Memoir

Code-switching

I was about four and a half years old when my family moved down from the dunes to the shores of Gaaway – the name for the Niger River from Gao to Niamey. The distance itself happened to be very short, but it marked a shift in my life. It was the moment I stopped speaking Tamashek (Tuareg language) and picked up Songhay. Thus I changed landscape, language and worldview. Years later I would be reminded that I used the words for the wild plants of the grazing plains for the riverside crops.

Independence and Freedoms

The whole Naga struggle, it is purely because of the invasion by India...this here is our land, this is ours. The coming of the English language too has given us new terms to describe us, including the word “indigenous” which itself is a way of saying that we are under India and it distorted our definition of who we are. After the British invasion, India too thought of us as a weak people and that it has a sense of ownership over us that led to the making of the state. It was an opportunity for Nehru to show a backup plan by giving us statehood which we didn’t ask for.

U Pein Bridge (2): Learning History Through Childhood Poem

This oral narrative was collected by the students exploring the word concept - belief. 

The seventy-two year old father of the fried-fish seller told us the following story related with the establishment of the U Pein bridge:

"I left the monastery long time ago but I remember what I learnt about the history of the U Pein bridge"

 

အင်းကအော်ညီး ဆောက်လုပ်ပြီး၊ ဉီးပိန် တံတားကြီး

အင်း၀ရေငံ တွင်းဂျီးစော်နံ၊ တောင်သမန် ရေချိုတွင်း သောက်ပါလေ့ ကို ရန်ကင်း ဘေးရန်က ရှင်း

ဘရူရာဇာ (ထန်းပင်) မည်သော ထန်းပဒေသာပင်များ ခြံရံလျက်ရှိသောနေရာများကို ရွေးချယ်ခဲ့သည်။

Forest Hero

Pati Preecha Siri is regarded as a very respectful elder among the villagers of Hin Lad Nai community. He was honoured by the United Nations, on April 10th 2012, at Istanbul, Turkey, with the “Forest Hero Award” for the the whole community's work in protecting and preserving the forest. There were only five people selected to receive the award from 47 people and 30 countries around the world, and Pati Preecha was the one selected from Asia.

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