To give a brief historical and political background on Burma – the country has been ruled by a military dictatorship since 1962.  In 1988, there was a massive uprising – students who were calling for an end to military rule and the establishment of a democracy.  Thousands of demonstrators were killed.

In 2007, there were again massive protests, this time for sudden doubling of fuel prices.  Thousands of people took to the streets and were joined days later by a great number of monks.  (The estimated total number of monks in Burma, according to the film, is about 400,000).   Despite warnings by the military, people continued to take to the streets.  Eventually the military just kept firing shots into the crowds until they dispersed.  Even monks were beaten and killed.

Political dissent in Burma?  Obviously a big no-no.  Also a big no-no?  Non-government controlled news.  Burma VJ centers on the 2007 protests and a group of underground video reporters called the Democratic Voice of Burma.  Because all foreign TV crews are banned from entering the country, members of the DVB risked their lives to capture what was going on and smuggle their tapes out of the country. Their footage was broadcast not only around the world but also back into Burma itself via satellite.  It was incredibly brave what these reporters did, as three of them are now in jail, probably for life.   The rest of the DVB has disbanded, and some have fled the country.  As you see in the film during the protests, one man with a camera, believed to be a Japanese reporter, was shot dead in the street.

I don’t even know what to say about this film, except that 14 hours later, I am still thinking about it.  It was one of the most incredible documentaries I have ever seen.  I was reminded of the Latin American filmmakers of the mid to late 20th century, who used their cameras as guns that shot 24 frames per second.  And I was reminded why I wanted to be a filmmaker in the first place…

You can probably see Burma VJ on HBO (if you have it) or should be able to get it on DVD soon.  But definitely watch the trailer and you’ll see what I mean.

Look on any list of the Top 10 or Top 25 things to do in Singapore and all of them will inevitably include Sentosa, an island off the southern coast of Singapore.  It’s considered a bit of a tourist trap, but after having been there, I’m not so clear as to why.  Singapore is a major shipping port – one of the three largest in the world – depending on how you categorize the size (number of ships?  containers? square miles of port?).  Here’s a picture I ripped off of Wikipedia of where Sentosa sits in relation to the port.  Can you see that green hill in the background?  That’s Sentosa.

National Junior College decided to have their annual staff dinner on Sentosa.  We were at this really nice hotel, with this snazzy pool area, and this beautiful seating arrangement for our dinner, but the view over the water was totally incongruous with the setting.  I was looking out over ships.  And a power station.  And no beach.  Huh.

But who doesn’t love ice sculptures?  And buffets?  And watching their boss (pictured below) WIN THE LIMBO CONTEST?

Anyway, here are some of the highlights of October –

The Peranakan Museum – I went here with an American woman I met named Belle.  In the Malay speaking parts of Southeast Asia, the term ‘Peranakan’ means “child of” or “born of” and is used to refer to the people of mixed ethnic origins.  The focus of this particular museum is on the Malaysian – Chinese group, the biggest of Southeast Asia.  There was an exhibit of Peranakan jewellery called “Baba Bling”.  I did not add the emphasis which makes that title even more awesome.

A discussion at Unifem – a NGO supporting women’s issues.  The talk was led by a HIV positive Cambodian woman who was infected by her husband who died two years later.  She has been living with HIV for almost 9 years.  This woman was absolutely beautiful, and you’d never even know she was sick.  I went to this event alone but struck up a very interesting conversation with a Dutch woman who had volunteered for a year in India working with HIV positive patients.  With the current increasing infection rates in India, China, and Russia, it is projected that the focus of HIV will shift from sub-Saharan Africa to Asia.  I heard that on an iTunes U download from Stamford the other week.  iTunes U is quite possibly my new favoritest thing in the world. You know, besides peanut butter.

Opening night of ARTSingapore – Contemporary Asian Art fair – with VIP access!  I was invited by this very interesting Singaporean woman I met named Sharmini.  One of the best parts of the evening was getting to see where she lived and meeting her children.  The art was typical in terms of contemporary art for me – some I loved and some I absolutely hated.  But the coolest piece I saw was a sculpture by a Korean artist named Hwan Kwan Yi.  He makes these sculptures of squashed people that make you feel so tripped out and a little dizzy and nauseous!  But very cool just the same.  I pulled this photograph off the internet – with the other people standing there, you get more of a sense of what I’m talking about.  Right?!!!

Participated in the Pledge of Silence to raise money for Action for AIDS.  Unfortunately, it was the same day as my school wide staff dinner, so I thought it would be SUPER weird of me if I didn’t speak to anyone hahaha.   I pledged 4 hours of silence (no talking, no phone, no internet) and raised about $150.  Thanks to a little help from my friends…

Speaking of – I love forging my own path in Singapore and spending time with people who live here and engaging with the community (which is how I find out about most of these things).  But I also love that I have a built in network of PIA’ers, who, let me just say, know how to throw down!  This is a photo of me and Ana – my chemistry guru – at her surprise birthday party.  I also love this group photo, although it’s incomplete, and has a couple of PIA fellows from Thailand thrown in.

Upcoming in November:  My first Mandarin lessons! A walk with 75 diabetes patients at 7am in the Botanical Gardens!  A night of documentary screenings on Myanmar!  Stay tuned to find out how much I suck at Mandarin, how many tissues I will use when I cry through the documentaries, and if I’ve slept through my alarm clock and missed the walk…

During what they call “The Honeymoon Period”, I don’t have a ton of responsibility at school, since the classes I’ll be teaching won’t start until January.  But I still show up at school every day at 7:30am and when I’m not helping out the video kids, I spend my days reading.  I’m reviewing a lot of art history, but I’m also trying to wrap up some pesky projects…  Like sorting and re-naming all 700 digital photos from the summer.  (Hey, remember when we used to take photographs with film?)

In the spring while I was waiting for my visa, I was looking at some old photographs from my travels pre-2003.  Some of the prints, especially the ones from Asia ten years ago, were pretty beat up, and I started to scan them in an effort to do some retouching work on the scratches.  It’s pretty fun to look at these photos, as I plan my holiday trip to Bangkok, Laos, and Northern Vietnam…  I haven’t done traveling like that in a long time.  I forget what it’s like to take malaria pills and drink water with iodine and feel like I’m on a real adventure.  The feeling of What is going to happen today?!  I’m having trouble not day dreaming, reading books on the Vietnam war, and downloading movies like The Killing Fields,  even though I’ve already seen it.

This is the year I promised myself I would stop saying “someday I want to” and just started DOING IT ALREADY.

Friday night – Student Art Show Opening

The students decided to call their show “A Treatise on Drunken Ninja Rabbits, Disappearing trays of Milk Tea and Not Having Enough Time”.   The two works below are my favorites.**  The first time I saw the lights switched on in the five light boxes, I was absolutely blown away.  The effect was stunning.  The student had taken family photos and used a needle to poke holes in black paper.

**Unfortunately I had to delete these photos because their A-level grades have not been released.

The girls asked me to wear some earrings they made that had neon glow-in-the-dark filling that reminded me of all those raves of my early 20s.  At some point during the evening, I touched my neck and realized that my earring had broken, and that I was now covered in fluorescent glow stuff.  Yikes!  Nothing has happened to me yet though…

Saturday night – Deepavali, The Festival of Lights

As I described in a previous post, Singapore is a melting pot of cultures – including languages, cuisines, and public holidays.  Last month we celebrated the Chinese Moon Cake Festival, with the traditional moon cake deserts and dried barbecued pork.  This month is the Indian new year, Deepavali, the Festival of Lights.  (Deepavali is also known as Diwali).  Little India has been decorated for a month, colored lights and decorations lining Serangoon.  A bunch of us went down to Little India Saturday night to eat family style, including two ladies who were staying with me for weekend, both posted in Indonesia.  I had never met them before but it’s sort of an unspoken rule of PIA to offer your couch to those coming through town.

Oh, but Little India is no longer there because I ATE IT.

Sunday night – The Brollagio presents “I Not Stupid”

The Brollagio is what fellow PIA’ers Dan, Mark, Trevor, (and by extension) Steve have decided to call their apartment.  Dan shipped a projector from the US, so about 12? of us piled in there to watch a feature film about the Singaporean education system called I Not Stupid.  It was a very entertaining, very funny, very moving film, I thought, and I did end up tearing a bit in between handfuls of Cheetos.  It wouldn’t be appropriate for me as a teacher to comment on the education system in a public forum, but I will say that I hate seeing children getting beaten with a cane by their parents for doing poorly in school.  (or the dramatic rendering thereof).

Monday – Extra Day Off

I went to Orchard Road, the part of town that you might as well be on 5th Avenue.  Mall after mall after mall with Prada, Gucci, Gap, Nike, Borders, whatever.  It’s equally nice (when I am missing home) and kind of gross.  I ate lunch at this amazing food court called Food Republic, and then went with two girlfriends to see 500 Days of Summer while drinking a diet coke I got at a Subway.  So depressing.  It kind of makes me think that this is a good time to be in Asia – as these countries are all changing so rapidly.  I remember in 1993 seeing the huge McDonald’s in Beijing – at that time it was quite a novelty.  In Singapore there are McDonald’s now all over (of course), 7-11 is a big chain here as well, KFC, Burger King, Starbucks, etc.  Glad to see we’re taking over Asia, one fast food chain at a time… Ugh.

Last week I went out for lunch off campus with my colleague Yasmine.  You know, whenever I think that I’m doing “Asia Light” in Singapore, I remember that the experience I get to have getting to know people here is pretty cool.  It doesn’t matter if you’re Chinese, Tamil, Malay, or Singaporean, everyone speaks pretty good English, if not fluent.  So we can dive right into talking about our lives, our work, our students, our feelings (Landi, do you miss hearing about my feelings?), on a much deeper level than say, if I were learning a couple phrases of Thai each week.

So as I was saying, Yasmine and I went for Indian food.  And, of course, while we were eating we were talking about food.  I told her that I had tried durian, thought it was disgusting, spit it out, and that my friend told me to “grow a pair”.  She had never heard this phrase, so I explained what it meant.

Yesterday, I went out to lunch with my other colleagues Pheng Guan and Yilin.  Although she was eating a bowl of fish porridge and sharing a plate of duck with Pheng Guan, Yilin wanted to try the raw fish they served.  (Yilin is about 90 pounds but eats about 5 times as much as me).  When I made my I-am-totally-grossed-out face in reference to the raw fish, Pheng Guan told me to “Grow a pair”.

Apparently, the phrase “Grow a pair” has been spreading like wild fire through the first floor teachers lounge.  Hilarious.

Thanks, Billy.

Action for AIDS runs a lot of different programs, but I specifically wanted to volunteer at the anonymous testing site as well as the buddy program for people with HIV.  There is a huge stigma against AIDS in Singapore.  I had to get an HIV test to get my employment pass.  If you are not a citizen or permanent resident of Singapore, and you happen to test positive for HIV while you’re here (say, for example, you need to re-apply for a work pass), you will be deported and banned from Singapore.  None of the health insurance companies in Singapore cover treatment options for HIV, and treatment is about $1000 – $1500 a month.  If you get generic drugs from Thailand maybe $200-300.

This afternoon was my first training session at the clinic.  My volunteer position will mainly consist of counseling people who come in for testing, talking to them about why they are getting tested, trying to gauge what they know about HIV and AIDS, and explaining to them how the blood test works.  I will then send them to another room to get the blood test, and when the results are back, I will tell them whether their test is positive or negative.  This morning the clinic manager told me, You never forget the first time you have to tell someone their test is positive.  I will learn what to say in my training, but I’m not sure I will ever be prepared….

When I’m not counseling, I’ll either be helping out at reception or I’ll actually be conducting the blood tests.  At the clinic they use the rapid blood test, which is a finger prick and then a drop of blood placed on a litmus strip.  The blood will then travel down the strip, and if there is a line in the first circle, the test is working properly.  If the second circle is blank, the test is negative.  If there is a line in the second circle, the test is positive. The results take about 15 minutes.

Because I signed a code of conduct agreement, I’m not at liberty to discuss who I see, what the results are on any given day, or what people tell me about their sex lives.  Not that I would blog about that anyway.  But I will say, some of the things I heard today were a bit shocking.  Yes, I know that people have unprotected sex and oral sex and people have sex with sex workers in Asia.  A lot of sex workers.  That’s not shocking.  What I’m referring to is some of the things I heard today about how people think they might have contracted the virus.   Somebody today thought he might have gotten it from a lubricant used during a hand job at a massage parlor – that maybe the lubricant was infected and it got into his penis hole. Yes, he used the word penis hole.  And thank god my face was covered with a mask (H1N1 paranoia) because I almost burst out laughing.  Penis hole.  Come on, that phrase is funny.

But the fact that he thought that is not funny at all.  Sex education, like drug and alcohol education, is practically non existent in schools here.   So…. a huge part of my job will be to educate every person that I see about HIV and STDs, and, of course, to advocate safe sex practices at all times. But as we all know, change is hard.  And slow.

I’ll be at the clinic at least once a week, every Saturday, but I have a feeling I’m going to end up there a bit more often…

As for the texture, I was pretty surprised when I picked up the piece.  I expected it to have the same firmness as melon or pineapple, but it was really soft and mushy.  “The texture of toothpaste covered in hair” is how my neighbor, Colin, described it.

I think durian is like Singapore’s version of marmite – you either love it or hate it.  But either way, you’ve at least got to try it once.  So did I love it or hate it?  I think the following picture sequence sums up it pretty well.

In addition to restaurants, Singapore is full of places called hawker centers.  These are local food courts – sort of like if you took a food court out of an American mall, filled it with Indian, Chinese, and Malay food stalls, took off the windows, and stuck it in various neighborhoods all around the country.  The food is ridiculously cheap – dinner usually costs me about $2 or $3.

Despite the convenience of our local hawker center, however, I’ve also occasionally been trying my hand in the kitchen with a few Asian cookbooks I picked up here.  The hardest part is actually finding the ingredients and the corresponding names in the local supermarkets – like coriander is called Chinese Parsley here, not to be confused with Chinese Celery, which looks the same but is pretty flavorless.  And galangal is just a fancy word for blue ginger.

After a somewhat rough start (sliced my finger open not once but TWICE on a new cutting knife from Japan, forgot they used Celsius here when I was toasting cashews for a garnish, burnt the first try of eggplant curry on the wok), I seem to be getting the hang of it now!

I’ve had success with (the second try of) Balti eggplant curry, Thai sweet and sour soup, and a steamed tofu dish.  This extremely productive Sunday, I’ve been preparing meals for the work week – braised bok choy and spicy Indonesian tempeh.  Although they are both so tasty, I’m not sure if either will last ‘til tomorrow, especially since I swam for over an hour this morning…

I am an art teacher at National Junior College, which is equivalent to junior and senior years of high school in the US.  NJC is one of the few junior colleges in Singapore that have a special Art Elective Program (AEP).  Basically this means that my students are among the best artists of their age group, and they have specifically applied to be in this program.   With all the different levels and classes and abbreviations, it took me a while to figure out what exactly I’d be doing.  My simplified explanation might even be confusing as well.

When the students enter as juniors, they start taking an art history class that will last for two years.  They also do two years of studio classes.  At the end of this two year period, they take their A-Level exams, the most important thing they do.  Nothing else really seems to matter that much compared to this exam.  For the Art A-Level exam, their grade is based on two things:  their art history exam (which counts for 40% of their grade) as well as an art project (which counts for the remaining 60%).

Since the school year runs from January to December, the A-level exams are administered at the end of November, early December, meaning that I won’t actually start teaching until next January.

But in January, I’ll be teaching art history to the juniors (from Classical Art to Modern!) and an art theory elective to the seniors.  I also will be in charge of all the studio classes that cover video, as well as the extracurricular Digital Video Club.  (Now that wasn’t too confusing, was it?!)

So until the end of the term, I am shadowing the other teachers, getting to know the kids, helping out with their A-level video projects.  But I was also asked to prepare a two hour lecture on Asian Art.  Yes, Asian art – covering Islamic art, Indian art, and Chinese and Japanese painting, across all time periods.  (Did I mention I took that Islamic art and architecture class 10 years ago? Ahhh!  What does it all mean?!)  But a challenge is what I asked for this year, and a challenge is exactly what I am getting.

I have much more to say about the school, the classes, my students and their work, but that’s enough for now…