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The Last Journey for the Man of Peace

 

The Last Journey for the Man of Peace: A Daughter’s Remembrance

 
by Aye Aye Thant
November 25, 2019 is the 45th anniversary of my father U Thant’s passing. I would like to take this opportunity to share my personal recollections of a fateful time: the events surrounding my father’s funeral, when student activists in Rangoon seized my father’s body to protest the
military government’s refusal to give him a state funeral.

My father, U Thant, passed away at the age of 65 on Monday, November 25, 1974 at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, where he had been admitted a week earlier with pneumonia, a complication from cancer of the mouth. Father had been ill with cancer for one year; he’d had his first surgery on November 13, 1973.

Upon receiving word of my father’s death, the delegates to the United Nations General Assembly stood for a minute of silence and then began delivering a eulogy. The UN flag was flown at half-mast. My father’s body was laid in state in front of the Meditation Room at the United Nations. This was unprecedented and we considered it a great honor. The President of the United States, Gerald Ford, issued a statement saying that for “U Thant, loyalty was not to any one power or ethnicity, but to humanity.” He also called him “a man of peace.”
The family wrote a letter to General Ne Win, the military dictator and President of Burma, telling him of my father’s death and asking for permission to bring his body back to be buried there. We did not receive any formal response, but informally, there were a number of indications that the government would cooperate with our plan. For example, the Permanent Representative of Burma to the United Nations, U Lwin, joined my husband and me in the reception line at the United Nations where my father laid in state. This indicated to us that he was there to represent the government with the approval of General Ne Win.

Last Journey

On November 29, 1975 we boarded a Pan Am flight bound for Bangkok. Traveling with me were my husband, my 8-year old son, and the Chief of Protocol at the UN, Mr. Sinan Korle, as a representative of the Secretary-General. At every stop along the way, ambassadors from Burma received us at each of the airports where Burma had embassies. That also indicated to us that the Ne Win government was welcoming my father back home. In Bangkok, we chartered a Burmese plane. This was also a sign of approval from the government, since all commercial planes were owned by the government.
We landed in Rangoon on Sunday, December 1, and were greeted at the airport by a tremendous crowd. But, no one from the government had come to meet us at the airport.
There was also no appropriate vehicle there to carry Father’s casket. Instead, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) of Myanmar provided us a SUV to carry the casket. I was told then that arrangements had been made a few days earlier for my father’s body to be laid in state at the Kyaikkasan grounds, the former colonial-era race track.
Along with my son and the UN Chief of Protocol, I followed the casket with the UNDP representative in his car. My husband rode with one of my uncles. The streets were lined with people, some weeping, some holding their hands together in the Buddhist gesture of “kadaw,” and some saluting. I was overwhelmed with emotion: pride at seeing my father received with such love, and sadness that he could not be there himself to receive that genuine devotion and respect. I murmured something like, “Oh, he is loved.” No one in the car responded.

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Blogs Posts

Rangoon University

Rangoon University
by Richard Yu Khin

Rangoon University Badminton team used to have badminton courts at Convocation Hall in the early 1950s. My father who was All-Burma Badminton Doubles Champion in the late 1920s made arrangements for students to use Convocation Hall after work hours – i.e. after 4.00pm. But students bunked classes and starting playing Badminton at Convocation Hall during office hours. So, permission to use Convocation Hall had to revoked. My father secured funds from an American Foundation to built Recreation Center where students could play badminton. But Prime Minister U Nu suspended all American economic aid due to Chinese KMT invasion of Shan States of Burma. The Caretaker Government of 1958 permitted construction of Recreation Center and the building was built by 1962. At the opening of Recreation Center, a basketball goodwill game was played between Sailors from visiting American Warship and Rangoon University students. I invited my sailing friend Barbara Everton, daughter of American Ambassador, to this event. Barbara was a student at Mount Holyoke College ( one of the seven sister colleges, female equivalent of Ivy League) who was spending her Junior year at Rangoon University. What is important is that a top college in America was accepting grades earned at Rangoon University as transfer credits because Rangoon University was then one of the best universities in Asia.

Chancellor Road leading to Convocation Hall – you will notice there are no exposed electrical wires at the lamp-posts. When my father returned from a study tour of America, he was impressed with electrical wires being buried underground in America.

American Ambassador John Everton was President of Kalamazoo College in Western Michigan before serving as Ford Foundation Representative in Burma in the 1950s, when he also served as Adjunct Professor at Rangoon University. Barbara Everton attended MEHS and is seen in class photos with Jillian Logie, daughter of Principal Mrs Logie.

Submitted by Edwin Tin Hut

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Ma Htin Mya Nwe’s 2018 High School Matriculation Examination Academic Achievement.

D1MEHS Graduate, Ma Htin Mya Nwe’s 2018 High School Matriculation Examination Academic Achievement.

Dagon1 Basic Education High School (Dagon1 B.E.H.S) / former Methodist
English High School (M,.E.H.S.),OR, D1MEHS:

Thanks very much to our D1MEHS Alumni, Kenny Teoh, Cecil Wagstaff,
John Chen, and, many Others, for our EXCELLENT D1MEHS Website,
www.mehsa.org, where our D1MEHS Community, our Families, and, Friends
can Share, Communicate, and, ‘Keep-In-Touch’, with each other. Please
Register, Log-in, and, Participate, at www.mehsa.org.

On 09/17/2019, I have been able to read that, Ma Htin Mya Nwe has
obtained 1st Position (with 553 Total Grade Points), in The Myanmar,
Final, High School Matriculation Examination, held in June 2018. In
ADDITION, Ma Su Yee Wynn, Ma Su Nay Chae Moe, Ma Yamin Aung, and Ma Su
Myat Oo have held the Top 10 Positions, with Total Grade Points from
553 to 548.

We appreciate very much, our D1MEHS Graduates, for their Dedications,
Hardwork, and, Disciplines, toward their Education Goals. Thanks very
much to our Community Support Groups of Principals, Teachers,
Instructors, Administrative, Operations & Maintenance Staff, Families,
Friends, and, Others, who have contributed to our D1MEHS Successes.

An Awarding Ceremony for D1MEHS Outstanding Students was held on
11/11/2018, at the D1MEHS Assembly Hall at 09:00 am. MEHS Alumni
Society members: Dr. Nyunt Nyunt Yi @ Julia Win, U Saw Wynn @ Selwyn
Kyi Win, and, U Ye Myint @ Albert Ohn Khin were present, at The
Ceremony.

The MEHS Memorial Foundation, Yangon, and, D1MEHA Alumni Society, each
contributed 500,000 MMK (5 Lakhs), Totaling 1,000,000 MMK (10 Lakhs).

Good Luck & Best Wishes,

Myint Myint Yee@
Miss Lois Jane Lee
Alumna,
D1MEHS
Yangon, Myanmar.

DATE: 09/17/2019 @ 03:45 pm (EST, USA)

Submitted by Mis Lois Jane Lee

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Blogs Posts

Gathering in Australia

MEHSA Gathering in Australia-Sept, 2019
Pic l..to R. john Cronin (a.k.a Turner), Cecil Wagstaff (a.k.a. MEHS Bayoke or Larrikin) Edward Gonsalves (a.k.a. Turner)  & U Tin Aung Cho

MEHS Mates IN CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA-17SEP2019

MEHS Mates will always contact each other
Whether neighbours ….and…where ?
From Melbourne, Canberra, Indiana and again Canberra
Which as you see are near and also really far
Braving Long distance Travel – with No Fear or Care
Yes, indeed ……from Here, There and Everywhere

Apart, since our respective Graduations
Has taken us all,  to Many Nations
USA,  Australia  to name only two
I could add many more BUT there are quite a few
The  List would go on forever
As The Tyrannies of Time and Distance could never conquer

Ship Ahoy,  Ahoy, there Matey or Yo Ho Ho, 

In sailing  parlane ..At My Canberra Yacht Club
WE are in a Landlocked Capital,…but can still enjoy a Row or a Sail
Raise or Hoist the Anchor
 Going For’ ward, when  the Wind blows stronger
Jibing & Tacking and working the Mainsail
Keep an eye on the attached Painter….attached  your Tail
Sharpies, and Dinghies, Kayaks …or  any kind ‘a’ Tub

The Bonds first formed  By Our Respected Teachers, in all of us at MEHS
The Values they instilled in us  = the Very Best
REALLY……….?? Did they put you through the “True Friends” Test
Yes, indeed, YES, YES, YES
Three Cheers for our Dear ‘Ole MEHS

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Blogs Posts

My Dear Little Sister by Cecil Wagstaff

My Dear Little Sister
How much we all still Miss HER
 
And yes, she will NOT grow Old, as we who are left Grow Old  
We always remember and think of her
From The Going Down of The Sun
……and in The Morning 
 
May  Our Lord have Welcomed her and Grant Her
Her well deserved Heavenly Peace and Blessing
This is being sent to her last known Address
A Helicopter, Shipboard, en route to Heaven
 
Watched lovingly by THE BROKEN HEARTED
The Helicopter   ….and she, departed
Her Journey Heaven Bound-  STARTED 
The Passing at 26 August 2017, Sydney Time 0525 
But In Noumea Local Time, it 0625 
Happy/ that She is at Rest
Afteryrt doing wat she loved Best
To The Last things done were DANCING,  TRAVELLING
…..And SINGiNG 
Now, Amongst the BEST, …MY Dearest MUM/DAD and all The Family
At Cecil Hills, Kemp’s Creek, Catholic Lawn Cemetery, 
 
Marilyn you demonstrated  For Each of  us – with all you have done 
 
Yes, indeed “THE POWER OF ONE”
Cecil Perveen, Michelle, Frank, Craig, Tammy, Asha-Isabella & Lila-Gabriella
 

Note: Marilyn was in Mrs.Brindry’s class in MEHS, before she left Myamnar

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Announcements Blogs Posts

MEHS (Dagon 1) Student Stood First in 2018

Dagon (1) Student – Ma Htin Mya Nwe

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Adventure Blogs Posts Reflections

MY MYSTERIOUS MOTHER: BEAUTY QUEEN, REBEL LEADER, NATIONAL ICON by Charmaine Craig

MY MYSTERIOUS MOTHER: BEAUTY QUEEN, REBEL LEADER, NATIONAL ICON

CHARMAINE CRAIG ON THE AMAZING LIFE AND TIMES OF LOUISA BENSON CRAIG

This article was posted by Charmaine Craig on Literary Hub.

I do not speak Burmese, yet I understand from my late mother that pon is one of those Burmese words that are impossible to translate. “Power. Wisdom. Karma. Insight,” she once explained to me cryptically. “When your pon is elevated, you think on an elevated plane—very little about yourself, and always about others.” She hesitated. “Pon can also mean memory. You were born with too much of this type.”

This was nearly 15 years ago, when I had begun interviewing her in preparation to write a novel based on her experiences in Burma, the country of her birth, renamed Myanmar in 1989. I pressed her—I always had to press my mother, gently, to elaborate on a past that she seemed unwilling to revisit—and asked what she meant by my having been born with too much memory.

“You were just about one year old,” she said. “Not out of diapers, yet talking. You convinced me that you had once been my mother.” With a shift of her gaze, she seemed to push away the thought, just as she had apparently tried to push away my pon with a ritual aimed at making me forget my past life. The ritual had been simple, she said: feeding me rice from the lid of a pot under a stairwell when I was a baby. Was this dulling of my memory the reason that I was called so strongly to untangle the truth from the legend of her life?

Disparate details of that life had been sketched for me by Burmese expatriates living in places from Bakersfield to Paris—details emphasizing my mother’s iconic status as both a beauty queen and a revolutionary. More than once I heard, “When she wore slacks, we wore slacks,” or, “Because she had curls, we wore our hair curly.” My American father often reminded me that the Burmese government had placed a price on her head—a thrilling and terrifying tidbit, as it underscored my mother’s importance in her homeland and the fact that, if she were to return, she could forever be taken away. When I was an undergraduate, a photography professor, having recently returned from a shoot in Asia, indirectly accused me of lying about my mother’s whereabouts. I claimed she had been a longtime resident of Los Angeles; he looked me in the eye and told me to stop the charade—“She’s been spotted riding a white horse through the jungle, protecting her people,” I remember him saying.

Even as a very young child, I’d been aware that, somewhere out there, a nation of citizens regarded my mother as something of a queen, and I’d felt heartbroken when strangers in our California home assumed she was my nanny or our family maid. Yet my mother wasn’t proud of her status among the Burmese. Her disregard for image and popularity became a lesson in self-respect, one that eventually encouraged me to walk away from a burgeoning career in film and television in the 90s, when I was most often sent out on calls to play “exotic” types and aliens from outer space. Writing afforded me dignity—a dignity I felt I could endow my mother with in prose, if only I could get beyond her reticence, her humility, and her desire to keep my pon low and my memory of the past shadowy.

Known by her maiden name, Louisa Benson, my mother was not Burman, the majority race in Myanmar. Her father was Sephardic, and her mother was of the Karen ethnic nationality, one of Burma’s indigenous and chronically oppressed peoples.

She was born on the eve of Burma’s involvement in the Second World War, when the Japanese invaded, led by a band of Burmans wanting to oust the British. Her father led the family out of Rangoon on a nightmarish 900-mile trek to northern Burma. Strewn everywhere along the mountain roads was evidence of the massacre of minorities: corpses missing an arm, legs, a head, a breast, genitals—always the genitals—mutilated, chopped off, impaled, abdomens ripped open and disemboweled. And the screams. The screams and groans of the not yet dead whom no one dared to help.

Eventually, my grandfather was captured and tortured—terribly—yet he survived; they all survived. The family even went on to flourish in the post-war years, as my grandfather established an empire of trucks, ice factories, and bottling plants that would make him one of the wealthiest men in Burma. Their living room housed a beloved concert-grand Steinway, the mango tree-lined path to their portico welcomed a daily parade of vendors, and their home, like my grandfather’s businesses, was staffed with Karens—an increasingly downtrodden people to whom he now gave himself out of gratitude for their protection of him throughout the war. In 1946, he financed a Karen goodwill mission to England to plead the Karen case to the British government. When that had no effect, he joined other Karens in peacefully appealing to the government for equal rights for all of Burma’s peoples. But the Burman-dominated government proved to have another agenda.

In early 1949, civil war erupted. One night, at the age of seven, my mother was secretly sipping crème de menthe out of a little liquor glass before one of her parents’ parties—she remembered how the servants had powdered and polished the floor until it shone like a mirror, how the guests streamed into the house, and how a family friend, wearing a cravat, swooped her up and twirled her around to the strains of Nat King Cole—and the next night shots were being fired across their estate. It was the beginning of a second season of violence, loss, and exile: my grandfather would be tortured and imprisoned for years; my grandmother would disappear for months at a time, searching for ways to support her refugee family. Upon the fatherless family’s return to Rangoon in 1951, blood covered their looted villa’s walls and bullets fell from the trees whenever it rained.

My mother’s foray into the world of beauty pageants at age ten was a direct response to her father’s imprisonment. The plan, hatched by her mother, was to captivate the wife of the district commissioner. So taken was the woman with the tender pleas of this “doll-like” girl in Burmese court clothes that my grandfather was released at once—though soon he was put under house arrest.

Ironically, as her family’s freedom and financial assets were stripped away, my mother’s fame skyrocketed. Her particular combination of artlessness and “exotic” Jewish-Karen beauty—black curly mane, dewy wide-set eyes, and Sophia Loren-like curvaceousness—became a phenomenon of national pride. When she was 15, she won her first Miss Burma title; at 17, she won her second. But she was a reluctant beauty queen. “I had to be taught how to walk in heels, how to pose. It was a nuisance,” she told me. “I’d much rather have been out playing soccer in the mud, or climbing trees.” In order to fund her brother’s American education, she at last agreed to star in a Burmese film, which catapulted her into the kind of fame that can be crippling for one who values unselfconsciousness. Nevertheless, after a stint studying in America (where she met and briefly dated my awestruck father), she starred in another film: she had her family’s welfare to consider, and she learned to tune out her celebrity.

Still, fame defined her life; she was courted by the country’s political heads of power, including Katie Ne Win, wife of General Ne Win—Burma’s Prime Mister and the military leader responsible for my grandfather’s imprisonment and decades of atrocities committed against the country’s peoples. Katie Ne Win was a socialite who enjoyed having an entourage of young stars around her, and she used her power to force my mother to attend her extravagant parties. My mother’s proximity to the Ne Wins caught her in a round of political mud-slinging: Accused of being Ne Win’s lover, she escaped to Hong Kong, where she was rumored to be having an abortion. Hospitalized later for an emergency appendectomy, she was said to be recovering from a stabbing by Katie.

Brigadier “Brig” General Lin Htin was a Karen 16 years my mother’s senior and one of Burma’s most notorious rebels. He had a bullet lodged in his skull, illegitimate children scattered across the country, and the distinction of having been reported slain countless times. When he asked my mother to marry him in 1964, he was in Rangoon pursuing peace negotiations for the Karen—negotiations that would soon irreversibly break down. The marriage was a sensation, and before long the spies following them numbered in the tens and twenties. My mother and Brig were forced underground, to the jungle war zone. “I would open my eyes at night,” she told me, “and see Brig beside me, looking up at the ceiling, strategizing.”

A year into their marriage, Brig and my mother lost their only child, an infant boy; and then Brig, too, disappeared. Before leaving her in the jungle to attempt another round of peace negotiations, he paused, as if prescient, and cautioned her never to believe rumors that he had been killed. He would someday resurface, he promised. When he didn’t return, she received communication from Rangoon authorities declaring him dead and urging her to return to the city to be reunited with her family. But her father-in-law radioed her conflicting information: “Do not come back. They will chop you into one thousand pieces.”

The next year marked the period she would later be most unwilling to speak about. Yet, as I learned in the weeks after her death—when one of her remaining sisters sent me 26 pages of reflections my mother had penned as many years earlier—it was a period about which she had been willing, haltingly, to write. In these reflections she elliptically describes how, after Brig’s disappearance, she donned military garb, cut off her long curly hair, and led his brigade toward a mountain range where another faction of the Karen Army was stationed, one resistant to the peace talks Brig had pursued. “Brig’s men looked to me as a leader who would negotiate for them so that they would not get swallowed up.” She dispatched neutral villagers to the rival Karen brigade headquarters, requesting safe passage, and was permitted to advance with one bodyguard. The two of them had to cross the Salween River to reach the rival brigade’s headquarters, and when they arrived, she was presented with traditional Karen women’s clothing. “But I politely refused,” she writes. “Dressed like a woman I would be at a distinct disadvantage in our negotiations.”

Her written account stops short with this, though I know from what she and others have told me that my mother successfully convinced this general to reconcile and pursue a shared agenda of pan-ethnic peace—an act of huge significance at that critical juncture, when the government was reigniting its ruthless program of dividing and subduing ethnic minority groups. Still, the details of what she went through in the year that followed—when she lived as a soldier on the Thailand-Burma border and acted as a liaison to other ethnic leaders—remain cloaked in mystery for me, as do her reasons for parting from her people in 1967 and marrying my father, who, after eight years of unuttered love for her, had connected with her family (now mostly in America), at last confessed himself to her in a letter, rendezvoused with her in Bangkok, and arranged for her to enter the US as his wife.

“When you do something, you have to think about yourself and others,” my mother often stressed to me. “If you think only of yourself, you’re no better than a cow.” For a time after my birth, she was drawn into the cocoon of parenting. Yet all along Burma called, and with the Burmese military crackdown in 1988, she reemerged as a leader in the Burmese pro-democracy and human rights movements, advocating passionately for inter-ethnic dialogue and protections for children and the displaced, and eventually facilitating the resettlement of what would be over 50,000 refugees to this country.

Not long after I abandoned my first version of the novel based on her life, my mother died, in February 2010. A few days later, I ventured to a modest yellow house serving as a Burmese Buddhist monastery in Baldwin Park, Los Angeles, where I had been invited to a ceremony in her honor. I had never visited the monastery before, but I knew it was a place where my mother—though not Buddhist—had both given and received consolation, a place inhabited by the monk she affectionately called “Pon Pon,” whom she had met while pursuing an internationally ground-breaking lawsuit on behalf of unnamed plaintiffs in Burma (the corporation Unocal had turned a blind eye to the displacement, forced labor, murder, rape or torture of tens of thousands of villagers by the country’s military during the construction of a gas pipeline).

Memory was not yet for me a powerful antidote to loss, as it would become later, when I would write the final version of the novel that will be published this May. As the monks at the monastery, including Pon Pon, recited rounds of discordant prayers, I searched for signs of my mother’s spirit everywhere: in the reflective glass of a cupboard that shelved sacred objects, in the white picture of day through the open window, in the face of the Buddha over the altar, in Pon Pon’s surprisingly innocent eyes.

Following the ceremony, Pon Pon and I sat alone near the altar and he pointed to one of the folding chairs lining the walls. “She sat there,” he said, and then, pointing elsewhere, “and she sat there. And, another time, there. Tell me, do you think she is here with us?”

“What do you think?” I ventured.

“I asked you first,” he countered. “When I heard that you would be coming, I told myself she would come with you, that maybe she would come here.” His uncertain eyes moved from mine back to the edges of the sanctuary. “I cannot believe she is dead. I don’t believe it.”

For a span, we sat in silence, wondering, I think, about evidence and faith, disappointment and disbelief.

“You know,” he continued finally. “She was my friend. And when I speak about my friend, I want to cry. She had a beautiful mind. And she was part of our hope.”

The child in me still yearned for her world to begin and end with mine, though I knew—had always known—that she was Burma’s.

Charmaine Craig is a faculty member in the Department of Creative Writing at UC Riverside, and the descendant of significant figures in Burma’s modern history. A former actor in film and television, she studied literature at Harvard University and received her MFA from the University of California, Irvine. Her first novel, The Good Men (Riverhead), was a national bestseller translated into six languages. Miss Burma is out now from Grove Atlantic.
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Blogs MEHS Notalgia Posts Reflections

Follow your dreams by Cecil Wagstaff

Follow your Dreams

By Cecil Wagstaff (Australia)
What does a derelict Tennis Court at the Corner of York & Sule Pagoda Roads, Rangoon, with an enormous mango tree growing next to it, in the 1950’s, later developed and a Cinema & Hotel development (The Thamada, Or The President) Cinema, the original 1937 Version of a movie of the James Hilton Book ‘Lost Horizon’ by Frank Capra, an extraordinary Teacher of Geography at the Methodist English High School or M.E.H.S., in Rangoon, a Teacher, Daw Lily Hein Tin,  who inspired two schoolboys whom she taught and instilled an immense appreciation of her subject in them, these two schoolboys who originally lived in Rangoon, but later moved to Pakistan & Australia respectively, forged links in a chain that commenced way in 1958 and still endures.
Let me please elaborate:

One Cecil Leighton Wynter Wagstaff, was a really mischievous  schoolboy, who was always in trouble with this Geography Teacher …and other Teachers too, if he may add, particularly his English teacher, lived and grew up at No. 5 York Road, Rangoon, next to the Tennis Court, with his late beloved parents, Moira & William Wynter Wagstaff.
No. 5 York Road was a Boarding house run by his late beloved Grandmother, Phoebe (lovingly known a Buddee) Pereira.  He learnt to ride his first bicycle (a Raleigh) Sports Model which was a borrowed bicycle. He was devastated when the Court and the mango tree were demolished and uprooted respectively, by developers, more the mango tree, as he used to shoot mangoes down with a homemade catapult, a banned implement, nowadays.  This was the 1950s where every naughty schoolboy had his ‘prized ‘catapult’ or Gwa as it is called in Burmese.
The Developer, built what is now The Thamada Cinema & Hotel, which opened in 1958.
As with all Cinemas, it ran movies for a few weeks before opening its doors to the public, and one afternoon, being the inquisitive chap Cecil was, he was wandering around the construction site of the Thamada Hotel, which was still incomplete, and heard Sounds of movies within the Cinema Complex.  Curious, as always, he found his way into the Cinema Complex, and found himself enjoying the ‘Free Movies’.
Unbelievable luck, better than winning the National Lottery, perhaps or knocking down a half-dozen mangoes.  The movie, which was about to start was Lost Horizon, in Black & White, the original 1937 version, starring Ronald Coleman & Jane Wyatt.

He was enthralled with the regions of the Karakoram and Himalaya Mountains, the location of the legendary Shangri-la, those were projected on the largest screen (of the time), that he had ever witnessed.   He was enthralled and fascinated, and could picture himself amongst those mountains.  He vowed to get there – one day.
The years rolled by, Graduation from school in 1962, a job with a Travel Agency, Mandalay Tours and Travel Service, and because he spoke French, courtesy of the teachings of his MEHS French Teacher, he got this job and the next at Air France in 1963, in New Delhi, India, and these took him to the far flung regions firstly in Burma, including Pegu, Mandalay, Loikaw, getting to meet and even share a meal with the Padaung Tribe (the Ladies with the elongated necks, with rings around this, for support.
In 1963 after he moved to India and joined Air France, then Lufthansa and secondly, these took him to the far corners of the World, all the major and not so major cities he wanted to visit.  He married and had two lovely and loving children, Michelle & Craig, but till he left India to migrate to Australia in 1977, he had not fulfilled his dream of getting to his ‘Shangri-La’.
Undaunted he made several trips, to Pakistan, albeit for ‘other reasons’ ……………..but still not to his Shangri-La.  On these trips he constantly sought ‘someone’ who would be interested and willing to accompany him to these mountains.
At long last, he found this very special person, in his long-time and closest friend, one, Mohamed Amin I. Gaziani.

Amin and Cecil had been in school together from Std.7.A, and by coincidence, the class when they first met and became friends had ‘Homeroom Teacher’, the Geography Teacher, mentioned earlier.
Amin and Cecil planned the trip, with most of the organizing having to be done by Amin, who lived in Islamabad at the time. Islamabad being one the closest major cities to get to Shangri-La.
Then in 2001, the next century following the century when the dream was dreamt, it finally happened.
In August 2001, Cecil, his loving wife Perveen (who was really not to keen, but did, for Cecil’s sake), Amin (whose wife Farida could not accompany the group, due to their daughter just having presented them with a grandchild, but was pleased to let Amin accompany Cecil, as he had done for many years albeit on other outings and visits to Karachi, and a group of Amin’s other friends, began their odyssey.
From Islamabad, along the famous Kararoram Highway, which replaced the Old Silk Route, to Besham, then further to Chillas, Gilgit, the capital of Pakistan’s Far Northern Areas or F.N.A, to Hunza or Karimabad, the town believed to have inspired the novel Lost Horizon.
Lunch at Besham overlooking the mighty Indus River, one night in Chillas, two in Gilgit and two wonderful nights were spent in the Hunza Valley.
Standing at the Junction Point of the three Highest Mountain Ranges, The Hindu Kush/The Karakoram & The Himalaya, at the confluence of the mighty Indus River and the slightly smaller, but awesome swiftly flowing Gilgit Rivers, in the valley below, demonstrated the awesome power of Almighty God Who created all this, and humankind’s – diminutive part we play in Our World.

One of the two nights’ stay in Karimabad or Hunza, coincided with the Birthday of the Mir, or Leader of Hunza.  Amin, Cecil & the group were fortunate to receive an invitation to his Birthday Dinner, and watch Fireworks (sic.) Display, at his Official Residence. This through our Group Leader’s personal contacts.
The Fireworks Display is not what we know in the Pyrotechnics of today, and although our current fireworks teams do a magnificent job, spare a thought for the people of the Hunza.
The fireworks there are actually old automobile and Truck tyres that are hauled up the steep mountain-sides, manually, many days & weeks in advance. These are arranged in varying shapes and designs, such as Cars. Ships, ancient and modern, aircraft, Castles, even Disney Characters, and a Coca Cola Bottle.
When darkness fell they were set alight (environmentalists will shudder and die a thousand deaths).  Burning tyres are rolled down the hillside, to great the appreciation by onlookers.  Definitely not the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Hong Kong Harbour, or New York’s Times Square, on New Year’s Eve, but spectacular, nonetheless.
From Karimabad, our group proceeded further along the Silk Route, to Sost, the last Border Town before one crosses the famed Kunjerab Pass and the Border between Pakistan & China at 16,500 feet above mean sea level, where the air is so thin, even matches will not light.

 

Cecil exchanged Caps with a Border Guard, as a gesture and token of our Group’s respect and appreciation.

The Karakoram Highway which replaced the Old Silk Road was built at the cost of many brave men who made the ultimate sacrifice and paid with their lives.
It is tragic, but a credit to the detail project management of the planners of the Karakoram Highway.  Empty Graves were prepared in advance, and those that were not filled, on completion of construction, with a brave Road Construction worker, are still there, for all to see, in a Cemetery in Gilgit.  A credit, as these ensured proper and respectable grave sites so that in the event of a life being lost, the hero, was not subject to a hastily dug grave on a hillside, and this also ensured the hero received a ‘fitting burial’.
Returning from Sost, the group stopped at Gulmit and were amazed to see a school Cricket team – why you may ask?  Cricket is played with a Passion in Pakistan?
Well this Team was wearing the Green & Gold Colours of Australia, with ‘AUSTRALIA’, boldly emblazoned on the chest and back of the shirts. Unbelievable!  In this remote part of the world.  Of course we stopped for photographs and a chat. How could we not?

Even more unbelievable when Cecil asked them for a name and address to send the photos to, the Captain responded, saying, ‘Sahib, please send these to us via The Internet’ !!!!!! …..and gave his internet address.  Later on his return to Australia, Cecil sent them all, caps from Australia…………………and the photographs via The Internet.  He is happy to say that he is still in touch, to date, by e-mail……………….of course!
However, one must give credit to the Administration of the Hunza Region.
Education is a prime objective of the Mir of Hunza with 92% of the population, being educated and they are working hard to move into the modern age.
The Crime Rate in the Hunza is an amazing Zero percent, and Yes, there are NO Police there.  Food is plentiful and the longevity of the people is astounding, with health rates being excellent, no doubt the lifestyle and conditions are contributing to this.

They work hard, BUT never rush.  Cecil saw someone who looked like a 70 year old man with about a 50 pound load on his back, walking up a hill, walking slowly, but getting to the top, nevertheless.
Truly a Shangri-La.

Returning to the city of Islamabad, we were advised that a Flash Flood had washed away the one bridge that gave access to the plains.  This was at the village of Shatial.
We had no choice; we had to halt and could go no further, until alternate arrangements could be arranged. We had to hire porters, as they did in days of Frontier Travel of centuries ago.
We were advised that three men had been washed away in the disaster, one corpse had been located, work was underway, digging out another man, who was found to be still alive, and there was a full scale rejoicing, but sadly, one was never located.  We had to, ourselves, clamber down the steep sides of the riverbank and up the other side.
In the village of Shatial, we secured two rooms, in a tiny road-side truck stop venue, the only road-house in Shatial, there are No Hotels or even Boarding Houses.  We nicknamed this the ‘Shatial Sheraton’, and spent the remainder of the day there – the Ladies in one room, the gents in the other, as per the custom that prevails in those regions.
We had a Grandstand View of the Pakistan Air Force and Army Helicopters flying up, along and through the River Valley, flying in Men & Equipment to mend the Bridge, and we learnt that this may have taken up to three days.
Fortunately for us, when we contacted the organisation from which we had hired our vehicle, we learnt there was another group heading up to the Kunjerab Pass who had hired a vehicle from the same Company as we had, but that vehicle would take a few hours to get to Shatial.  We made arrangements to use theirs, when it arrived, and they would take ours that was stranded there, when they got to the other side of the now demolished bridge.
We had a few hours wait, as you will understand.
We asked the owner of this only road-house in Shatial, if he could cook a meal for us. He obliged, but advised he did not have sufficient plates as the number of people who used the road-house never exceeded four (two rooms, after all) at any given time.

What to do? Amin, resourceful as ever, went to the local Marketplace and bought a second hand Melamine Dinner set (Melamine ware is manufactured in Pakistan and they do a good job).
We had a great meal, eating with our fingers (right hand only, as custom demands), and then advised the Owner, that he could keep the Dinner Set, with the Compliments of our Group.
Getting back through Besham was a major concern, as we would be travelling at night….Besham is notorious for Dacoits or Armed Robbers.  So what did we do?  We waited a wee bit longer for another vehicle which was leaving and the two vehicles traveled in a Convoy, with only their Parking lights on steeply curving Mountain Roads, – hazardous, but, the Drivers seemed to feel that this was the safer of the two options – so who were we to argue with experts.
The Fact that we got back safely to Islamabad, is a tribute to their skills….and boy, were we relieved when the lights of the first major town, after Besham, came into view.
Epilogue

Cecil and Amin have been back to their beloved Mountains, since then, and hope to keep going back as often as they can. On these they have had the privilege of seeing some of the magnificent Twenty Thousanders, Peaks over 20,000 Feet. To name a few, K2, Nanga Parbat, Masherbrum (Cecil’s favourite mountain peak), and many of the lower ones, perhaps not as well known namely Rakaposhi, the Twin Ulter Peaks & Lady’s Finger, Gold,Peak, Diran Peak.
Cecil’s love of the mountains also took him the Eastern Himalayas to see Kanchenganga and Everest (in Nepal) – he saw Everest, but only whilst airborne. As these were in India, Amin could not accompany reasons, sadly, because of the political situation that exists between those two countries.
Again, another trip with Amin, to Skardu, Lower and Upper Kachura Lakes, Sadpara Lake, Shigar, the Deosai Plains at 14,500 feet, and the Sanctuary for the Himalayan Brown Bear, Khapalu and very close to the L.O.C. or ‘Line of Control between Pakistan & India. We even shred hot cup of Tea with the Pakistani Brigadier and his platoon of 12 Soldiers, who politely accosted us enquiring to what we were doing there.
We have seen and thanks to our favourite Geography Teacher been able to identify the physical features, Ox-Bow Lakes, Rift Valleys, ad have gazed on the magnificent Passu Glacier – just awesome!.
We also enjoyed a cup of hot Goat’s Milk with the owner of a small farmhouse overlooking picturesque Upper Kachura Lake.

Cecil now has another dream – to go and live up there, and, inspired by the 5year old daughter of the owner of the Farmhouse, but who had no school to attend, to build a small school for infants, perhaps be the Administrator, or even teach, as any idiot, even himself, can teach basic A/B/C and 1/2/3/ and Amin is assisting him in this.
Can he realise this dream too? …………………….….Only Time will tell.
Every Good story has a sequel. Can the Sequel of this story be written?…………………………Cecil hopes so

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The Foundaions laid by Our Respected Principal Mrs. Doreen Logie’s by Cecil Wagstaff

The Foundaions laid by Our Respected Principal Mrs. Doreen Logie’s 

Another  True Story in The Life & Times of this Reprobate …………….only there was a break of several Years in between the related events:

In the year 1975/77,  I was working with an  Airline at Bombay Airport

A certain First Officer on one of our flights made an innocent mistake which led to some pretty serious consequences and could have required our Flight to be seriously delayed 

The issue involved a breach of Customs Regulations, and could have also cost my Airline hundred of thousands of Dollars with passengers Costs, due Missed Connections etc.

I offered to pay the maximum penalty which could have been applied, personally guaranteing this with My Personal Cheque,  only for this F/O to be not held  in Custody, pending resolution of the issue and provided a Personal Financial Guarantee that he would return to BOM  to face any charges,  by depositing my Personal  Cheque to cover this and Customs released him to Operate the Flight

  • Fast forward to…………….. SEPTEMBER 2008 
  • I am at Frankfurt Frankfurt/Rhein Main Airport a Now Long Retired from ALL Airlines,  with which I had worked in Australia but still travelling as a PAD (Retired Ailine Staff on a Discounted Saff Ticket – Subject to Load)  (Airline Mates can relate to this)
  • I had resigned  in 1977 to emigrate to Australia, in that year ….. and this was NOT a LH Retired Staff Ticket
  • Trying to get  seat on board a connecting Heavily Booked Lufthansa Flight , after attending my School Reunion (Lasallian Schools in Rome SEP 2008 – I was a student at St. Paul’s High School, between stints at MEHS
  • I had chatted with the Check-in Staff, even telling them I had been with LH, but no longer was , and this probabl they had been born (they were very young ladies who also later  advised me that I had very Little chance of a seat, but that they would notify the Cockpit Crewe and seek appoval to offer the Spare Crew Seat, or Jump Seat  to me
  • This I  also expected to  become  a NON-Option as I was not in Possession of an ASIC Identification Card Airport Identity Security Card, which is now Mandatory, for Cockpit Travellers Crew & Staff), with Security Measures being tightened 
  • I later went and sat in the Standby Staff Area, w.a.i.t.i.n.g.
  1. I saw the Commander of the Flight come in and he  started  discussing ’something’ with the Traffic Counter Staff…..who were pointing to me while this was in progress
  2. The Commander (‘a pretty stern 6 foot 2inch  or so, tall German’) strode towards me and I thought I would be in b.i.g. Trouble for  me seeking this Jump Seat, and that Ishould have known better
  3. He said, ” are you Cecil Wagstaff. I concurred, sheepishly . “YESIR”
  4. He then said,  Cecil Wagstaff, Cecil Wagstaff, do you know who I am? – to which I again responds sheepishly – “NOSIR” 
  5. I am Captain —— -, but when we first met I was Only a First Officer, and if you had not got me out of a F@*&#**@ Mess, caused by my stupidity,   I may not even have been a F/O…needless to say and never made it to Flight Commander. I could have lost my job
  6. He then related what I had done …..for him in 1976…I had not at first remembered,  as one does NOT keep ‘Favours Done” in Memory Banks………and it all came back to me, in a Flash

A Favour repaid as:

His next words were”…….. “Of course you can travel in My Aircraft’s Cockpit. Bugger the Rules……….I know I can trust you,  JUST  AS YOU TRUSTED ME ALL THOSE YEARS AGO……”???

That,  Mates is true, as it happened to me, and exactly as I related it to you

A FAVOUR REPAID More than 32 years Later

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Blogs MEHS Notalgia Posts Reflections

An Ode in Appreciation of Our Dear Ole ‘M.E.H.S. by Cecil Wagstaff

An  Ode in Appreciation of Our Dear Ole ‘ M.E.H.S.

A Debt We students can n’er Repay

 

Methodist English High School

Yes, Indeed, we are “Proud of Thee”

If it was not for M.E.H.S., where would any of us be?

 

A Rhetorical Question, perhaps?

Yes, Us Blokes, Guys, Gals, Ladies & Chaps

Would NOT be where we are, 

WE would NOT have gone very far 

So only thanks to the Education we received

From our many Teachers who with and their help, achieve 

And  we could make something of ourselves

Pursuing our Youthful Ambitions on then on to Better things on shelves

To grasp these and 

With our Teachers’ Guidance & Help

Achieve Great Lives for Ourselves

In The Wide Tough Challenging World of the Future

Yes only our teachers could nurture

Helping US – To Conquer 

The Problems & Difficulties we would one day have to face

A Herculean Task – like Olympians in Races

Discus Throwers or Rowers 

And win, with a Grin on our faces

MEHS, MEHS, MEHS

Not Just A Champion amongst Schools – rather,  The very BEST