The next collaboration was also through Fondació Myanmar. It is a project called Green Pastor carried out in a village called Tee Gyi, near the village of Shwebo. Our contact was Martin, a very nice Burmese. He is the project coordinator and lives in this village together with his family.

He explained that they provide education to the children of the village by supporting the local school and providing extra classes in the afternoon. They have also opened a daycare center where they take care of the children from 3 to 5 years old while their parents are working. In order for children to attend school, they provide support to their families through a goat breeding program. This one tries to promote and generate a business for these families as goat breeders, in addition to the other activities of the field, and thus receive a salary.

To get to the town from Mandalay, 110 km away, we followed the indications that Martin gave us. First we took a local bus to the town of Shwebo. The trip lasted 3 hours, in a pretty scenic bus, full of locals, with a tendency to get dizzy and to expel the breakfast prematurely …

At least one person per trip shares the breakfast with the landscape … without any obvious reason, we only saw it in Myanmar … Once in Shwebo we hope that Martin will pick us up taking us a delicious tea from Myanmar, green tea with condensed milk … an exquisite caloric bomb.

Up to the village we went on two bikes, one of Martin and one of his brother, which did not have a double seat, but a platform to carry merchandise. The journey lasted 40 minutes, and I assure you it was not easy, the platform was hard as a rock. The first road was by asphalt road and then by car road, literally, we were dodging carts pulled by oxen.

The platform was a nightmare … Also part of the road was impracticable, we had to get off the bike to get it out of the mud and continue, the adventure began in the village of Tee Gyi !!!!

Once there, we went to Martin’s house, where some of the adults of the town were waiting for us, curious, they came to receive us … What a spectacle of people, what laughter we stuck together, especially with one that had a lot of character.

There was also Ségolène, a French girl we met in Vientiane, collaborating with Enfants du Mekong and who had put us in touch with Fondació. She was living there for a week … how brave …

Then we explored the area. We went to see the school, which was a brick building with an esplanade in front. All the furniture was made of wood, we found it very beautiful, with few resources and very basic, but the image of that place in the middle of the field, with the children “uniformed” in green and white was very bucolic.

The uniform of schools throughout the country is: the bottom, skirt or lodgy, green and the top white shirt, and usually the clothes have a hole that another … also carry a cross bag, usually handmade for them, sometimes they hang it on their foreheads.

When they saw us arrive, the children went crazy! and of course, we started playing with them. The teacher tried to calm them, but without success, and we decided to leave so that they could recover normality and continue with their tasks, we would see each other in a few minutes after class …

Martin’s farm and his family is where the corral with the goat farm is. There are about 40 goats, 4 cows, 3 pigs and a few chickens that got everywhere …

The place was very picturesque, perfect for the workshop and the show !!! The problem was finding a space with shade, avoiding the scorching sun, and being free of obstacles. Finally we decided to do it on an area covered with grain of wheat, or something similar, with the occasional boundary of a cow, which enjoyed the shade of a large tree.

Martin gathered all the children to do the workshop, they were euphoric, super excited to be with us !! Any small game that we proposed they accepted immediately … very funny.

We started the exercises of the workshop, it was impossible to get them to concentrate, they did not stop, they all shouted every word we said … hahaha … Since they did not speak English, Martin translated us, but it was complicated, each explanation took a long time , so we let go of complications and we oriented everything to games …

Despite the small difficulties, we had all very well, between games and laughter, the children were delighted! And the parents who were around all the time looking around kept smiling …

After the workshop, all the children dispersed, as did the adults, while we reminded them that in 30 minutes we were going to do the performance. We prepared the bank on the grain area as a stage, and we put other banks as tiers for the public …

We prepared, we had everything ready and some children had already arrived, however they were still too few to begin with. We decided to wait a while, and yes, there were some more, but still not enough, in total there were about 12, compared to the more than 30 people we expected.

After a while of waiting Martin recommended us to start so that the rest were attracted by music and laughter … And so we did, we started the show. The first laughs came very quickly, and effectively that attracted the rest of the people, almost the entire village, in the end the audience was about 50 people.

The adults, especially the women, laughed loudly, it was a success, they started laughing. They loved that we were volunteering, it seemed to them that they would see someone from their village on stage with us dead of shame … An excellent audience … At the end of the number they asked us for a second part, they wanted more!

We told them that the next time the story would continue … While a group of children with nicked smiles, wild hair and dresses full of mud and dust surrounded us asking for more play. So we spent the next half hour crashing palms and tickling between chases. And our collaboration ended, with dozens of smiling faces around us recreating number scenes while commenting and continuing to laugh.

We stayed to sleep in Martin’s house, like Ségolène. The family slept in the dining room, and we in the kitchen. During the dinner appeared on the floor of the dining room, next to Ségolène, a centipede 15 cm long and 2 cm wide that apparently is poisonous, a true prehistoric monster, without exaggeration! They all threw themselves to kill him at the moment, but that did not prevent poor Ségolène from being scared white …

The night was not very good. The mosquito net did not isolate us from the smaller insects, so we were covered in them … and one of the goats was angry with the world and did not shut up all night! However, we had next to it an open window showing us a spectacular sky, all the stars were visible, besides the precious light of some firefly from time to time …

The next day, from the hand of a group of children, we took a walk through the village, among cows, huts of straw and bamboo, looms and large wooden containers where as a mortar they crushed the grain … another world .. another century …

And we went back to Mandalay along the same road but in the opposite direction … An unforgettable experience … We do not stop learning.