I've neglected story-writing for a while

Yangon, Myanmar, 8 AM

The nondescript woman made her way through the eerily empty marketplace stalls and bazaars of Yangon, clutching a folded piece of paper in her hand. From time to time she looked behind to see if she was being followed by people in the shadows.

 She surreptitiously punched a memorized sequence of numbers into the cell phone as she walked. 

“Nei here,” she said quietly.

“Internet has been shut down. The government is still forbidding UN food shipments to pass through,” the mysterious voice on the other end of the line said hurriedly. “Tens of thousands of people are starving or already dead. We believe that the Swedish government may be sympathetic to our cause, but we need to get the information to them.”

“I have a hard drive with me. It contains a lot of amateur video footage,” he said. “I need you to get outside of the country, where there is Internet access, so that we can have them publicized. Also a list of names of government officials who may be willing to be bribed.”
 

“This is where you can help us," the man continued. "No one is allowed to leave the country now without permission, or at least without drawing suspicion. But you are a flight stewardess who routinely travels to many places anyway and hence will not raise alarms with anyone. You also have easy access to officials and diplomatic channels abroad.”

She slammed the cellphone back in her pocket - such a "Western convenience" would arouse the suspicion of authorities.

She was still numb. Only days before, when she was in a plane en route to Europe, the cyclone had come and killed every single member of her extended family except for her nephew and one distant cousin. Few people even in Myanmar itself knew the extent of the calamity - the regime scrupulously shut out all outside information as always - but she had managed to watch a CNN telecast when she was in Europe and knew that the death toll was anywhere between 60,000 to 100,000 dead.

She was known only by her surname, Nei. A flight stewardess for Myanmar Airlines, she was 23 years old. She had always been fascinated by airplanes, and the only thing that separated her social status from the inhabitants of the dirt-poor village in which she was born – and enabled her to win a high-paying flight stewardess job – was the fact that she had learned some English as a child from playing word board games, which she loved, which had been left to her family by a missionary.

Today, however, she was a player in a different game altogether. Her handler, An, had asked her to help out in a scheme. The Myanmar military regime had been consistently one of the world’s most oppressive for the past decades, but now was a chance to turn the tables. After the devastating cyclone, Western nations were furious that their aid was not being permitted to reach millions of starving people who needed it. The chance to persuade Western governments to subvert the regime with clandestine action and overthrow under the guise of “humanitarian reasons” was too good to pass up.

An knew where he was getting at. She had said yes immediately when approached with the plan. Despite her Khmer name, Nei was Vietnamese, and thus had special reason to hate the Burmese government.

Five days later

The blue and gold-trimmed livery Myanmar Airways jet was on fuel overload today for the flight to Singapore.

Nei went through the safety demonstration procedures by heart, a knot of dread in the pit of her stomach.

Two days ago, she had packed all of her meager belongings with the expectation that she might not ever return to her homeland again. Tucked away in her flight stewardess’ travel bag right now were two videotapes of compromising government material and lists of names of officials and secret agents. She had managed to avoid inspection when bringing them aboard. The mission was to take them through Singapore and into a connecting flight into Amsterdam, where she would hand them over to a diplomatic courier.

Nei knew the risk she was undertaking. The official penalty for treason was cremation while still alive.

The heavy Russian aircraft began lumbering slowly on the taxiway.

"Good evening passengers, we are closing the doors now and getting ready to taxi," said the friendly voice of the pilot. "Please remain in your seats until the seat-belt sign is turned off." The doors closed with a hiss and the tires squealed momentarily.

Nei strapped herself into the flight attendant seat, shut her eyes closed, heart pounding, and curled her hands tightly into a ball. She would not feel safe until the plane had left the runway.

End of Part 1

Bugs, nature, God, and life

So I was on devotion walks the other afternoon when I noticed a giant woolly mammoth caterpillar that was in convulsions as it was crossing the road. Apparently it was trying to escape the hot pavement, but the scorching sun was not going to let it escape in time before cooking to death.

 
So I got a tree branch and lifted the caterpillar across to the road to some leafy shade. Then I doused him with a few drops of water to cool him down, but the caterpillar had a violent reaction to any kind of moisture (like the Psammead in Five Children and It.) If a caterpillar ever could sneeze, that is what that one did right there. Finally, I got my Geometry homework and started fanning him with the paper sheets of Euclid’s proposition 2.16 – to cool him down, and also to dry off the moisture.

 
Creationists vehemently oppose the idea that human beings are mere evolved creatures, and for good reason. But I’ve found it easier to love people when I consider that they (and me) are beings created by God, just like hamsters or centipedes (although not quite.) "Observe, (scientist voice,) as human beings place their young in little carriages with wheels that they call 'strollers.' They will push their young around in these strange carriages, and they have strap restraints to prevent the young from escaping........"

 
One can go on a walk in the morning and just look around – and be fascinated with everything God has created in nature? There is Mr. Darcy, the heron that stalks around the pond on one leg in a ridiculously somber and dignified manner. There are frogs in the drainage ditches, and if you overturn some rocks in the water, there will be black bugs that will swim out from underneath. Even in an urbanized place like Purcellville, you can find prairie dogs poking their heads out of holes near the student life center construction site.

 
I’ve always been fascinated by talking animals. Sometimes I try to imagine what a particular animal would sound like if it could talk. Mr. Darcy, the heron, would probably put on spectacles, peer down at the shallow water, and adopt a scowling old English professor’s voice: “Hmmmm….no grubby minnows in the lake today. *Grumbles* I think I’ll pass.”

The wonderment of watching a small black beetle on a plant stem – “Look – it’s eating tree sap.” This is what God has made. This is Life.

10 random things about me, a.k.a. If I were a Catholic this is what my time at the confessional would sound like:

1)      Believe it or not…..I am actually a registered Hillary Clinton supporter. Has nothing to do with support of her – I’m trying to sabotage things by helping her cause in the Democratic primaries against Obama, for reasons that make sense only to a devious, evil, Republican.

2)      When I was 5, I started reading World Book encyclopedias. Mom told me, “Ben, just remember, they’re in alphabetical order.” Only problem was, she hadn’t put the books in correct order. For a long time, I thought “J” was the first letter of the alphabet.

3)       When I was little, my favorite color was pink.

4)      My Chinese name is actually a girl’s name.
 

5)      After reading about U.S. interrogation practices in Newsweek, I decided to waterboard myself to see what it felt like. I got a hose, put a heavy towel over my face, lay down, and put the hose on direct flow on my face. I don’t think I did it right, because it didn’t do anything to me – I didn’t smother or suffocate. I lay there for 5 minutes and was thinking, "You know, maybe Guantanamo's not so bad after all."

6)      Speaking of suffocation, something happened 13 years ago that still gives me nightmares. When my youngest brother, Tim, was a baby, I was 7 years old and was once covering him with blankets in his crib. Being unnoticing, I put several heavy blankets over his face and didn't think about it again until hours later. He's perfectly fine, but even today, I still wake up with a jolt suddenly in the middle of the night, thinking about how he could have suffocated.

7)      My right wrist was dislocated when I was 12 and the bone was never really put back in place. Sometimes when I type for an extended period of time, it starts to hurt. Really, really bad. To make the pain go away, I will lie on my bed and throw a football at the ceiling, sometimes for hours on end. 

8)      There is a porcelain rooster sitting on my desk. (Ask Karen for the story.)

9)  When I was 6, I was at a Children’s Institute in Houston and the teacher was asking all the kids what their favorite animal was. Most of the kids replied: dogs, cats, parakeets, hamsters, etc. My favorite animal was the bombardier beetle.

10)  Another memory from the same Children’s Institute: On the first day, the teacher said she was going to take all of us kids to “The Big Arena” – where all the large groups met for songs, story telling, etc. Well, I remembered from reading Foxe’s Book of Martyrs that an “arena” was a place where Christians got fed to the lions. I made a huge fuss...