What we do with many of the books we bring in is give them to the Buddhist monks. I’m not sure whether we make any merit in the Buddhist sense, but many temples in Myanmar have libraries that house our books and are used by their communities. The monks also distribute the books to these at little or no cost to us. They run a number of schools that can use our books as well.
Things are done in the Buddhist way, with appropriate ceremony. Several of these presentations have occurred in the past in various parts of Myanmar but this is the first that I have attended. The monks are in front, the adults facing them in the audience, and the children from the temple school are behind. The banner of Myanmar Book Aid and Preservation Foundation, our counterpart organization in Myanmar, is over the front area. The boxes on either side between the monks and the audience hold our books. The brown boxes are primarily English language children’s books while the white boxes are Burmese language books purchased from the proceeds of selling some of the popular fiction and non fiction books we bring over at book fairs in Yangon.
The actual presentation occurred when Hector, Thant and I handed a small stack of books to a monk. We did this several times to about four of the monks.
After we had presented the books to the monks and the ceremony was over Sue presented a book to to the children. The way they quickly got into position around her on the floor indicated they sit with a teacher this way often. It worked better than I would have thought. I suppose her experience teaching kids in the Indian slums English in part by reading to them helped. Also the book “Goodnight Moon”, like most of our children’s books, has many pictures and few words. I think this helped, and hope it will help the children to learn English as they use these books in their schools and libraries.
I got distracted by Sue reading to the kids but still managed to catch part of the distribution network before he got away on his bicycle taxi.
We stopped at several libraries on this trip. The Saya Zawgyi Centinary Library in Pyarpon on the way back stood out. We met with the library board. These men represent the “grass roots” people that we deal with. They are essential to our success and their country’s education. We went over records, check out proceedure, etc. and saw that circulation was substantial for a library of that size. Many of our books were already in this library, with more to come.
I don’t go to the library much. I buy books I read from a bookstore or online. It was an eye opener for me to realize how important libraries are in Myanmar. They don’t have the money to buy a book, and if they did, where will they get English language books, even in Yangon? Even if they could get online Amazon does not deliver in Myanmar. Fortunately for us, with the help of American President shipping lines, Thriftbooks does.
No need to change anything, Jack. A marvelous job. Spelling these towns is various and not to worry about due to the “official” changes in names [often including an r to represent the position of the tongue as it sounds a vowel, but not actually an r as Americans pronounce: thus the terrible errors many of us make when trying to sound out official spellings of Burmese names. Linguists have codes to protect against this—but none of us are linguists.