Am'ara'-pu'ra Orphanage.

Little baby Emily

















The oldest member of the orphanage 73















The Girls with the sisters receiving their Christmas presents

Today is my last full day in Mandalay. I will be sorry to leave in one way because though there is a lot of poverty here, the people in general are a happy race. They always have a smile and a welcome for you. I suppose it is an unusual trip that I am doing for instead of doing all the tourist bits I am going round seeing the places that are usually not on a tourist list. Therefore I think that I get a little more feel for the place and for the people.

Its up at six again starting with Mass followed by breakfast. This morning we have not far to go as we are going to Am’ara’-pu’ra and Peter our driver is back. The girls orphanage at Am’ara’-pu’ra was started a long time back. There is a lady who is seventy three there and she entered as an orphan when she was a baby. Unlike our orphanages they don’t chuck them out until they are ready and sometimes but not very often, a few are never ready. There were three old girls here and they looked extremely happy. The girls all came out to meet us and they ranged from the ages of Emily who was nine months to the oldest school age girl who was nineteen. They were very shy but got really excited when for a photo shoot they all received the presents that they would be getting at Christmas, though the sisters would not let them open them and took them back to wait for Christmas. To see the joy and the excitement was wonderful.

I was taken round the orphanage and it was well run very similar to the one at Zawgyi. On our trip round we came across baby Emily. She was only nine months but I thought at first she was only three months because she was so small. Poor baby Emily’s mother had died only two weeks after she had been born. Her father had tried to bring her up but was too poor to do so. He had no job and no money or accommodation. He was found sleeping in some shack with this tiny baby. He was told of the sisters and he asked them to take her in. Emily was three months at the time and weighed only three pounds. The sisters have slowly raised her weight and she is recovering gradually. All the young children adore her and take turns in playing with her. While I was with her she would not take her eyes off me.

After lunch we went for a walk over a wooden bridge which is Am’ara’-pu’ra tourist attraction. The bridge connects to the village over the river Wadie and is over a mile long. As it was a holiday that day the bridge was busy with people as it is the place to parade up and down. Pollution and traffic free and to top it a slight breeze.

Am’ara’-pu’ra is also the centre for novice Buddhist monks. The place was packed with young monks of all ages, male and female. The male monks wearing a deep coloured saffron robe and the females wearing appropriately pink robes. Some of them are so young it seems criminal that their childhood is being taken away. We had the same in the west not so many moons ago when we sent ten and eleven year old children to the junior seminaries. To see the very young monks going around begging for food and money is not inspiring. It was interesting to see how many of the teenage and older monks end up in the bars drinking and chewing the beetle nut. A very funny habit that suppose to give you a buzz and which will eventually rot the teeth. I would say there were over two thousand monks there. After this we went into a silk shop. The sisters thought I would like to buy things as all westerners seem to want to shop till they drop. They were greatly surprised to see that I had no interest whatsoever. But they insisted that I have two shirts and a bag to put them in and bought them for me. I couldn't leave Myanmar with nothing.