New book coming

My blog posts have been infrequent lately, taking second place to a new work in progress, as yet untitled.
It is non-fiction, an inspirational collection of brief profiles of actual people I know - or have known - personally. Probably 1,000 to 3,000 words each, in final draft. They are people who have touched other lives around them, whether in their local community, or on a much broader scale.

Some of them I discovered by merest chance; others were my colleagues for several decades whose work took unexpected turns. I will try to discover how those lives did take that turn and, where applicable, because any of us might find such possibilities in our own future.

I think you will find them interesting, with occasional surprises. Deo volente, it will be ready for market this fall.

I am also trying to improve this blog and the nearly defunct website from which it sprang. I am a klutz with computers, so it may take awhile before I get two-way comment capability.  Come visit.

My Kind of Poetry

Many poets nowadays tend to be as obscure as possible. Individual preferences differ, but I have met poets who contend that meaning doesn't matter at all; poets who eliminate prepositions and connecting verbs, or who want the listener to "feel" the work rather than comprehend it. Playing such mind games is all right as an exercise, I suppose; I find the individuals themselves entertaining (and I mean that in a positive sense); I enjoy them as people, but when they finish their reading and look around the small group expectantly, I panic. Each obviously expects some comment.

What reaction is best? To say,"I haven't any idea what you were talking about" seems rude, even when true. "Impressive imagery" can be used only a few times. "Wow" or "Fantastic" rarely measure up to even low levels of sophistication, and are too likely to invite further questions.

But whatever happened to meaning? When I take the time to travel to a writers' group, the literary equivalent of strobe lights or aroma therapy aren't enough to satisfy me. I want something I can retain and ponder, perhaps even recall word for word while I use my exercise bike, or lie awake in the night. Meter and rhyme used to have purpose, not only for any pleasure they bring in themselves, but as a means to imprint the poetry on my mind, to be recalled days or years later.

A poem need not have meaning, meter, and rhyme, all three, to make it memorable. Like the body's physical sense of balance (derived from inner ear, eyesight, and awareness of body position), one can be removed without loss. Remove two out of the three, and the mind in the one instance, or the body in the other, begins to stagger.

The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things;

Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings.

And why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings.

(Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass.)

Utter nonsense, unless you suspect satire about pompous professors the author, Lewis Carroll, may have known. But Carroll descends further into meaninglessness in his poem Jabberwocky. It starts:

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

Even though there is little meaning in the words, the mind constructs a picture, carried on by the perfect rhythm and rhyme of his lines. The poem goes on to tell the tale of a man sending his son to kill a forest monster, and the poem became so famous that it has planted several new words in the English language (e.g. chortle, galumphing, beamish.)

Ancient Hebrew poetry, translated into English, has no rhyme, and no definite rhythm,but depends instead on a repeat of a phrase in different words. But the meaning has inspired readers for three thousand years: 

 

Whither shall I go from thy Spirit?

Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?

If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there.

If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.

If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;

Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall guide me.

(Psalm 139)

Contemporary poetry, on the other hand, is easier to remember because the similarly inspiring thoughts also scan and rhyme. Consider:

Though the cause of evil prosper, still 'tis truth alone is strong.

Though her portion be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong.

Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown

Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

(Lowell, Once to Every Man and Nation)

Finally, poetry can be simply enjoyed for its wit and humor. Starting as nursery rhymes long ago, limericks were made popular by Edward Lear in the nineteenth century. He, however, usually ended the first line and last line with the same word, robbing the verse of any surprise. Later limericks are more imaginative, greatly improving their popularity:

The humor may be gentle:

A Canadian fisher named Peck

Fell through the ice up to his neck.

When asked, "Are you froze?"

He said, "Yes, I suppose,

But we don't call this cold in Quebec."

Or merely ridiculous:

There was a young lady from Natchez

Whose garments were always in patchez.

When comment arose

On the state of her clothes,

She would drawl, "When ah itchez, ah scratchez."

(author unknown)

In our writers group in Kellogg, Idaho, there is a man, Jeff Simonson, who can produce original limericks almost without effort - sometimes as a narrative poem of five or six verses, each verse a faultless limerick, expressing his mood or a recent event. I envy his skill, but poetry is not my major literary interest. I have rarely tried to compose any poetry since high school class assignments long ago.

My favorite form remains the limerick. It permits satire, surprise, rhythm and rhyme, and is brief enough to memorize. Mind games and cross-cultural poetry have their appeal, but I still treasure the traditional forms that can be easily recalled and retained in the mind.

Midpoint on My Pacifist Journey

I thought about peace a lot, there in 1961 and 62, living in Kengtung in the middle of the Shan rebellion. After Burma expelled all the foreigners, and my family and I moved to Thailand to start the medical work at Mae Sariang, I thought still more. The Chinese Communists had a news broadcast in English each night and we would listen once in a while. They boasted about the coming liberation of Thailand. Thailand is the only country in Southeast Asia that has never been anyone’s colony, and I wondered whom the Chinese wanted to liberate Thailand from.

The Vietnam War was also starting up about the same time. Vietnam had been partitioned, and the Communist North was beginning to invade the non-Communist South and were behaving there much like I had seen the Shan insurgents behave. And I decided that there were times when the pacifist position is not enough.

It was not that I feared for my family. In Burma my three-year-old son used to crawl into bed with Lois and me for reassurance when the rebels set off dynamite to destroy bridges, as they sometimes did, but the explosives were not directed at us. And in Thailand we kept a bag packed in case we had to walk out across the border but we trusted God for our safety then as we do now. But although I still saw a need for pacifism in the world, I realized that in the immediate situation, people in the villages sometimes had to defend themselves.

And so, after I came from Asia and lived in Idaho, I often sided against those who protested the war in Vietnam. At the Baptist Convention in Seattle in 1969, some delegates organized a public demonstration for peace in Vietnam. I asked if anyone could carry a sign. Sure, the demonstration leader said, everyone has the right to free speech. So I made a sign that said, “Peace will come to Southeast Asia when North Vietnam gets out of South Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos” and I got into the line of marchers circulating around the Seattle Center grounds. Nobody read the signs, they just saw the marchers. Two soldiers walking by criticized me for marching. I asked them, “Hey, have you even read my sign?” They looked at it a moment, said, “Oh. Okay,” and walked off. At that, a fellow peace marcher amiably peered over to see what I had written, uttered a shocked expletive, and moved as far away from me as he could get.

And that’s kind of where I stood, for a couple of decades, gaining a prickly reputation during twelve years on the American Baptist General Board. I and another Board member who was an Air Force colonel were the Board’s token hawks in those years. It was during that time that I went back to work in Thailand for another four-year term. That time included a spell giving emergency medical aid to the refugees coming out of Pol Pot’s Cambodia in 1979, tens of thousands of refugees, eleven hundred in the hospital tents of our camp, with up to forty deaths per day following their months of starvation and disease. More about that later.

But in the nineties, I thought some more. By that time, we had seen the Gulf War, the Rwandan genocide, Somalia, and of course the Irish civil war had been going on a long time. The fighting in Burma, which had begun in 1947, was still going on fifty years later, with neither side winning, and the nation in a long slide into economic and political chaos. And I began to wonder: not only, ‘Is peace worth the price’ but ‘Is war worth the price?’ Is there not some third alternative, besides battle and surrender?

A possible answer showed up in 1996, when Lois and I were invited back into Burma after thirty-five years’ absence. A Seattle-based volunteer group named World Concern had a project training village health workers up in the Kachin State. The Kachins used to be an American Baptist mission field from around 1890 to 1965, and even after all the foreigners were expelled from Burma, the Kachin church kept on growing rapidly. For thirty years, the Kachin Independence Army had been fighting the Burmese government. They are good fighters, these Kachin Christians, but in thirty years neither side could gain victory. Travel and trade were almost impossible, and most of the men had fled from their farms to escape the Burmese. Many people did not have enough to eat.

Finally, the Kachin leaders said, “This is not the way God wants it to be.” In 1994, working with other Christian groups in Asia and Europe, and consulting with the Carter Center in Atlanta, they finally reached an armed truce with the Burma government. According to the truce terms, neither army may enter the other’s territory, but postal workers, medical workers, and other unarmed people may go back and forth. Our medical training teams, in fact, were approved by both the Kachins and the Burma Government as part of the truce agreement. Snipers no longer fired upon trains and river boats. Farmers began working their fields again and bringing their crops to market.

Present-day Burma has certainly not solved all its problems. The government is still a dictatorship; the legally elected parliament still cannot meet, and dissenters still go to jail. And just lately, the Burma army has started moving hill tribespeople out of their villages and setting up free-fire zones. If anyone returns home to harvest his crops or to get something he forgot, the soldiers shoot to kill without further warning. (Where do you suppose the Burmese learned to do that?) But the Kachins have decided they are going to get on with their lives again. Many still privately disagree with the way the country is being run, but they have decided that killing is not the solution. I admire them for that.

2003: The more I read, the more I am uncertain that I have anything to say that other people need to hear. Granted, there are a vast number of books on subjects more trivial than mine, and even authors who can't write as well as I think I can. But who am I, to be telling others the way to peace? Any particular nation, including Burma, has a great many authors more experienced and more involved than I. But no one has had the same experiences that I have had (except maybe my wife), and some of mine are probably interesting, but may not be of earth-shaking importance.

The peace theory behind my writing the novel Flame Tree has been that the Kachins chose to get on with their lives despite a dictatorial and corrupt government, and that this decision could have wide application in other troubled countries. So far, the Burmese dictatorship has shown little sign of changing the destructive path they have been on for forty-one years. And some of the ethnic groups, Karen, Shan, and others see no alternative to armed defense except extinction. Economic and political sanctions have not had much effect on those in power. There are neighboring nations—China, India, Thailand, Singapore—who are still quite happy to sell weapons and other supplies to the Burma army.

Faced with all this, what can I say? Pray? Yes, certainly, for only God can have the ultimate answer to this impasse. But while waiting for God's answer, what? Stand idly by while families and whole towns are "ethnically cleansed" to the cheers (perhaps orchestrated) of the group in power?

Some people say why get so upset about people who have warred with each other for hundreds of years? What about Sudan, what about Congo, what about Burma, Ireland, Afghanistan, Liberia, what about injustices here at home?

The more such hot spots, the less effectively any nation or alliance can remedy them by military means. We must acknowledge that we can't fight them all. But I am reminded of the motorist who was pulled over for speeding who complained, "Officer, what about all the cars that were passing me?"

The officer continued to write out the ticket as he said, "Buddy, if we could catch them all, we would. This time, I caught you."

Police action alone is not enough, of course. There must be more or less consensus that speeding has bad consequences, there must be education of the public about the needless deaths, good design of highways, general acceptance of the dangers of drinking and driving, and of road rage, and of running stoplights, and many other facets of the problem before the mayhem is assuaged.

More to the point, the spirit of the law must be within the hearts of the citizens, before anything is really accomplished.

In this era of the worship of power, pride, and economic force, we have a long way to go before the spirit of peace is in our hearts.

So back to writing about peace. The Kachins say, "We don't care who governs the country down in Yangon; the weaker their governing is, the better."

That can sound a lot like, "**** you, Jack; I'm all right." But I don't think that is what they mean. What they are saying is more like, "For thirty years we fought the Burma army, and we had a land where no travel was possible, villages were depopulated of men, fields untended, the women and children hungry and sick. This is not what God intended for us. If the Kachin Independence Army standing by in the hills is enough to allow us to live at peace with the government, we will cooperate and get on with life, despite the government corruption."

  It took faith to say that, and restraint, diplomacy, and self-control. Not every group is ready for that. It takes faith to write about it.

Peace is not the primary work of the church or any other group; peace is a by-product. Peace involves laying aside ego and power trips. If a peace advocate is too busy with protest movements and politics to pay attention to those who are spiritually lost, or if the peace advocate is too preoccupied to participate in the church family, then his or her spiritual foundations are likely to be unstable.

             I myself really know very little about war. I have seen the edges of it. I have seen hungry children; I have watched soldiers burn a village. I have seen thousands of people in a refugee hospital, too weak to make any sound except a cough, and I have watched some of them die. I can’t tell you if peace is worth the price, or if war is worth its price; that’s something each person must decide. But I can say that something is badly wrong when there are hundreds of thousands of refugees. Something is badly wrong when people are driven from their homes so that free-fire zones can be set up. And I felt a dull anger mix with my fatigue at that refugee camp as I watched the Cambodian people silently die, nameless, with no friend or family nearby, slipping away so quietly that the only sign of death at first was the lice leaving the cooling corpse.

Something is badly wrong with us when our daily concerns are for higher income, more amusement, a more patriotic America, while we dismiss the deaths we have brought about in Afghanistan, and Iraq as mere “collateral damage.”

Is the struggle against overwhelming greed, pride, and violence worth the price? Jesus said so, and I know no greater authority. He said, “In the world you will have tribulation. But be of good cheer, I have overcome the World.”

Faith means acting on one’s belief, even when no peace is in sight. Even when “the other side” shows no inclination to change. Peace begins in one’s own heart, giving up the demand for vengeance. Vengeance only leads to escalation. How many more suicide bombers and fanatics will be needed to convince us?

There has been a saying, “Don’t get mad, get even.” But getting even is only another term for vengeance.

A better concept is, “Get rid of the enmity, not the enemy.

Ten Pork Chops On The Platter

President Obama's State of the Union address last night struck a responsive cord in me. Predictably, many Republicans objected to the President's plan to finance upgrading the nation's infrastructure, educational system, etc. by increasing the taxes on the richest of the rich. Or by imposing federal taxes on those Americans who move their business offshore and pay no taxes at all.

Such objections bring to memory certain of my fellow Idahoans a decade ago, who insisted on driving their cars on public roads without paying to register those cars. Some even designed their own unique license plates to proclaim their freedom. The roads are there, they reasoned, free for everyone to drive. Whoever built them or maintains them is irrelevant to the present moment.

The claim has been made that the richest 80 individuals in America own as much as the whole lower financial half of the American population combined. Seems pretty wild. Be that accurate or not, there are quite a few billionaires, increasing their wealth by several million dollars per year, while millions of working Americans do not earn enough to feed their children adequately or pay the rent. Let alone those in many foreign nations who subsist on less than two dollars per day.

Many business higher-ups explain that they are worth what they receive because of all the jobs they create, or the charitable foundations they fund. And in some cases they really have enabled whole nations to be free of, say, river blindness or guinea worm, or have funded better education or small business start-ups.

I think that the basic conundrum such explanations ignore is best illustrated by a problem brought to light in the Wisconsin summer resort where I worked in my student days. We served two sittings each meal, about 300 people at a sitting. The view over Green Lake was spectacular, the cooking was good, the people congenial, ten at each table, served family style.

A conference speaker once noted that each table was served a platter of ten pork chops, (or whatever was on the menu), passed from person to person. If one person helped himself to four of the chops, that meant three other people got none, despite his assurance that he gave a lot to charity. Or management's promise to order more pork chops next time.

I think that's what, in Bible times, was called a parable.

The Sleeping Watchman

Making hospital rounds late one night, I happened to find the night watchman lying on a bench, his eyes closed. My first impulse was to wake him up and fire him for sleeping on the job. I spoke with the night-duty nurse, asking how long he had been lying there. She said about an hour; he had complained of a stomach ache earlier, and she had given him some aspirin. We woke him up, I talked with him and checked his abdomen. Two hours later he was in a hospital bed minus his severely inflamed appendix. I was glad I had not given in to my first impulse. I was doubly glad, many years later after I had moved on to other work, to hear from a reliable source that he was now the pastor of the town's church and had increased its membership ten-fold to about one thousand.

I reflected on that incident last night (January 11, 2015) after watching TV's Sixty Minutes presentation about  the ongoing conundrum of how to fix the Affordable Care Act. One interviewee said the good news is that ten million more people now have medical insurance. The bad news is that there's no way to pay for the increasing cost of medicine. I thought at first that the man merely had a knee-jerk Tea Party reaction to increased taxes, but no.

But he went on to enumerate what both parties in Congress have failed to do in the past six (or more) years. No price controls on pharmaceuticals, in order to placate the pharmaceutical lobbyists. No ceiling on lawsuit punitive damages except in Texas and a couple other states, where it has worked very well to keep down cost of medical malpractice insurance. That was to please the lawyers. Hospital overcharges, usually summed up in a few lines on your bill. All three of my own daughters are RN's with executive hospital experience, and they give me long lists of ways to cut hospital charges, from the price of a single pain pill, to the cost of "spare no expense, doctor!" in prolonging the life of an obviously terminal patient in the critical care unit. Read your hospital bill, and ask for an itemization. Question the necessity of multiple tests.


Is there any logical reason why a medicine manufactured in USA should be twice as expensive as it is across  the border in Canada (or anywhere else)? Is there any reason why the VA or any other government agency should be forbidden from seeking mass discounts on purchases of drugs or medical equipment?

Americans do not have "the best medical care in the world." By and large it's good care, but not the best. Congress often behaves like I almost did with my "sleeping watchman." More often they act like sleeping watchmen themselves, be they Republican or Democrat .

These topics and others are expanded in my 2008 book Access to Medical Care, available on line and on Kindle.
Your comments are welcomed.  Keith Dahlberg MD

The Cold War Comes to Burma

Given the present interchange between Russia's Vladimir Putin  and President Obama, the following true story from 1961 may be of interest.

2 p.m. February 15, 1961: Squadron-Leader Tin Maung Aye, accompanied by the commander of the 5th Kachin Rifles, Major Aye Win, were flying reconnaissance in a Burma Air Force Cessna southeast of Kengtung. Over the Mong Hpayak area, they spotted a field with strips of cloth laid out to spell “D Z” and realized that the Kuomintang forces were preparing a supply drop zone. They returned to Kengtung airstrip and sent up three BAF fighter planes with orders to force any KMT aircraft they encountered to land at Kengtung. The squadron patrolled the area for about a half-hour with no success. Then, just when they were about to return to base, they spotted a green four-engine plane enter Burmese airspace from the south and make two air drops. Squadron-leader Maung Thein radioed the intruder to identify itself but got no reply. The three Burmese Sea Fury fighters closed in and were fired upon but not hit. When they fired back, the intruder made a U-turn, heading for Thailand. In a second pass, both the intruder and one fighter were damaged and crashed just inside Thai airspace. The Burmese pilot, Noel Peters, died in the crash. One of the other fighters managed to reach Kengtung with part of its tail shot away, the third fighter was undamaged..

The Burmese army and the KMT often fought on the ground but this was their only air battle, at least during the years I lived in Kengtung. The KMTs, of course, were the remnants of General Chiang Kai Shek’s anti-Communist Chinese forces supported by Taiwan. They had had little effect on the Chinese Communist army since the 1949 Communist takeover, but often harassed the Shans and mountain people of Kengtung State.

Radio Voice of America that night announced that the Burma Air Force had shot down an unarmed plane bearing relief supplies to refugees in Northeast Burma. I could see the damaged fighter parked beside the local airstrip, and the Burmese newspapers were full of reports of the battle and the death of Pilot-Officer Peters. I knew VOA had it wrong, possibly misinformed by Taiwan, its ally in the so-called “Cold War” of communism vs. democracy in the mid-twentieth century.

By the time Burmese officials could inspect the wreckage across the border in Thailand, KMTs had stripped the four-engine plane of identifying markings and equipment. It appeared to be a modified World War B-24.

A Taiwanese group calling itself the Free China Relief Association acknowledged chartering the plane to supply “Chinese refugees.” Taipei news editorials compared the overflight of Burma to America’s use of U-2 spy planes over Russia, said the flights would continue and “if we are caught, we are caught.”

A week later the Burma Air Force flew military attaches of the United States, India, Indonesia and Thailand to Kengtung to inspect the damaged BAF fighter, and then on to Mong Paliao near the Laotian border, where they had recently captured a KMT base. There, reporters saw 75 mm guns, machine guns, mines, ammunition, radios and fuel drums, all bearing United States markings. The Nation, an English-language Rangoon newspaper, printed a photo of one label: “Commanding Officer, Erie Ordnance Depot, Port Clinton Ohio, TO: Officer in Charge, Air Freight Terminal, Travis AFB, California”. A Burmese reporter noted the American officials paid closest attention to equipment several years old, and said it could be bought by anyone at any surplus store. The reporter said they made no comment on items manufactured within the past year.

Burma had enough trouble fighting its own insurgent armies in those years without involving itself in conflicts between world powers. It wanted no part either of the United States and its allies, or of China and the Soviet Union. It declined foreign aid from either side whenever possible, and distanced itself from both. References to the “American Way of Life” made little impression in Burma. Burmese could read reports of American racial problems as well as anyone else, and were familiar with Russian maneuvers as well. No one could prove the United States knew what Taiwan was up to. But some thought that if it didn’t know, then of what use was the CIA?

In any case, there were protest demonstrations in front of the U.S. Embassy in Rangoon. A crowd of 3,000 demonstrators got out of hand. Before police controlled the riot, two demonstrators died and fifty three were hospitalized. Things quieted down until two months later, when U.S. Senator Fulbright publicly declared that he didn’t think it a good idea to send American boys to the jungles of Laos. The terrain was not suited to them, he said; better for them to fight in Vietnam, Thailand, or Burma.

Russia showed the world that it could make equally bad foreign relations blunders. In April 1959 TASS, the official Soviet news agency, implied that a prominent Burmese newspaper editor was in the pay of the U.S. Embassy. The TASS correspondent must have been dismayed when many Burma newspapers published front-page blasts against him personally and started two lawsuits for libel, pointing out that the source he quoted didn’t even exist.

About the same time, the Russian military attaché entered Rangoon General Hospital and, according to news reports, tried to pass along information (nature unknown) to Burmese Intelligence. He then jumped from a hospital window in an apparent escape attempt. His Russian comrades caught him and hustled him back to the Soviet Embassy, and from there to the airport at Mingaladon. Several reporters tried to question him there while he was being put aboard a plane, and his Russian escorts beat them up. Even pro-Communist Burmese newspapers then united with other Burmese to denounce the Soviet Union, and about forty reporters gathered at the Soviet Embassy to hurl tomatoes. The Russians emerged armed with broken chairs and joined battle. Police soon stopped the fight, but the Burma press gleefully pointed out that in Russia, May 5th is celebrated as “Freedom of the Press Day.”

It is not surprising that for many years Burma’s attitude toward the world powers was, in effect, “A pox on both your houses!”

A Shan Christmas Greeting

My Internet connection has been shut down for three days for something in the regional system, but is apparently fixed tonight. I have been working on a new book during the past two months, and have had few new posts. While working on the new MS, I shall bring a few stories from the past for your interest: the following is a Christmas letter home from Kengtung in Myanmar's Shan State, that I wrote fifty-five years ago - a different slant on the holiday.

Christmas in Kengtung December, 1960

Merry Christmas to all of you! There is no snow and few Christmas trees in Kengtung, but we are all looking forward to a pleasant time. Here, everyone visits everyone else and the Shan Christians are holding open house for the whole city, whether Buddhist, Animist, Christian or Muslim, and have bought more than one ton of noodles to feed the crowd. (Shans' favorite dish, called hkao sein, is a sort of spaghetti and meat sauce, though the spices and flavor are different from the Italian kind.) At the same time, they will have exhibits and movies in the church to tell non-Christians about the birth and life of Christ.

Susie, Patsy and Johnny are very impatient for Christmas to come. Already Susie is getting suspicious of the Santa Claus theory, though she is only six. The trouble is that all her playmates have been skeptical from the start, since they'd never heard of such an idea till Susie told them, and certainly had never ever experienced a visit from Saint Nick. Susie is also in the school pageant, and Patsy would very much like to be, just as she always wants to go to school, but she is too little for either. John, at the age of two, still takes things pretty much as they come.

Christmas Eve brings to mind the unsettling experience we had last year of being serenaded by a large number of drums and Scottish bagpipes at three in the morning. (At that hour, even one of each is a large number but there were more than that.) We awoke to the crashing strains of "For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow" outside our window, led by a bandmaster who kept time by loudly clapping his hands to the beat. Presumably, some of the Regimental Band members whose children had been treated at the hospital got together to celebrate with a few drinks and decided, "Let's go serenade the Doc." At three a.m., I'm afraid I could do nothing more cordial than pull the blankets over my head and pretend I was sleeping through it--quite an illogical pretense now that I think of it.

Everyone in Kengtung enthusiastically celebrates any holiday, including Christmas. No one refuses an extra chance to celebrate, especially one with all the pageantry the Burma Christians put into their celebration of Jesus' birth. Electricity is limited, but Christians decorate the outside of their houses by hanging dozens of lighted candles inside colored cellophane cylinders, to rival the Buddhists' October festival of lights.

Everyone holds open house. No one could possibly attend everything. One Christmas we were fed at seven different homes, and regretfully turned down an equal number. And that's only in Kengtung. We try to spend Christmas eve or part of Christmas day with our colleagues Paul and Elaine Lewis, seventeen miles up the mountain at Pangwai, and there are more invitations from neighbors there.

Many groups come caroling; some know little more than "Merry Christmas To You," (same tune as the birthday song). Others try an American melody or two when they get to our house, maybe in tune, maybe not. One group offered, "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones you used to do," and then faded into confusion as they tried to recall what rhymed with that. The older students at the school which Susie attended stay up all night, warming themselves around a fire, serenading neighbors and gratefully accepting cups of hot tea or cocoa from those who were still up.

The gifts are sometimes embarrassing. We have so much more of material goods than most of our neighbors, and are given so much more. People bring us baskets of oranges, eggs, or a live chicken on a bed of rice. We reciprocated with baskets of cookies or banana bread, and held a dinner for the hostel students. The ruler, Sawbwagyi Sao Sai Long himself, stopped by with a basket of avocados one Christmas, and our next-door neighbors sent us a live fish all Christmas-wrapped. (There was no doubt of its freshness at least). We put it in a tub of water where Susie and Patsy watched it wave a fin at them as it swam lazily back and forth.)

The more cosmopolitan mission compound church holds Christmas morning services in simultaneous translations into Burmese, Shan, Lahu and Chinese, but its main event is the Christmas pageant. Susie was in the angel chorus one year, her blond head standing out among the little Shans and Lahus, and Lois and I of course had to attend all three performances that season. The first night, the pageant ended very impressively, with people of all the ethnic groups of Kengtung bringing their gifts to baby Jesus as the music built to a climax. The second night, when VIP arm chairs had been assembled and the first two rows were filled with invited city elders and assorted officials, the pageant director seemed to feel that more was needed.

The curtain drew to a close on the final scene. Moments later it opened to reveal four schoolteachers, each with one foot propped on a chair, guitars at the ready. I had a premonition of disaster, which was confirmed when the quartet broke into a spirited version of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" complete with sound effects. I don't know what the visiting officials thought. I privately thought the director had lost his mind.

Christmas is also a time for reflecting how many people here have still not been reached by God. The thirty-year-old man dying of cancer, the boy half-crazed with fear after threats of torture by rebel soldiers, the woman who believes her disease is an evil spirit eating her insides--what do you tell them? The idea of a loving God who cares for them is so foreign to all they have been taught, and seemingly is refuted by the very situation in which they find themselves. It's not easy to try to explain, even in one's own native language. Still, it's not all discouraging. This week, a ten-year-old boy opened his eyes to see for the first time in three years, after getting the vitamin A he had so badly lacked. A middle-aged clerk, out of work for seven years because of his swollen draining tuberculous knee, now walks free of pain because of what, with God's guidance and help, you and I have done for him. The salvaged are rather few, but we must continue to do what we can. May God bless you all during the coming year.