Myanmar index

Babbling seer

1 dollar: average daily wage in Myanmar.

1 dollar: average daily wage for goverment school teachers in Myanmar.

$80: monthly salary of Ko Htun Htun at a boarding school in Mandalay Division for working 24 hours a day, seven days a week as a teacher and dorm supervisor. (Htun Htun was forced to give up being a tour guide last fall when tourism collapsed in the wake of the uprising.)

$60: Amount Htun Htun sends back each month to his wife and three children a hundred miles away in Taunggyi. (There is no place for them at the boarding school. Htun Htun sleeps in the dorm with the students.)

10 cents: bus fare from the outskirts of the city to downtown Yangon before last fall's price hikes.

20 cents: bus fare after the increase.

$2.50: price for a gallon of gas last August.

Over $5.00: price in September. (Food and other costs went up more or less proportionately.)

50 cents: cost to enter Mahabandoola Garden, a "public" park in downtown Yangon. (When we visited it, about 20 people were relaxing in this three- or four-acre nicely manicured oasis.)

$50 million: estimated value of wedding gifts received by General Than Shwe's daughter a few years ago.

$3 to $5: Daily wage paid to hundreds of thugs hired by the government to beat monks and other demonstrators last September and October. (Each man hired also received a free breakfast and a club.)

Between 11 and several hundred: number of non-violent demonstrators killed by police, military or paid gangs.

4: number of times the power went off for anywhere from one to four hours in Malamyine (Moulmein) on March 11, 2008. (Rolling blackouts are a way for the government to save fuel. No one knows when they're coming, but in many areas the electricity is off about half the time.)

6 miles: distance part way up the mountain from the "base camp" at the Shrine of the Golden Rock in Kayin state, a holy site where a huge gilded boulder is balanced atop a single hair of the Buddha.

$3: Cost to ride in a truck cab up the mountain.

$1: cost to ride on plank seats in the truck bed with 50 other pilgrims. (We rode up in the cab, down on the planks.)

Unrecorded number: the serial number of the truck we rode down on. (After the smoking truck ascending barely made it to the top, our guide checked the serial number of the descending vehicle to see if was a "lucky number." It was.)

$18: cost for a white person to be carried the last, steep mile (no trucks allowed) on a palenquin by four slender, sweating brown people in the 100-degree-plus heat. (I rode, Joe walked.)

10 pm: the time on March 9 when the monk-noviate initiation ceremony at Thamanya monastery in the building next to the one where we were sleeping took a break for the night. The ceremony included powerfully amplified music on percussion instruments that repeated clonk-clonk-clonk-bonk-clonk many times.

3:55 am: the time the ceremony---and the music---resumed.

2004: the year the venerable Thamanya Hill Sayadow (abbot) Bhaddanta Vinaya died. His corpse is on display for pilgrims at a shrine near the monastery, and despite the sayadow's not having been embalmed, he "still has not spoiled."

$3: amount foreigners (but not Burmese) must pay to enter Kaw-Gon Cave, in Kayin state, where over a thousand 18th-century Buddha statues are arrayed. Pilgrims come from all over to pray here. A monk told us many foreigners complain about the fee.

$0: donation to Kaw-Gon monastery made by the Myanmar prime minister during a visit. He admonished the monks over the dirty floors.

2: number of cigarettes smoked simultaneously by a babbling seer and counselor giving Dr. Phil-style marriage and personal advice to pilgrims who queue up inside the cave and pay for this service.

$3,500: cost of roof repairs at Seindon Mibaya pagoda and monastery in Moulmein to keep this ramshackle architectural and spiritual Burmese treasure from crumbling even further. ($500 came from Aung San Soo Kye's brother in New Jersey.)

Hundreds of thousands of dollars: estimated value of wooden carvings and other pieces of the 18th-century pagoda stolen by thieves with police complicity and sold to Westerners in Bangkok antique shops.

1: number of women from Lenox, Massachusetts Joe ran into at Seindon Mibaya on March 11 while spending the day there photographing the monks' daily life. (He thinks her name was Lisa Galvin.)

1: number of times we have heard of anybody's sandals being stolen when left outside a Buddhist temple anywhere in Southeast Asia. The theft victim was a Greek-American geologist living in Bangkok who travels often to Myanmar for "research." He told us, "The government thinks I'm a spy." Is he? "No, those guys approached me in Bangkok, but they don't know anything." Good answer.