The guests at our wedding gave (and very generously too, I might add) us gifts of money. We ummed and ahhed about doing our ‘money tree’ on the day because we both felt a bit uncomfortable asking for cash – but because we have made our life in London and we marrying in Australia, physical gifts weren’t practical at all. It was at some point early in the planning process that R floated the idea that we not spend any money we were given on stuff for a home we didn’t have yet (my list of ‘wants’ included a pale blue kitchenaid, a Rob Ryan print, some Portmerion china and an Alessi kettle to name a few) and that we go off and do aid work somewhere instead. Now for all my daily swooning over the luxe and the lovely, I have always wanted to do some kind of volunteer work overseas, and R felt the same. We’ve always agreed that we are incredibly lucky to have comparatively privileged lives. (sometimes I need reminding of this at the shoe counter in Selfridges, though.) We didn’t want to lose sight of the ‘big picture’, but when you’re planning a wedding and bombarded every day with expectations, inspirations and also stuff, stuff, and more wedding-related stuff, it can happen. I started to be able to justify ridiculous expense in my head for various things, and one morning when I was lying in bed I added up my list of ‘wedding wants’ (as separate from ‘house wants’, above) and realised I would have been ashamed to share it with R, the man I was marrying. Oh dear. I kept that little epiphany to myself and when R suggested we go to an orphanage in Asia to volunteer, I readily agreed.

*See the rest of Gemma’s Wedding here.

So we decided on Burma, much to the gasping of our families. A small country bordered by Laos, China, Thailand and Bangladesh, Burma’s official name is The Republic of the Union of Myanmar. Oh, and it’s run by a tightly controlled military government who spend an average of 80pence per person, per year, on public health. The Burmese economy is one of the least developed of the world, and the government is under UN sanction for various human rights abuses. The more I read about life for the Burmese (no freedom of speech, little access to education, no electricity or fresh water in some villages, political imprisonment, etc etc) the more I wanted to help, and the more I wondered whether we would actually be able to be of any real help – we didn’t want to be do-goody Westerners with bleeding hearts getting in the way, or in the case of Burma, getting the people into serious trouble with the government. It was supremely difficult to organise, too, because very few places in Burma have telephones, and the ones that do exist are only able to call within the country, calling out is forbidden. Despite all this we managed and left the snowy UK winter for Kuala Lumpur, where we had to apply for visas to enter Burma.

We arrived about 5pm on a Saturday, after much hilarity on the plane as I was sitting next to two Burmese ladies who couldn’t speak or read a single word of English and therefore couldn’t fill in their landing cards which were written completely in English. I filled them out for them at their request and after much flipping through of the Burmese phrase book, and to say thank you they gave me an orange and a few hugs and told me they loved me forever. One was also determined to lend me her reading glasses when she saw me pick up my novel.

Our first impressions of Burma were in many ways what we expected it to be but in others totally different. I was amazed at how modern, clean and sleek the airport was, but then we came out of customs and arrivals accompanied by our Burmese host and into an ancient kombi-like bus which I won’t go into detail describing, suffice to say no seatbelts, suspension or even attached seats. It did have big windows though through which we eagerly drank in the sights of the city, which ranged from the sublime (the Shewdagon Pagoda – a giant golden temple that is said to be clad in more gold than is contained in all the bank vaults in England, described by Rudyard Kipling as ‘A golden mystery that upheaved itself on the horizon’) to the ridiculous including a man carrying two basket bags at either side, both bursting at the seams with squawking live chickens. And one was perched on his head.

We had obviously been expecting to see a lot of poverty, but I don’t think anyone living a comfortable Western life can ever imagine what it’s truly like until they go. Just outside our guest house were people living in corrugated iron sheds which looked like they’d been cobbled together with thumbtacks and would fall over under the weight of a fairly puny kick, kids squatting in the dust and playing across overgrown, but live train tracks and many wrinkled locals who opened their mouths to smile at us and displayed rows of blackened, rotted teeth. The people were incredibly friendly, and although we attracted a few stares and giggles (I think for our height more than anything else, we both towered over the Burmese by quite a way, and R bumped his head a few times going into doorways) everyone was forever smiling at us and calling out hello. On the first night we were there, we sat outside our guest house and took stock – We had seen no signs whatsoever of any kind of upheaval or unrest, and felt completely safe, just a little excited and nervous about what was to come.

On the Monday, after some sightseeing on Sunday, we took the ‘Circle Train’ to the Paw Khan settlement which is about 8km away from central Yangon. Despite being such a short distance, the train however took an hour to get there and rattled us round like marbles in jar. We shared the ride with chickens, baskets of bananas and a pakora seller who was frying his wares over a bubbling pot of oil without spilling a drop. Going at that speed meant we saw a lot of the countryside and also because we were running late every. single. day. (no change from my London life there, then!) we could make a sprint for it at the station and swing ourselves up on without any major injury which considering my coordination is no mean feat.

We were both a little apprehensive before our first day but as it turned out we needn’t have been, and we spent our time at the centre playing with the adorable children and helping out with basic tasks. Mainly staffed by women, the Eden is testament to what’s going right in Burma – it’s incredibly efficient, the teachers and carers are all very professional and enthusiastic, the parents and communities of the disabled children are integrated into various programs and basically the only thing lacking is funding. R and I certainly provided a lot of fun and laughter for the kids and the staff, and we were told that the thought that people in the developed world cared enough to visit them was amazing. It was incredibly humbling for us, to see how adroitly the people just got on with what needed to be done to rehabilitate their children so cheerfully and with so few resources. I tend to fall back on clichés when I talk about Burma, but I can’t help it. It was a humbling, life changing, ‘you’ll never know until you go’ experience. It did ‘really make us think’ and ‘re-examine our priorities.’ And we will never forget everyone we met at the centre, including a little boy called Goji who insisted on jumping up into R’s arms every time he clapped eyes on him, even if he was meant to be sitting quietly, Oli, a 10 year old downs syndrome boy who ran to meet us in the mornings, Augustina, a downs girl who shyly cuddled my legs and constantly whispered ‘mingalaba’ to me (it’s hello in Burmese but it’s also a blessing) and dozens of others, all of whom we fell in love with and were very sad to leave. We hope to go back at some stage and visit taking some supplies, like books, toys, writing paper, pencils – the very basics which, to spout another cliché, we take for granted in schools at home.

When our volunteering came to an end, we were both pretty exhausted. It sounds a bit precious, because there are people who do it every day without complaint, but we found the work quite emotionally draining. We didn’t have heaps of time to be ‘tourists’ in Yangon but one Saturday we visited the Shwedagon Pagoda which I mentioned above, and it really was one of the most amazing things we’ve ever seen. We lost count of the Buddha statues dotted around after about number 57. Because we were both born on a Saturday, according to Burmese astrology our lives follow the same cycle of good years and bad years, but obviously staggered by a difference of 6 years because R is older than me. We sat down cross-legged for an hour or so with a spiritual teacher at the Pagoda who explained that R is currently under the influence of a ‘difficult planetary time’ and that his luck will really change for the better when he turns 42. If the last year, especially, has been one of the most rubbish of his life, I confidently expect a lottery win in 2021.

Our guide taught us about the way to Nirvana and the road to spiritual enlightenment, and kept mentioning ‘right thought, right speech and right molarity’. We assumed this was a spoonerism and he meant us to keep a strict eye on our morals, though due to the damage he’d done to his teeth chewing betel nuts it is possible he was talking about dental hygiene and not making the same mistake he had.

The following week we travelled by bus overnight (with more chickens!) from Yangon to Mandalay. We had both romanticised the city in our separate ways – for me, it was after reading ‘The Glass Palace’ by Amitav Ghosh, and imagining the life of the Burmese royalty in the late 1800s. We debated about actually visiting the palace, as although it’s open to the public, it was rebuilt by forced labour in the 90s, and any entry fee money goes directly to the government, however we did go and it was a highlight of the trip for me. We roamed the practically deserted citadel, walked silently through the reception rooms and mirrored walls the palace is named for, and with a bit of (over-active if you ask my husband!) imagination the gorgeous design and gracious bungalows of Queen Supayalat’s quarters came alive for us and I danced on the lawn barefoot and pretended it was ours. Mandalay Hill was another fascinating ‘tourist’ site – it was magnificent, with views from the summit stretching out all over the city. Mandalay Hill is sacred to the Burmese, and used as a prayer site. On the steps up to the top though is wedding town! A lot of Burmese can’t afford new wedding gowns and when they put their day together it’s a combination of scrimping together whatever they can beg or borrow.

If they can’t, for whatever reason, get a photo taken on the day, (lots of people we met later in the trip had only one or two photos of themselves taken in a whole lifetime) there are a few photographers who have ‘offices’ on the way up Mandalay Hill complete with ‘props’ and ‘stages’ and even accessories girls can borrow. As you can see in the photos – the ‘sets’ are gorgeous and I was desperate to climb in and have a play, but we didn’t want to be disrespectful (let’s face it, I’d have broken that tiny chair!) and it was just a wee bit disappointing there wasn’t a real bride there on the day! (I wanted to wait around and see if anyone turned up but R vetoed that suggestion.)

From Mandalay we went to Bagan, (another bus ride, this time with a sack of rice as a seat) and hired pushbikes to ride around all day ‘sunset chasing’, seeing literally hundreds, if not thousands of temples as we explored the surrounding villages. The temples in Bagan seem to sprout up on their own so numerous are they, and they’re as much a part of the countryside as the trees and bushes. The oldest ones were built in the 11th century and you can still see the murals on their walls. Super-frustratingly the camera ran out of battery half way through the day and we hadn’t brought any spares with us so we retraced our steps the next day although, as is always the way, photos never really do justice to what we saw. We spent a few days in Bagan and then bussed again to a mountain region called Kalaw in readiness to do a hike into the country-side and see what a lot of the Burmese told us, was the ‘real Myanmar.’ From Kalaw (where we stayed in a guest house room that reminded me of a painted out stable, complete with large fence bolt on the door) we trekked for 3 days and two nights down to Inle Lake, a walk of about 70km that took in some of the most poverty stricken parts of the country. We walked through villages that were so incredibly poor it was mind blowing, where they speak their own, almost unrecognisable, dialects of Burmese, where the kids make their toys out of sticks and discarded fruit, where there are government built schools that stand empty because no parents can afford to pay a teacher to use the classrooms.

One town we went to had the ‘industry’ of making straw brooms, by hand, under the heat of the midday sun. The people had no electricity, took their water from ground wells and have no real roads in or out of their homes – for a lot of people in the mountains of Burma the only way to move around is to walk. Our guide was a 30 year old Burmese man called Jo, and at one stage I mentioned to him that my father was an engineer. His response was ‘what a lucky man your father is, to have been able to study something so interesting and to have such a venerable job. Your family is truly fortunate’ That comment really stuck in my head – Normally we wouldn’t say a family was ‘fortunate’ unless they’d just won the lottery. During the trek we stayed for a couple of nights in Burmese houses with families, and it was, again, incredibly humbling to see that we’d been given what was the best room in the house , decorated with flowers, and had been given all the family’s blankets while they slept next to the cast iron firepot in the kitchen. We ate by candlelight after watching the sun go down and the temperature dropped sharply, so we snuggled up on the wooden floor and looked out at the stars. In the morning we showered with a watering can and steam came off us – we could see our breath in the air, but by 9 o’clock the burning sun was out again. Once we were nearing the bigger cities again we spent one night in a monastery which was absolutely fascinating. Myanmar is a predominantly Buddhist country, and it is a requirement that every Burmese man spends at least two periods of his life (between the ages of 8 and 13, and again between 30 and 40, for between a few months to a couple of years) cloistered in a monastery dedicating himself to Buddhism. We were in the same room (a large hall with rattan sleeping mats on the floor) as the ‘mini monks’ boys between 8 and 11. Despite their ceremonial robes and angelic faces, boys are boys anywhere in the world: very cute and very cheeky! Their day at the monastery started with chanting at 4.45 in the morning but that was ok as we’d been in bed not long after the sun went down the night before (again by torch and candle light) and waking up to the giggles and whispers of 70 baby monks who don’t want to get out of bed was really a lot of fun. Plus there’s something soothing about being curled up on a rattan mattress under warm blankets as the sound of meditation washes over you – very relaxing and it was difficult to be outside for breakfast by 6.30!