To Be Young and Cool in Burma
Kandawgji Park
"I went to Burma," Dundon writes, "in order to try and understand something about its citizens' experience in the year leading up to the country's first democratic elections in decades. What I found in a traumatized nation of extreme poverty and neglect was a people who refused to be despondent. My last night in Yangon was spent drinking beer out of plastic water bottles at a popular roadside turnout. Planted on the hoods of battered Toyotas and patchwork Hondas that blared Akon and Lady Gaga, I was enraptured by the persistence of the beautifully disjointed city, its pain and its revelry. As we sat and drank, groups of local kids would gather at the spot the way they do at a California sunset: grounded in the presence of something greater than themselves."