Looks like a lot of things are happening in Myanmar these days (check out BBC world news). It's been a while since I was there last, but I still remember all of the people that I had the opportunity to meet. For those of you who haven't been following the news lately, the military junta doubled the price of gasoline which has put a big strain on people. Myanmar is one of the poorest southeast asian countries. A lot of countries have imposed trade sanctions that prevent companies from doing business in Myanmar, which has only exacerbated the hardship for the people there. The intention of the sanctions is to put pressure on the military junta; however, it only makes life more difficult for the general population (we learned this from our short term mission trip in 1998). The junta failed to recognize the results of the democratic election that was held many years ago, and western nations responded to this civil rights violation by imposing the sanctions.

In response to raise in gas prices, among other things, the buddhist monks have started staging some protests. This is very, very unusual and I have never seen anything like this in all the time I've been following Myanmar in the news (almost 10 years). The last protests were in 1988 and I believe that they were led by college students, which led to the closure of universities in Myanmar. When we went in 98, our guest house owner was a former student and he told us that sometimes they would reopen the universities and the close them again.

The interesting thing about these new protests is that it is mostly the young monks that are leading the protests. About 10 years ago, it used to be that most of the buddhist monks (more than half) were orphans. Because abortion is illegal, babies would be left at the buddhist temples and would be taken in by the monks. It was a form of social welfare. They would basically spend the rest of their lives "begging" for rice.

It looks like things are coming to a boiling point there. If the monks are successful in leading a revolution, it could mean even greater reverence and deeper entrenchment of buddhism within Myanmar. It remains to be seen what will happen to the Church in Myanmar. I am somewhat undecided about what role the church should have in this. I guess that is best left up to the church leaders in Myanmar to decide. Religious beliefs aside, everyone would agree that a change in government would be welcome.

The US has announced a visa ban, which doesn't really seem to do anything. One of our good friends in Myanmar, Dr. Aung would often travel to the US and has a sister-in-law in the states. The visa ban would prevent him from traveling here. Seems to be more of a "looks good in the news, but doesn't really do anything" kind of response. I don't see many of the junta leaders traveling to the US for any particular reason.

Keep Myanmar in your prayers.

So I'm watching CNBC and there's a show about retiring rich. As I listen, I feel like there's a lot of bad advice. There's this panel of 4 people that became successful in different ways, giving conflicting advice to the studio audience.

The ONE good thing that I heard was from a guy who was talking about changing mortgage payments to biweekly instead of monthly. You can call your bank and set something like this up. If you do this with a 30 year mortgage, you can pay off your mortgage in 23 years, instead of 30. So instead of paying $1000/mo (more like $3000, in CA), you can pay $500/bi-weekly.

Now that I'm working for New York Life and helping people with their retirement planning and insurance, I'm realizing that there's a lot of good stuff out there that people don't know about and a lot of bad stuff that people think is good. A lot of companies take advantage of people's ignorance instead of really trying to serve their clients. You can see it in the things that they put into their contracts, etc. I'm thankful that New York Life isn't like that.