Arriving at the Dharma Center, March, 2013

We pulled up the long driveway to the center and came to a quiet rest beside a large pond, the iris of which was a little island of a pagoda with two towering peaceful gold Buddhas and a wide, long wooden prayer expanse stretched out in front where the novice monks pray and meditate every morning at 5:30 am and 7 pm (which soon involved us too!).

Young boys in orange robes gathered around the car, shyly laughing and joking with Laurie, our fluent Thai speaking 70 year Australian old ex-monk and ex-Thai Hollywood soap star who has lived in Thailand for 40 years. We were handed plain white outfits to represent our purity and desire to learn, which we wore during our entire stay.

A student, Patrick, and our teacher, Pra Ong

That afternoon after lunch, we piled back in the van and made our way 16 km to the Burmese border where Laurie told us the heart wrenching history of the very place we sat, which was the epicenter for a bloody conflict between two ethnic  groups in Burma (the wah and the shan). Similar to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the Wah did not have any lands of their own and backed by the Burmese government, planned to take over Shan territory.

The Wah warned the Shan to be out in one day and the following day, they came in droves and murdered entire villages. Running for their lives, man Shan people took refuge in the monastery where we were currently sitting, digging out the mud walls and hiding inside, or cowering beneath images of the Buddha. Today, the monastery sits right in the middle of the now  Thai/Burma border, the main monastery here on the Thai side and a stone’s throw away over some fencing, classrooms now sit on the other side in Burma which nobody dares cross back over. The border is this close- separated only by a large ditch riddled with landmines.

View of the monastery one sunrise while sweeping the grounds

With this background, we now learned that the 14 novice monks at the dharma center were all refugees from this conflict, which happened in early 2000. Laurie walked us through recent conflict in Burma (2010), which involved hundreds of peaceful protesting monks shot dead protesting the gov’t and two young boys he took to the hospital several years ago who developed massive ulcers in their testicles after seeing their entire family killed.

Coming back that afternoon to the center, we gazed upon these shy, smiling, thin young boys through a different lens of awe, admiration and sorrow. We were soon given white pants and shirts that we wore the entire week representing our desire for unattachment and began diving right in-sitting while the monks chanted for an hour at 5:30 am and 7 pm, meditation for two hours in the morning and learning about Buddhism and the dharma each afternoon from two to four.

That first night, we all sat in a big circle and one by one introduced ourselves, us speaking in our newly learned Thai, the boys practicing their English. Question time. One monk asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up and then we turned the question on them– a photographer, an architect, an adventurer, a teacher, an artist. A person who helps the poor. boys whose villages have burned to the ground. Boys grinning at us, shadows casting light onto their dark eyes peering at us beneath the glow of a lantern about to be released into space.  Boys giggling and saying the hardest part of being a monk is not eating dinner (they can’t eat past 12 noon). Me thinking- this is not a gimmick, not a show. This is real life for so many people, so far from any life we could imagine or inhabit.