Events of Saturday, September 22nd 2012
After our visit to Htee Pu school (described here), it took about three quarters of an hour to drive to Nga-Minn-May. I'd not visited this village before and my trip allowed me to see the refurbishment carried out at the school with the support of the 'Road to Mandalay' Social Contribution. The last part of the journey involved slow travel on rutted dirt roads. We became even slower as we were forced to follow a bullock cart until the young driver turned onto a side track.
Our car pulled up near to a large school building. I was surprised at just how many adults and children from the village were watching our arrival from under the shade of an ancient tree.
First, Doctor Hla Tun and the group of men from the village who had organised the refurbishment showed me around the school. It was quite a large wooden-framed structure with a 'wing' at each end and a verandah across the front. The roof was corrugated iron. The walls had originally been wooden planks but the refurbishment had removed the wooden cladding and replaced it with brickwork faced with cement for durability. The new walls had been painted pale blue on the outside with the exposed wooden framing picked out in green.
Concrete had been placed around the vertical timbers where they entered the ground to prevent (or at least delay) rotting. The building certainly looked smart and the group of men from the village who'd been involved in the project seemed rightly proud.
Although it was a non-school day, the children (including the nursery children) were waiting in their various classes for our visit. As always in Burmese schools, discipline was impressive. Some of the original wooden cladding from the building had been adapted to form simple internal partitions to give the different classes some slight isolation from one another.
Doctor Hla Tun had brought a number of pairs of spectacles (from the donation made by Ruth and Linda) for distribution to the group of elderly villagers squatting in the school yard where we had parked. The Doctor supervised the selection of the most effective spectacles for each person.
It was then time to distribute the stationery to the waiting schoolchildren. The tables bearing the stationery were moved out into the dusty schoolyard to leave room for the children to line-up and teachers helped to make up the 'kits' for each child. The actual distribution by Doctor Hla Tun and Jan then proceeded quite quickly. Finally, a table and two chairs had been set-up near our vehicle, and we were invited to take a snack before starting our journey back to Bagan. Here, the Doctor carried on giving consultations at the Bagan Medical Clinic. I observed the work for an hour or two but then, shattered, returned to the ship leaving the Doctor and his colleagues to complete the day's work. There's a report on my visits to the Clinic that day here.
Photographs: Nga-Minn-May School.
