opportunities in the career ladder seemed to have become wide open and readily accessible for those who wanted to work hard. Hence, Nyi Naing was having second thoughts in not joining the government service. His only reason was that entering the government civil service would prevent him from joining Hlaing in UK.

But that dream was shattered on that day. He started to read Hlaing’s letter again which he received in the morning. It said: “Forgive me Naing though I can fully understand if you don’t. It’s too much to explain now and I don’t want to sound like an innocent one justifying my actions. May be one day I can fully explain this to you. But for now, I’d rather call you “a friend” Naing!” Love. Hlaing. It was short but was more than enough to relay the intended message. Between Hlaing and Naing, they both knew what this sentence of “rather call you a friend” meant. It was their personal coded message. That was a Dear John letter. After all, their relationship was first announced in an opposite way, “I’d rather not call you a friend”. That night Nyi Naing submitted his application for a government employed doctor (AS) job. And he received no further letters from Hlaing.

Later and little by little he learnt more about Hlaing from his friend Soe Than who went to UK. Contrary to Nyi Naing’s initial suspicion, it was nothing to do with Tun Oo. That smarty pant did quite well though, passing the PLAB exam in his first attempt and was already aiming for the MRCP diploma and beyond. Hlaing met a German doctor who came for rounds at the nursing home she worked as an aid. Learning that Hlaing was a doctor, he helped her a lot both career wise and in financial means. He got her into a clinical attachment position at a nearby teaching hospital. Supposedly he was a very nice gentleman. Eventually proximity begets intimacy, especially when one was downtrodden and lonely. To make the long story short, Hlaing fell in love with that German guy. She passed the PLAB exam in her last attempt and was finally able work as a doctor too. The last Soe Than heard of Hlaing was that, there were to be married next year in Germany, at his home town. Nyi Naing didn’t feel bitter. He just blamed himself that he couldn’t be next to her when she was vulnerable and needed him the most. He just accepted this as his fate and tried to devote his life to medicine from then onwards. He promised himself that one day he’ll get himself a MRCP and a period of overseas training in the west. That was what Hlaing had wanted to have him in the first place. He had failed her twice before, once during the 1988 uprising and later in not accompanying her to UK soon enough. He won’t fail her for the third time. By hook or by crook, he would get a MRCP.

Late Spring 1998: @ City of Chester, England:

Nyi Naing’s initial fears were unfounded. Robert was such a nice gentleman. He genuinely showed interest in the affairs of Myanmar and made Nyi Naing feel at ease right away. If there were any awkward moments, it was all from Nyi Naing. May be that’s a skill in life that Myanmars need to pick up from the westerners, how to show no animosity towards the wife’s ex-boyfriend over a dinner.

Nyi Naing arrived to UK six months ago as a Myanmar government’s state scholar. In Myanmar, after his first posting as a newly minted AS at Sayagyi Professor Winston Hla’s surgical ward, Nyi Naing was sold into Surgery. He threw away the dream of becoming a physician and shifted gears to become a surgeon. He eventually completed his MSc (Surgery) and was then sent to complete his Fellowship of the Royal Colleges of Surgeons (FRCS) training in UK. He was assigned at a teaching hospital in Birmingham area. By then quite a few of his classmates had settled well in UK. Through that old friend network, he had reconnected with many of them except Hlaing. He learnt that she and her husband were living in Cheshire. He deliberately made no attempt to contact her. It was Hlaing who tracked down Nyi Naing’s phone number and invited him to come visit her family in Chester that weekend.

While the three grown-ups were sipping wine and savoring the Sunday Roast and the Yorkshire pudding, Hlaing’s daughter May, who was three-year-old, played with her princess dolls in the living room.

Hlaing said, “Sorry for the last-minute invite Naing but I had just realized that we have only two more weeks left in UK and I wanted you to meet Robert and May while we are still here.”

That came as a surprise. Nyi Naing said, “What do you mean Hlaing?”

“We are moving to America. Both Robert and I will be starting our residency training over there in three weeks. And it seemed that we are moving there for good with no plan to return to UK.”

Before he could even think he blurted out: “Do you have to?”

“In a sense yes. You see, as an overseas graduate from Myanmar, I have not been progressing well in my career in UK. For example, I had been trying to get into the Cardiology Specialist Registrar training to no avail during the past two years. Having MRCP is not enough. Robert is also very interested in the bench research in his field. But funding for basic science research in UK is not as generous as in America. Of course, he can always return to Germany but with me not speaking German, I won’t find a job there. Therefore, we decided that America will be a good fit as the neutral third country for both of us. And that’s why we don’t think we’ll come back to UK either”.

There you go again Hlaing, a girl full of surprises, at least for Nyi Naing. One who always embraces change and adventure. And for the next two hours they tried to catch up which meant it was mostly Hlaing inquiring about friends and family in Myanmar. She hadn’t visited Myanmar since she left seven years ago. She was a bit out of the loop even from the classmates who were in England. When she learnt that Nyi Naing remained single, her eyes suddenly looked soulful though nobody except Nyi Naing noticed it. And finally, it was time for Nyi Naing to leave. He took the Intercity train from Birmingham to Chester. Robert volunteered to stay behind and watch May while Hlaing drove Nyi Naing back to the train station.

It was an extremely quite ride until Hlaing started:

“Naing, it’s about another forty-five minutes before your train departs. Can we stop for a few minutes to chat? I know a nice place where we can park the car and walk a short distance over the stone bridge crossing the River Dee. From there you can also see the Chester Cathedral in a distance”.

“Sure Hlaing.”

It was about eight o’clock but being spring, the sun had already set. The River Dee which Nyi Naing felt to be the size of a brook for Burmese standard was flowing quietly under the bridge transecting the town of Chester. After walking a few feet along the pedestrian path, they stopped in the middle of the ancient stone bridge.

“I don’t know how to thank you for coming out to see me Naing. I was worried that you might be resentful towards me. To be honest, since I learnt that you arrived to UK a few months ago, I meant to invite you over but was worried that you may turn down my invitation. But when I realized that I have only two more weeks to stay in this country, I just had to take the chance. And I am glad I did. I am also very proud of you of what you have become Naing, a soon to be a FRCS surgeon, a job at the professorial surgical ward in Myanmar waiting. Your English has improved so much that I couldn’t even recognize you at first on the phone. And you had achieved all those within the past seven years. Do you still have time to compose poems?”

“Thank you for the kind words, Hlaing. Being single helped. Without any family responsibilities, I was able to devote myself to the study of Medicine and English at all times. And no, I don’t compose poems anymore. Can’t get into the writing mood. And by the way you have a very beautiful family. Robert is such a nice man and May is so cute”.

“I know Naing but sometimes I lament and feel guilty of what I did to you. Will you forgive me?”

“I always forgive you Hlaing.”

“Sorry, I should have known that too Naing. It’s not an excuse but those were my bleakest days in life. I was so lonely and desperate in a foreign land where every attempt was a failure.”

“Let’s not talk about the past Hlaing. In life, what doesn’t kill makes you stronger. At this point you should be appreciative of what you have now, a lovely family and a beautiful daughter. In a sense those bleak days took you to where you are now. So, you should be thankful.”

“True and thanks for being such a gentleman Naing. I have never felt so relieved like now. But can I still ask you for one more favor?”

“Shoot Hlaing.”

“Can I continue calling you a “friend” Naing?”

“I will forever be your friend Hlaing and you will be mine too. Now let’s get back to the train station. If I miss this one, the next one won’t be till 11 PM and I have to be in OR (Operating Room) by 5 AM tomorrow”.

Hlaing seemed to have become very relieved for the first time in the whole evening. There was a notably radiant smile from her for the rest of the car ride. She dropped him off at the station but after flashing the hazards lights, she got out and quickly came around to his side of the car. Glowingly, she planted a quick kiss on Nyi Naing’s cheeks and said,

“Goodbye Naing. Hope to see you again somewhere sometimes and hopefully with Mrs. Naing then.”

Then she drove off. And that was the last Nyi Naing saw of her, at least for another decade.

Nyi Naing’s surgical training in England was a smooth sailing. Since he had already passed the Myanmar version of the FRCS exam, which was MSc (Surgery), the British exam wasn’t a tough one to overcome. And under the close tutelage of his Professor Sayagyi Winston Hla at New Yangon General Hospital in Myanmar, Nyi Naing was so already well trained in the fundamentals of surgery that he was ready to operate efficiently in the British ORs. The British consultants were very impressed by him. Since he passed the FRCS relatively quick, he also had a chance to go through the hands-on training for a longer period than others who were focused on passing the exam. As his elective, he spent six months at the solid organ transplant surgery division of the famed Birmingham General Hospital. But during his next two years in England, he never heard anymore again from Hlaing in USA.

( Part III to follow).