Happy New Year Resolution

In 2009, I made the following resolutions:
(1) Free Alcohol in January, February, March and April of 2009.

(2) I will try to be more a doer, rather than a sayer.

(3) I will post some Arakanese pages in this blog.

For the resolution 1, because of one of my mistakes, I had to be free alcohol from January to June (two months longer than original resolution plan).
For the 3rd, I did.
For the 2nd resolution, I do not feel I did enough.

Alright. For 2010, I will have only One Resolution, which is – I will fight Oo Thein Maung of 2009, till I win!

Thank you!

Meanings of the Given Names (X, Y, Z)

Yates = Gate

People often ask me about - what does my name mean. Sometimes, I also ask other peoples if his or her name means something. These are not important but it is good to know about each other in our cultures of mankind. For my friends who want to know, the meanings of (Western) given names:

Men’s Names (X,Y,Z)

Xavier: (Spanish-Arabic) New house; brilliant
Xerxes: (Greek-Persian) King
Yates: (Old English) Gate
Zaccheus: (Hebrew) The righteous one; pure
Zebulun: (Hebrew) Habitation
Zenas: (Greek) Gift of Zeus, the chief Greek god.

Women’s Names (X,Y,Z)

Xenia: (Greek) Hospitable
Yolande: (Latin-French) Violet
Yvette, Yvonne: (Hebrew-French) Gracious gift of God
Zena: (Persian) Woman
Zoe: (Greek) Life

Source: Smith, Elsdon C. “Vocabulary of Given Names.” The World Book Dictionary.1968.

Note: All these pages were copied. Nevertheless, at least, I finished the job from A to Z of meanings of the given (western) names today, exactly on the last day of the year of 2009. Whatever it is, I take personal appreciation from this. Thanks everybody!

After Fall, Spring will be coming!

Today, I finish my official studying for this semester as a college student. In this semester, I take three classes those are Tennis, Introduction to Education, and English Composition (two).

Tennis class was done earlier than the other two. It was great that at least, I could play tennis much better than before.

Introduction to education class was also finished on last Monday. I feel I did well in that class. Our instructor was also very kind and enthusiastic in teaching since she taught in high school and at college as well. I took that class because of my interest in teaching. I was a teacher in Burma. I taught English, Math and History to 6th, 7th and 8th graders. I had a successful history in teaching. Till I was in Thailand, I was receiving more than 50 letters from my students and almost all letters described that my students wanted to come back and teach them. I miss my students and I deeply and honestly wish them to be successful in their lives.

I took English composition class intently in order to improve my English writing. It was also a great class. Our instructor was a teacher and also a writer. Her explanations are always very good and her hand writing is among one of the most beautiful kinds. At least I learned in this class the strategies of writing and evaluating on the sources, and how to research systematically.

Well, life is full with struggling and learning itself, after this semester, there will be many other semesters are waiting for me to give more challenges, different touches and lessons. The most important thing is to be honest by myself and to try my best in any field, any time for any reason.

Special thanks to my instructors / teachers!

I also give my thanks to all my friends and foes. Thanks all!

Religious Study: The Middle Path

Recently, I visited to Wheaton Warrenville Sough High School in order to educationally observe. The following is my brief experience from one of the classrooms.

In a religious class, students learned and discussed the concepts, ideas and terms of the five major world religions. On the day that I observed, students were very interestingly learning about the terms of The Ka’aba, Ramadan, Hajj, Kosher Laws, Jehovah / Yahweh, Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, Diwali, Ahimsa, The Middle Way, Book of Revelation and Gospels. I saw many critical questions, which students made on the board and their discussions were really high and standardize.

I was asked by the teacher to introduce by myself with the class and also to contribute something in the class about the religions. I said that I was a Buddhist monk about one year. Then, teacher asked me to make an explanation about the “Middle Path” of the Buddhism. “Middle Path” is one of the prime concepts, which the Buddha taught. Probably it was theme of Buddhism.

The key meaning of middle path was ‘to avoid the extremism’ in any part of our lives and conditions; even to love, hate, like or dislike on anything, any person, any opinion, any fact, and so on, because no man or nothing is perfect. No body or nothing is perfect to be extremely loved or hated or liked or disliked. Besides, nothing is permanent; everything was changing; is changing; and will be changing. As soon as we extremely love or hate or like or dislike on something or somebody, it makes us to not to see the truth. We could be seeing, thinking and pointing unfairly because of that extremism, which we are having. Reversely, as soon as we avoid that extremism, we are able to see things, cases, problems, persons clearly. Therefore, it makes us to see the truth and it also always makes the appropriate way. Moreover, the ‘middle path’ also reminds us to not to be extremely sad because of very poor conditions in our lives and at the same time, to not to be extremely happy because of very good conditions in our lives. Nothing will be everlasting. In time, it will be changed or erased. Hence, that middle-path approach also makes us to be appropriate living in our daily lives.

It was my contribution about the Buddha’s middle path in that religious class.
Picture: http://adreampuppet.files.wordpress.com/2007/01/buddha-3.JPG

Expectation Theory

In this semester, I am taking the classes of Introduction to Education, and English Composition. Both classes are very interesting.
One of vocabularies those we have to learn in Education class is ‘expectation theory.’ After I read about this theory, I would like to tell or discuss with you as the followings:

Natural Matters

In one of the Buddha’s teaching verses, it said that:

There are four kinds of rats –
Some kinds of rats dig the tunnels, but they do not live in the tunnels.
Some kinds of rats do not dig the tunnels, but they live in the tunnels.
Some kinds of rats dig the tunnels, and they also live in the tunnels.
Some kinds of rats do not dig the tunnels, and they also do not live in the tunnels.

So, what will be or which kind will be your expectation when you see a rat?

According to that verse, there are also four kinds of rains –
Some kinds of rains could make thunders, but they do not actually rain.
Some kinds of rains could not make thunders, but they actually rain.
Some kinds of rains could make thunders, and they rain as well.
Some kinds of rains could not make thunders, and they do not rain as well.

So, what will be your expectation when you hear or see a thunder or cloud?

In that verse, it is also expressed about four kinds of fruits –
Some kinds of fruits have the color of green, but they are actually ripe.
Some kinds of fruits have the color of ripe, but they are actually green; which are unripe.
Some kinds of fruits have the color of green, and they are really green.
Some kinds of fruits have the color of ripe, and they are really ripe.

So, what will be your expectation when you see or get a fruit?

All these rats, rains and fruits are truly natures. What can we truly expect from nature? The above examples show that we can expect from nature, almost nothing. In other words, we can expect something from nature, but carefully because whichever you expect, literally, there is only 25 percent of chance with you.

Manmade Matters

After an excerpt of sharing about natural matter, let’s continue the manmade things.

Firstly, let us read the prime definition of expectation theory.
Expectation theory: First made popular by Rosenthal and Jacobson, this theory holds that a student’s academic performance can be improved if a teacher’s attitudes and beliefs about that student’s academic potential are modified.
Inversely, if a teacher have lower expectation about a student’s academic potential for any reason, such as background of certain student’s, that can make academically suffering in student’s performance.

Alright. One thing that theory did not discuss was, how about if a teacher has extreme highly expectation on a student’s academic potential (for any reason), and the student does not perform well, even at the averaged level? Could the consequences make suffering for student or for teacher or for both? Thinkable matters. Similarly, it happened between Chicagoans or people of the United States and the result of hosting city for 2016 games.

Nowadays, the other matter that I would like to discuss with my readers is, about the color of the clothes. What do you or what can you expect or what do you believe in a person who is wearing a red shirt, or a blue shirt, or a black shirt, or a green shirt or a yellow shirt? It might be important with the color of shirt for some reason for some situation. Nevertheless, in my very own opinion, and especially for the person like me, the color of shirt is not important almost at all. The key is - where I stand for? What I believe in? What is inside of me? Not the color of my shirt. I am talking here how America has freedom to the other world and if I, by myself do not have freedom to wear whatever color shirt I have or I want, what is that freedom? I am not that much clever person. I cannot or I do not want to sell ‘medicine of freedom’ with deep disease inside me. I might be a foolish man indeed. I do not want any kind of position or money for it. But it is me. Let me die poorly, early and simply. I am not talking here about some kind of color and suit I have to wear for specific reason or for job nature or for a ceremony and so on. It is culture and in certain condition. I will be there at that time. But in daily life, I must have my freedom choice. Nobody can control me to wear this kind of color or that kind of suit. But at the same time, what color ever I am wearing, I will be standing for what I believe in, such as ‘Freedom’ and ‘Democracy.’ Any person, any nationality, any skin color, any gender, any religious person, wherever they may live, who stand for ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy,’ is/are my friend/s.

As our former president, JFK said in his speech in Berlin, “Freedom has difficulty, democracy is not perfect,” but we have more freedom than many other societies in the world, with empathy, sympathy, support and respect among human beings. How long it may take us, let us expect for more freedom world, with democracy and dignity.

Thank you!

Picture: http://stanleyinternational.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/mounteverest3.jpg

Meanings of the Given Names (W)

Wilbur = Resolution

People often ask me about - what does my name mean. Sometimes, I also ask other peoples if his or her name means something. These are not important but it is good to know about each other in our cultures of mankind. For my friends who want to know, the meanings of (Western) given names:

Men’s Names (W)

Wallace: (Old English-Scottish) A Welshman
Walter: (Germanic) Rule, army
Ward: (Germanic) Guardian
Washington: (Old English) Homestead of Wassa’s people; manor of the Wessyngs
Wayne: (Old English) Wagon
Wendell: (Germanic) Wanderer
Wesley: (Old English) West meadow
Whitney: (Old English) White island
Wilbur: (Germanic) Resolution, bright
Willard: (Germanic) Resolution, hard
William, Willis: (Germanic) Resolution, helmet
Winston, Winstan: (Old English) Winec’s homestead; friend, stone
Woodrow: (Old English) Row of trees

Women’s Names (W)
Wanda: (Germanic) Stem; a wanderer
Wendy: (Welsh) White-browed
Wilhelmina, Wilma: (Germanic) Resolution, helmet
Winifred: (Germanic-Celtic) Friend, peace; reconciliation

Source: Smith, Elsdon C. “Vocabulary of Given Names.” The World Book Dictionary. 1968.
Picture: http://www.cev.be/data/Image/Hands.jpg

Quote of the day

“We stand by the people of Afghanistan today, and we will do so tomorrow!”

Ban Ki-moon
General Secretary of the United Nations

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8329543.stm

Picture: http://www.judiciaryreport.com/images/Ban%20Ki-moon.gif

Today, I turn 5.

On October 26, 2004, my feet touched American soil that the greatnesses were existed; I breathed American air, which carried freedom and freshness; I drank American water, which had coldness and belief; I ate American food, which supplied power and energy; I read books in an American library those gave new light and new hopes; (in a little park), I laughed with American children who will make great contributions in the world’s community; for the first time. In other words, I was born in America on that day, and today, I have become a five year old boy in the United States. My life has meaningfully begun!

I am really happy here. There are many things I love and like in the United States. The top three things I like the most in the U.S. are:

(1) Freedom: The most valuable abstract noun to posses in a human’s life is FREEDOM. We can do everything whatever we want here as long as it is not an unlawful matter. We can create anything whatever we want. We have freedom to read; freedom to write; freedom to agree and disagree (with any person, any group, (president or government or any authority), any belief, any opinion, any mean); freedom to speech; freedom to travel; freedom to explore; and many others. (I will share with my readers later about freedom of the Buddha.)

(2) Democratic Government: From a school to a village, from a city to congress, from senate to white house, any level of it, we elect our own authority/s by ourselves, here. This means - WE OWN THEM. This is a country that the government is fully elected by the people.

(3) Sources: In the United States, what do you want to do? Just you exactly need to know what you want (to do). We have broadest sources in the world here. What language do you want to speak? Any nationality of any corner of the world is living here. This is the most colorful country in the world. What kind of religious building do you want to go or visit? There are many churches, temples, mosques and many others, here. What kind of books do you want to read? There are enormous libraries in any community of the country, with hundreds of thousands, or millions of books, tapes, videos, DVDs and many other learnable materials, here.

This is America! It is a free land! I am five year old, here now and I believe that as a human being, my life has truly, energetically and meaningfully begun!

God bless America!!!

Happy Birthday Your Honor!

Today is Mohandas K Gandhi's birthday. He was born on October 2, 1869. Died? Never. He will be alive all the time through out mankind's history.

He was one of the greatest human beings in 20th century who made his country and people independence with non-violent movements.

I will say he was also one of the luckiest persons because though he made non-violent movements in 20th century, he did not have to deal with non-violent (and some violent) games in 21st century's world history.

He will be smiling from the heaven.

Happy Birthday Your Honor!

Picture: http://ambassadors.net/archives/images/gandhi_hero.jpg

Chicago is not selected for 2016 Olympics Games: It does not mean we lose Everything!

We are still a Great City!

Congratulations!!

Every bid or every competition has only one of two choices: Win or Lose. We are not selected for 2016 Olympics Games but it does not mean we lost everything. Till we keep our good spirit, we can regain anything back.

As we expected too much from this as well as we are human beings, we may be disappointed from this defeat but not to give up; not to lose our whole future; not to lose our hope. Almost all the top and great winnings in the mankind’s history, based upon several lose.

We are still a beautiful and great city of a powerful country. Do not forget that we were in one of the last four cities for the bid.

Instead of we are feeling the ‘lose and shock,’ we should be satisfied for our standing as one of the biggest and greatest cities in the world; and we should take lessons from this event that Americans need to rethink all about by ourselves and our role Internationally. We cannot expect the other world is just like Americans. We need to rethink in both or inside and outside; reshape our image in the international stage and reconnect in appropriate way with the outside world.

Congratulations for Rio de Janeiro's great win and we will be back!!!

Picture: http://toursonline.org/wp-includes/images/rio_de%20janeiro.jpg
http://api.ning.com/files/8HUkhIJdYB*5onvI354TPtG9CLuDPFVCgN5RbtOoPQdCd9MBv7FuRn3wHPUuyiLreDkhR08o1yuygw9NZuNUxXEzPW06XueH/ChicagoSkyline1.jpg

Meanings of the Given Names (U-V)

Victor = Conqueror

People often ask me about - what does my name mean. Sometimes, I also ask other peoples if his or her name means something. These are not important but it is good to know about each other in our cultures of mankind. For my friends who want to know, the meanings of (Western) given names:

Men’s Names (U-V)

Ulric: (Germanic) Wolf, rule
Ulysses: (Latin) The hater
Valentine: (Latin) Valorous, healthy
Vaughn: (Celtic) Little
Vernon: (Old French) Alder grove
Victor: (Latin) Conqueror
Vincent: (Latin) Conquering



Women’s Names (U-V)

Una: (Latin, Celtic) The one; famine
Ursula: (Latin) Little she-bear
Valerie: (Latin) Valorous
Vanessa: (Latin) Butterfly; grace of God
Vera: (Latin, Slavonic) True; faith
Veronica: (Latin) True image
Viola: (Latin) From the violet
Virginia: (Latin) Pertaining to spring
Vivian: (Latin) Animated; alive

Source: Smith, Elsdon C. “Vocabulary of Given Names.” The World Book Dictionary. 1968.
Picture: http://www.steyningmuseum.org.uk/conqueror.jpg

Goodbye Mr. Kennedy

When we lose a good man, a respectful leader or somebody who had been contributing the great things in one place of the world, it is the loss of not only for that place, but also for the whole world, since we all are directly or indirectly connected each other. The loss of Senator Edward Kennedy is that kind. It is not only for Kennedy family, but for all families of the world, not only for Democrats, but also for Republicans, not only for the Americans, but also for all world citizens.

During discussion in one of my classes at the College of DuPage, somebody asked a question that which American leaders are the most famous around the world (outside of the United States)? Most of my classmates thought it was George Washington in the first place. I willingly contributed my answer through out my experiences outside of the US, as – first – Abraham Lincoln, second - George Washihgton, third - John F. Kennedy, and fourth – Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Kennedys are among the heroes in leadership field of late history of the world.

I have been listened to and remember a piece of Teddy Kennedy’s speech that he gave when his brother, Robert Kennedy was assassinated; he said that “Love is not such a facility of popular magazine!” It came from deepest part of heart!

If we borrow a few words from Ronald Reagan, those he said when we lost Challenger crew, that – “Now, Mr. Kennedy is waving goodbye to the people of the United States and people of the world, to touch the face of God!”

Goodbye Mr. Kennedy! We all shall miss you!

Picture: http://reneeashleybaker.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/us-senator-edward-m-kennedy1.jpg

Let Me be Myself

Today, I am listening to the song of "Let me be myself," and the following is my favorite lyrics.

Would you Let Me Be Myself

Coz I'll never find my heart

Behind someone else

I'll never see the light of day

Living in this cell

It's time to make my way

Into the world i knew

And take back all of these times

That I gave in to you

Lately I'm so tired of waiting for you

To say that it's OK, tell me please

Would you one time,

Let Me Be Myself So i can shine,

with my own light Let Me Be Myself,

For a while If you don't mind,

Let Me Be Myself

So i can shine, with my own light

Let Me Be Myself

That's all i ever wanted from this world Was to let me be me..


Picture: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2528/3776744954_bdff717b2b.jpg

ခဲဝါ နန္႔ ခရုစုတ္ငွက္

တခါက ခဲဝါတေကာင္ေရ ခရုစုတ္ငွက္တေကာင္ကို သူ႔အိမ္မွာ ညစာစားဖို႔ ဖိတ္ပါေရလွတ္။ ခဲဝါေရ ခရုစုတ္ငွက္ကို ညစာစား ဖိတ္ပင္ ဖိတ္ေကလည္း သူ႔မွာ မရိုးသားေရ အႄကံအစည္တခုဟိပါေရလွတ္။ ခဲဝါေရ စြတ္ႁပဳတ္ရည္ကို ကေကာင္းရွည္ႃပီးေက ကၽၪ္းလြန္းေရ ေလာင္းေခၽထဲမွာ ထည့္ပနာ ခရုစုတ္ငွက္ကို ေကြၽးပါေရလွတ္။ ခဲဝါကေတာ့ေက ယင္းေလာင္းေခၽထဲကို လွ်ာထိုးလို႔ ဝင္ေရခါ စြတ္ႁပဳတ္ရည္ကို ကေကာင္းေသာက္လို႔ ရပါေရလွတ္။ ခရုစုတ္ငွက္မွာေတာ့ေက စြတ္ႁပဳတ္ရည္ကို သူ႔ နသြီး အဖၽားေခၽမွာ ရာ မြီႃပီးေက ေသာက္လို႔လည္းမရ၊ ဝမ္းက ဆာဆာနန္႔ တခုလည္းမစားရ၊ မေသာက္ရပဲ အိမ္ႁပန္ဖို႔ ကၽပါေရလွတ္။
ေယခါ ခဲဝါက ကလိမ္ကကၽစ္အႃပံဳးေခၽနန္႔ ကေကာင္းအားနာလားဟန္ကို လုပ္ဗၽာယ္ “အိုး အကို ငွက္ႄကီး၊ ကြၽန္ေတာ္ ကေကာင္းအားနာလားခပါယာေထာ၊ ကြၽန္ေတာ့္စြတ္ႁပဳတ္ရည္ေရ အကို႔အႄကိဳက္နန္႔ တတည့္မကၽ ထင္ေရ၊ ကြၽန္ေတာ္ခၽက္စြာႁပဳတ္စြာ ၫံ့လို႔ထင္ပါယင့္” ဆို ဆို ပနာေႁပာပါေရလွတ္။ ခရုစုတ္ငွက္ကလည္း “အိုး၊ ကြၽန္ေတာ့္ကို ညစာစားဖိတ္စြာကိုပင္ ကေကာင္း ေကၽးဇူးတင္ပါယင့္၊ ကြၽန္ေတာ့္ကို ေတာင္းပန္ဖို႔မလိုပါ၊ အကိုခဲဝါအခၽိန္ပီးႏိုင္ဖို႔ဆိုေက လာဖို႔အပါတ္ထဲမွာ ကြၽန္ေတာ့္အိမ္မွာ ညစာ လာစားဖို႔ အကိုခဲဝါကို ႁပန္လို႔ ဖိတ္ပါရစီ” ဆို ဆိုပနာ ေႁပာပါေရလွတ္။ ခဲဝါလည္း ခရုစုတ္ငွက္၏ ဖိတ္ေခၚမႈကို ဝမ္းပမ္းတသာပင္ လက္ခံလိုက္ပါေရလွတ္။
ေနာက္တပါတ္ႂကာေရခါ ခဲဝါေရ ခရုစုတ္ငွက္အိမ္သို႔ ညစာစားဖို႔ ေရာက္လားပါေရလွတ္။ ခရုစုတ္ငွက္မွာ လည္း ခဲဝါထက္မၫံ့ေရ စြတ္ႁပဳတ္ရည္အေကာင္းစားကို ခၽက္ႁပဳတ္ပၽင္ဆင္ထားပါေရလွတ္။ ခဲဝါလည္း စြတ္ႁပဳတ္ရည္ ကို အားရပါးရ ေသာက္ဖို႔ပၽင္ေရခါ ခရုစုတ္ငွက္ေရ သူ႔စြတ္ႁပဳတ္ရည္ကို အဝကၽၪ္းႃပီးေက လိုင္ဖင္းရွည္ေရ ကေတာင္းထဲမွာ ထည့္ ထည့္ ပနာ ထားပါေရလွတ္။ ေယခါ ခဲဝါေရ ကေတာင္းအဝကို သူ႔ နသြီးသြင္းဖို႔ ႄကိဳးစားလိုက္၊ အဝမွာ ဆို႔နိန္လိုက္ ႁဖစ္ ႁဖစ္ ပနာ အနံ႔ကို ရာ ရ ရ ပနာ တခုလည္းမစားရပဲနန္႔ အိမ္ႁပန္ဖို႔ ကၽပါေရလွတ္။ ခဲဝါေရ ခရုစုတ္ငွက္ ကလိမ္ကကၽစ္နန္႔ တသိတမါန္ပၽင္စြာကို သိေကလည္း တခုလည္းမေႁပာႏိုင္ပါလွတ္။ ဇာႁဖစ္လို႔လည္းဆိုေက သူက အယင္ ခရုစုတ္ငွက္ကို ကလိမ္ကၽထားစြာပါကို။
သူမၽားကို လိမ္တတ္၊ ဝါတတ္၊ ကလိမ္ကကၽစ္ ကၽတတ္ေတလူတိေရ သူရို႔ကိုယ္တိုင္ အလိမ္ခံရဖို႔၊ အဝါခံရဖို႔၊ ကလိမ္ကကၽစ္ အကၽခံရဖို႔စြာလည္း ဓမၼတာသေဖါတရားတရပ္ လို႔ ေဒပံုႁပင္ေခၽက ဆိုပါေရ။ သက္ေရာက္မႈ အားလံုးမွာ ယင္းနန္႔ညီမွ်ေရ တန္ႁပန္သက္ေရာက္မႈတိ အႃမဲတမ္းဟိနိန္ကတ္စြာရာမဟုတ္ပါလား။
Picture: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3448/3383333447_c1d2861ed0.jpg?v=1238003934

Special Link: Salute to 70th Anniversary of the Founding of The People's Republic of China!

ကၽီးကန္းနန္႔ ရီကေတာင္း

တခါက ကေကာင္းရီေသာက္ငတ္နိန္ေရ ကၽီးကန္းတေကာင္ေရ ရီကေတာင္းတခုကို တြိပါေရလွတ္။ ရီကေတာင္းထဲမွာ ရီ အလတ္ေလာက္လာဟိႃပီးေက ကၽီးကန္းေရ ရီကို လွမ္းမမွီႏိုင္ႁဖစ္နိန္ပါေရလွတ္။ ကေတာင္းကို ေမာ့ေသာက္ဖို႔ႄကိဳးစားေရခါလည္း ကေတာင္းက သူ႔ထက္ႄကီးနိန္ေရခါ ႁမွင့္လို႔ေတာင္မႁမင့္ႁဖစ္နိန္ပါေရလွတ္။
ကၽီးကန္းလည္း ဇာလုပ္လို႔ဇာကိုင္ရေမမွန္းမသိပဲႁဖစ္နိန္တုန္းမွာ သူ႔ရွိနားက ေကၽာက္စရစ္ခဲေခၽတိကို လားလို႔ ႁမင္ပါေရလွတ္။ ကၽီးကန္းလည္း အႄကံရစြာနန္႔ ေကၽာက္စရစ္ခဲေခၽတခဲကို ကေတာင္းထဲသို႔ ထည့္လိုက္ ပါေရလွတ္။ ေယခါ ကေတာင္းထဲက ရီလည္း တဖဲ့ေခၽ ႁမင့္တက္ပါလတ္ပါေရလွတ္။ ကၽီးကန္းလည္း ေကၽာက္ခဲ ေနာက္တခဲ ထည့္လိုက္ပါေရလွတ္။ ကေတာင္းထဲက ရီလည္း ေနာက္ထပ္တဖဲ့ေခၽႁမင့္တက္ပါလတ္ပါေရ လွတ္။ ယင္းပိုင္နန္႔ပင္ ယင္းအနားမွာဟိေရ ေကၽာက္စရစ္ခဲတိကို ရာ နန္႔ခၽီပနာ ကေတာင္းထဲသို႔ထည့္ပလိုက္ႃပီးေရ အခၽိန္မွာ ကေတာင္းထဲကရီစြာလည္း ကေတာင္းဝ သို႔ ေရာက္ေအာင္ႁမင့္တက္ပါလတ္ပါေရလွတ္။ ကၽီးကန္းလည္း ေယခါမွရာ အရသာဟိေရ ရီအီးအီးကို အားရဗရ တဝႄကီး ေသာက္ခၽ ပလိုက္ပါေရလွတ္။
‘ကိုယ့္ဖက္က အင္အားခၽိနဲ႔ေရအေႁခအေနတရပ္ထဲမွာ စိတ္ရွည္သီးခံမႈ၊ ရည္မွန္းခၽက္ကို အေပၽာက္မခံပဲ ဇြဲ နပဲ သန္သန္ တတိတိႄကိဳးစားမႈ နန္႔ ၪာဏ္ရည္လႊာသံုးတတ္မႈတိက ေအာင္ပြဲကို ရရွိစီေႂကာင္း’ ေဒကၽီးကန္းေခၽက သင္ခန္းစာ ပီးနိန္ပါယင့္။

Picture: http://www.bewicksociety.org/galleries/publications/aesop/crowandpitcher800.jpg

Meanings of the Given Names (T)

Theodoric: (Germanic) People, rule

People often ask me about - what does my name mean. Sometimes, I also ask other peoples if his or her name means something. These are not important but it is good to know about each other in our cultures of mankind. For my friends who want to know, the meanings of (Western) given names:

Men’s Names (T)Terrence: (Latin) Soft or tender
Theodore: (Greek) Gift of God
Theodoric: (Germanic) People, rule
Thomas: (Aramaic) A twin
Timothy: (Greek) Honoring God
Titus: (Latin) Safe

Women’s Names (T)Teresa, Theresa: (Greek) The harvester
Thelma: (Greek) Nursing

Source: Smith, Elsdon C. “Vocabulary of Given Names.” The World Book Dictionary. 1968.
Picture: http://images.meredith.com/ab/images/2006/08/ss_nursing_mom_diamonds.jpg

Congratulations Brazil Soccer Team!

Today, Brazilions win for FIFA confedration cup final in South Africa.

Congratulations National Soccer team of Brazil!
It was great pleasure to watch the match and Brazil are such a standard and classic team!
For the U.S. team, though the match finished with the result (U.S. 2 – Brazil 3), politically and ethically, we won!
Keep all of your strength and congratulations again!

Picture:

http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/0aIX0dIfRmdYM/610x.jpg

JRS Curriculum Specialist

Position: JRS Curriculum Specialist
Programme: Mae Hong Son Education
Reports to: Project Director
Organization: Jesuit Refugee Service
Location: Mae Hong Son, Thailand

JRS
Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) is an international non-governmental organization with a mission to accompany, serve, and advocate the rights of refugees and forcibly displaced people. JRS undertakes services at national and regional levels with the support of an international office in Rome. Founded in November 1980 as a work of the Society of Jesus, JRS programmes are found in over 50 countries, providing assistance to refugees in refugee camps, to people displaced within their own country, and to asylum-seekers in cities and to those held in detention. The main areas of work are in the fields of education, advocacy, emergency assistance, pastoral care, health and nutrition, IGA (Income Generating Activities) and social services. In total, more than 376,000 individuals are direct beneficiaries of JRS projects.

Position Purpose
JRS has been working with the Karenni Education Department (KnED) in Mae Hong Son’s two northernmost refugee camps since 1997. JRS partners with the Karenni Education Department (KnED) to implement and deliver educational services and training in the following areas: primary, secondary, vocational, special education, teacher training and management. JRS works with KnED to provide technical support to the entire education system. JRS Mae Hong Son is currently providing assistance to over 7,000 children and 420 teachers in 11 primary schools, 5 middle schools and 2 high schools in two refugee camps. The primary goal of this support is to ensure the continuity of education while simultaneously developing the capacity of refugee educators for future self-sufficiency. Currently, refugees from these camps are being offered the chance to resettle to third countries (principally the US), resulting in a diminishing population with changing educational needs.

The curriculum used in Karenni schools is developed by KnED. The JRS Curriculum Specialist will work closely with KnED to support curriculum development, help outline existing curriculum, and develop new curriculum in response to changing needs.

Responsibilities
· Develop a framework of existing curriculum for better coordination with MOE, KED and other ethnic groups.
· Assist with review and development of basic curriculum.
· Conduct research and provide information to KnED.
· Attend in-camp meetings as requested by KnED.
· Represent KnED at curriculum related meeting held outside of the camps.
· Liaise and maintain regular communication with organizations involved in refugee curriculum (ZOA, KED, NHEC, MOE and other).
· Support active KnED decision making and capacity development.
· Collaborate and coordinate with other JRS team members, CBOs and NGOs working in the camp.

Required Qualifications/Experience
· Relevant degree – Bachelor (minimum)
· At least 2 years teaching experience.
· Experience with curriculum development/design.
· Previous development experience and/or experience in limited-resource, challenging environments
· Fluent written and oral Burmese and English
· Thai or Karenni language skills desirable
· Computer skills
· Flexibility and the ability to operate in a complex and rapidly changing environment
· Experience of the Burmese refugee situation desirable
Conditions: A two-year contract with an initial three-month probationary period.

Starting date: ASAP

Closing date for applications: 15 July 2009

Applications: Please apply by sending your cover letter and CV (including two references) to curriculumdeveloper@jrs.or.th

Only short listed candidates will be contacted.

Note: I have received this offer today from one of my friends' email, and I post this here for people who are qualified and interested in. Thanks and good luck!

JRS Teacher Trainer

JOB DESCRIPTION

Position: JRS Teacher Trainer
Programme: Mae Hong Son Education
Reports to: Project Director
Organization: Jesuit Refugee Service
Location: Mae Hong Son, Thailand

JRS:
The Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) is an international non-governmental organization with a mission to accompany, serve, and advocate the rights of refugees and forcibly displaced people. JRS undertakes services at national and regional levels with the support of an international office in Rome. Founded in November 1980 as a work of the Society of Jesus, JRS programs are found in over 50 countries, providing assistance to refugees in refugee camps, to people displaced within their own country, and to asylum-seekers in cities and held in detention. The main areas of work are in the fields of education, advocacy, emergency assistance, pastoral care, health and nutrition, IGA (Income Generating Activities) and social services. In total, more than 376,000 individuals are direct beneficiaries of JRS projects.

Position Purpose:
JRS has been working with the Karenni Education Department (KnED) in Mae Hong Son’s two northernmost refugee camps since 1997. JRS partners with the Karenni Education Department (KnED) to implement and deliver educational services and training in the following areas: primary, secondary, vocational, special education, teacher training and management. JRS works with KnED to provide technical support to the entire education system. JRS Mae Hong Son is currently providing assistance to over 7,000 children and 420 teachers in 11 primary schools, 5 middle schools and 2 high schools in two refugee camps. The primary goal of this support is to ensure the continuity of education while simultaneously developing the capacity of refugee educators for future self-sufficiency. Currently, refugees from these camps are being offered the chance to resettle to third countries (principally the US), resulting in a diminishing population with changing educational needs.

Due to the increasing turnover of teachers going on resettlement, JRS requires teacher trainers to be able to train teachers directly in Burmese, and to work with KnED to ensure quality education for children in the two refugee camps.

Responsibilities:
· Coordinate and implement pre-service training to new and inexperienced teachers, in conjunction with KnED
· Identify models for in-service training to existing teachers
· Identify gaps in training and help provide an institutional response
· Support monitoring of systems to ensure quality of teaching and learning
· Act as resource person to KnED for management training for head teachers


Required Qualifications/Experience:
· Relevant degree – Bachelor (minimum)
· At least five years teaching experience
· Experience of training teachers
· Previous development experience and/or experience in limited-resource, challenging environments
· Fluent written and oral Burmese and English
· Karenni language skills desirable
· Computer skills desirable
· Flexibility and the ability to operate in a complex and rapidly changing environment
· Experience of the Burmese refugee situation desirable
· Management experience preferable

Conditions: A two-year contract with an initial three-month probationary period.

Starting date: ASAP

Closing date for applications: 15 July 2009

Applications: Please apply by sending your cover letter and CV (including two references) to teachertrainer@jrs.or.th

Only short listed candidates will be contacted.

Note: I have received this offer today from one of my friends, and I post this for people who are qualified and interested in. Thanks and good luck!

Congratulations U.S. Men National Soccer Team!

Congratulations National Soccer Team of USA!!!

Today, my friends and I were watching the soccer match of FIFA Confedration Cup 2009 semifinal, which played between the national teams of USA and Spain at TV (Univision).

Every single player in Spain national team was very much professional player than players of US national team. In the first half time of the match, ball possisions were 33% for US team, and 67% for team of Spain. According to the current FIFA rankings, national team of Spain is also 1st. This means Spanish team is currently the best team in the world.

Nevertheless, the final result was USA 2 - Spain 0, Great Win and Great Lose.

Congratulations National Soccer Team of USA!

The best of U.S. team in this match were;

(1) Team work (great, great team work)

(2) Spirit (true spirit of Never Give-Up, though we are not that good players).

Special Thanks and Congratulations!

P.S. (Goal keeper of US team should be awarded as the player of the match in this tournament.)

Go USA!!!

Meanings of the Given Names (S)

Selwyn = Friend

People often ask me about - what does my name mean. Sometimes, I also ask other peoples if his or her name means something. These are not important but it is good to know about each other in our cultures of mankind. For my friends who want to know, the meanings of (Western) given names:

Men’s Names (S)

Samson: (Hebrew) Sun’s man; resplendent
Samuel: (Hebrew) His name is God; name of God; God hath heard
Sanders: (Greek) Helper of Men
Sanford: (Old English) Sandy river crossing
Saul: (Hebrew) Requested; desire
Scott: (Celtic) One from Scotland or Ireland
Sebastian: (Greek) Venerable
Selwyn: (Old English) House, friend
Septimus: (Latin) The seventh
Seth: (Hebrew) The appointed
Sewell: (Germanic) Victory, power
Sextus: (Latin) The sixth
Shelby: (Old English) village where willows grow
Sheldon: (Old English) Steep-sided valley, flat-topped hill
Sherman: (Old English) The shearman or cutter
Sidney: (Celtic) A telescoping of St. Denis
Sigfried: (Germanic) Victory, peace
Sigmund: (Germanic) Victory, protection
Silas: (Latin) Of the forest
Simon, Simeon: (Hebrew) God has heard; hearkening; snub-nosed
Solomon: (Hebrew) Peaceful
Stanislas: (Slavonic) War camp; camp glory
Stephen, Steven: (Greek) Crown or garland
Stewart, Stuart: (Old English) One in charge of the household

Women’s Names (S)

Sabina: (Latin) Sabine; of an ancient Italian tribe
Sally: (Hebrew) Princess
Sandra, Zandra: (Greek) Helper of men
Sapphira: (Greek) From the gem sapphire
Sarah, Sara: (Hebrew) Princess
Selma: (Germanic) Divine, helmet
Sharon: (Hebrew) Plain or level country
Sheila: (Latin-Irish) Blind
Shirley: (Old English) From Shireley, England
Sibyl: (Greek) A prophetess
Silvia, Sylvia: (Latin) Wood or forest
Sonja, Sonya: (Greek-Russian) Wisdom
Stella: (Latin) Star
Susan, Suzanne: (Hebrew) Lily

Picture: http://realchurches.net/images/hands2.jpg

Source: Smith, Elsdon C. “Vocabulary of Given Names.” The World Book Dictionary. 1968.

Happy Father's Day!

Happy Birthday, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi!

Happy Birthday, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi!

You are one of the greatest spiritual leaders, not just in Burma, but also in the world.

While many other Burmese leaders (who recognized by themselves) are forgotten and ignored, you will be remembered, respected and loved by Burmese people, even by the people of the world – decades, centuries. Even today, we should ask a question that how many birthdays of Burmese leaders are recognized, not only among Burmese, but internationally?

Whatever (whether good or evil) we think, do, act and wish today, will come back to us by ten times, tomorrow or sooner or later. Till you have true faith, love and respect for the people, you will be loved and respected by the people!

Like Daw Su, we all should stand for our belief (by Heart, not by Head)!

Happy Birthday Daw Aung San Suu Kyi!

Picture: http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/41692000/jpg/_41692740_child_ap.jpg
http://blogs.mirror.co.uk/developing-world-stories/css/aung%20san%20suu%20kyi%20addressing%20supporters%20before%20her%20house%20arrest.jpg
http://burmalibrary.org/docs/ASSK+TS.jpg
http://www.phaseloop.com/foreignprisoners/img-prisoners/daw_aung_san_suu_kyi.gif
http://blog.magnumphotos.com/images/PAR113195.jpg

First + Third Generations

I took this video in February, 2009.

On that day, Grandpa Hill, Izana Hill and Mahla Hill built together this perfect train and track.

Pre-Happy Fathers' Day!

ထင္းစည္း

တခါက လူ တေယာက္မွာ အႃမဲတမ္း အခၽင္းခၽင္း ရန္ႁဖစ္နိန္တတ္ေတ သားတိ ဟိပါေရလွတ္။ တရက္နိခါ အဖ သည္ေရ သားတိကို ေခၚေခၚပနာ ထင္းေခၽာင္းတိကို ပူးခၽိဳင္ထားေရ ထင္းစည္း တ စည္း ကို ခၽိဳးဖို႔ ခိုင္းပါေရ လွတ္။ သားတိလည္း တေယာက္ႃပီးတေယာက္ ယင္းထင္းစည္းကို ခၽိဳးဖို႔ နည္းမၽိဳးစံုနန္႔ႄကိဳးစားကတ္ေကလည္း တေယာက္လည္း ယင္းထင္းစည္းကို မခၽိဳးႏိုင္ကတ္ပါလွတ္။ တခါ အဖသည္က ထင္းစည္းကို ႃဖီႃဖီပနာ ထင္းတေခၽာင္းခၽင္းစီကို သားတိကိုခၽိဳးခိုင္းပါေရလွတ္။ ေယခါ သားတိေရ ယင္းထင္းေခၽာင္းတိကို တေခၽာင္းႃပီးတေခၽာင္း အလြယ္ေခၽပင္ ခၽိဳးပလိုက္ကတ္ပါေရလွတ္။
ေယခါ အဖသည္က “ေအး ငါ့သားရို႔၊ ယင္းမွာႂကည့္ေယ။ မင္းရို႔တိအားလံုး စည္းစည္းလံုးလံုးနန္႔ နိန္ကတ္ေတခါ တေယာက္ကလည္း တခုပိုင္လည္း မင္းရို႔တိကို ဖၽက္ဆီးလို႔မရ၊ အခၽင္းခၽင္းမသင့္ပဲ တကြဲတႁပားစီ ႁဖစ္နိန္ေရခါ တႁခားလူတိက အလြယ္ေခၽပင္ ခၽိဳးပလိုက္လို႔၊ ဖၽက္ဆီးပလိုက္လို႔ ရေရ ဆိုစြာကို ယင္းထင္းေခၽာင္းတိ နန္႔ ယင္းထင္းစည္းကိုရာ ႂကည့္ဖိေယ” ဆိုႃပီးေက သားတိကို ေႁပာလိုက္ပါေရလွတ္။
ဇာပိုင္လူမၽိဳး၊ ဇာပိုင္အဖြဲ႔အစည္းတိ၊ ဇာပိုင္အေႁခအေနမွာမဆို ‘စည္းလံုးမႈေရ အႃမဲတမ္း ခြန္အား’ ကို ႁဖစ္စီေရ လို႔ ဆိုပါေရ။

Source: Aesop’s Fables (retold by Ann McGovern)
Picture: http://www.homeeducationday.org/Aesop%20Fable_files/image002.jpg

စပၽစ္သီးတိ ခၽၪ္ေရဗင္

တရက္နိခါ ဝမ္းဆာနီေရ ခဲဝါတေကာင္ေရ စပၽစ္ႃခံ တႃခံထဲသို႔ ဝင္ပါလတ္ေတ လွတ္။ ေယခါ အပင္အႁမင့္တေနရာမွာ စပၽစ္သီးမွည့္တိကို ယင္းခဲဝါတြိရပါေရလွတ္။ ယင္းစပၽစ္သီးတိေရ အေရာင္က လည္းလွ၊ အရည္ရရြမ္းနန္႔ ကေကာင္းစားေကာင္းဖို႔ ပံုလည္း ေပၚနိန္ပါေရလွတ္။ ခဲဝါလည္း ဝမ္းဆာဆာနန္႔ သူနန္႔အပါးဆံုး စပၽစ္သီးခိုင္ကို ခုန္ပနာ လွမ္းပါေရလွတ္။ ေယေကလည္း စပၽစ္သီးတိက အင္တန္အႁမင့္မွာေရာက္နိန္ေရခါ ခဲဝါ ခုန္လွမ္းလို႔မမွီႏိုင္ႁဖစ္နိန္ပါေရလွတ္။
တေခါက္ႃပီးတေခါက္၊ အႄကိမ္ႄကိမ္သူခုန္ေကလည္း စပၽစ္သီးခိုင္ကို မမွီႏိုင္ႁဖစ္နိန္ေရ လွတ္။ ေနာက္ဆံုးမွာ ယင္းစပၽစ္သီးတိကို လွ်ာရည္တကၽကၽနန္႔ႂကည့္ ႂကည့္ပနာ ဝမ္းက ဆာဆာ၊ စိတ္ပၽက္လက္ပၽက္နန္႔ စပၽစ္ႃခံထဲကနိန္ ခဲဝါႁပန္ထြက္လားခပါေရလွတ္။ အထြက္မွာ ခဲဝါပါးစပ္က ဇာတိေႁပာလားခ ေရထင္ေရာင္။ “ေဒစပၽစ္သီးတိ ခၽၪ္လိုက္ေတ ဗင္က” လို႔ ေႁပာလားခ ပါေရလွတ္။
ေဒ ပံုႁပင္ေခၽက ဇာကိုေႁပာလားေရလဲဆိုေက “လူတခၽိဳ႔ေရ ကိုယ္ မရ ႏိုင္မွန္း၊ ကိုယ္နန္႔မႁဖစ္ႏိုင္မွန္း ေသခၽာစြာနန္႔ ယင္းခၽင့္ကို မေကာင္းေႁပာပလိုက္ဖို႔၊ မေကာင္းလုပ္ပ လိုက္ဖို႔ အဆင္သင့္ႁဖစ္နိန္တတ္ပါေရလွတ္”။

Source: Aesop’s Fables (retold by Ann McGovern)
Picture: http://www.litscape.com/images/Aesop/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes.jpg

Note: In the begining of this year, I had a few 'happy new year resolutions' and one of them was - I will post some Arakanese pages in this blog.

To fulfill that resolution, I post these pages. Thanks!

Mom’s first lesson and Happy Mother’s Day

First of all, I love you very much, Mom.

Mom was my first teacher, first mentor and first visionary.

In this world, the very first thing that I learned from mom was “A Smile,” mom’s smile, which was the sweetest and the most beautiful.

Lately, I had chance to know that ‘smile’ was a behavior, which can be made only by human beings among all creations in this world. This means – Mom was teaching me to become a human being, since I was born as her first, the most artful and the most meaningful lesson to her little child.

Now, I am almost 40 years old, mom. What I found by myself, is – I am still struggling to fully understand your first lesson, but I will still be trying to finish that first lesson.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom!

I love you!

Picture: http://interfacematters.com/images/mother.gif

These Beautiful Pictures Were Taken by Pa Pa.

I VOTED!!!

Kai Salute You.

Peek-a-boo!!!

Hi, I'm KaiSein.

You get my attention, and....

I salute you.

Thanks!!!