There’s a nice story by Ginanne Brownell in the New York Times about funding education for good but poor students in Nepal. A while ago a group of Nepalis who had made it all the way up through the education system to higher degrees noticed that even good students from poor and marginalized communities were abandoning their studies well before the end of high school. “An estimated 1,500 Nepalese leave the country each day in search of jobs abroad (28.8 percent of the country’s gross domestic product comes from remittances).” In 2012 they therefore decided to set up a grassroots NGO called the Samaanta Foundation with the aim of bridging the gap – which often amounts to no more than $100. “The idea was to fund the students, referred to as fellows, through their higher secondary education and, depending on their abilities and motivation, help finance a few of them through university.” And that is what has been happening on a small-scale throughout the two years since.

Amid all the celebrations marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall (on November 9, 1989), the Washington Post came up with something interesting. “But there are also lessons to be learned from German unification. Here are four – proposed by Germans from both sides of the now-destroyed Berlin Wall.”

1. A divided country needs a joint mission – in Germany, it’s the environment.
2. It only takes one generation to change attitudes and prejudices – a remarkably positive conclusion.
3. Integrating foreigners is important (and eastern Germany would be better off if it had) – I think this is an important point about being as open to difference as possible.
4. Unification can lead to prosperity – it certainly make things easier if a win-win economic scenario unfolds.

Myanmar is also a divided society – broken not simply into west and east, but rather into a multitude of social fragments. Do these lessons apply there too?

President Obama will visit Naypyitaw later this week to attend the East Asia Summit and the US-ASEAN Summit. On Friday he will meet with opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who recently stated that the US has sometimes been “over-optimistic about the reform process”. At The Diplomat, Steve Hirsch has a good analysis of Obama’s objectives for the trip – chiefly to ensure that Myanmar stays on the side of the angels by investing fully in democracy and human rights.

I was in Yangon two years ago when, on November 19, Obama joined then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for a six-hour drop-by – the first ever visit by a sitting US president. The atmosphere in a city visibly spruced up for the occasion was electric, and at least for one afternoon Obama’s impact was enormous. Standing on the crowded street outside Aung San Suu Kyi’s residence, I tried to count the size of his motorcade as it pulled out of her driveway – something between 40 and 50 cars bracketing the presidential limo.

The following day, I happened to meet with Daw Suu and said how surprised I was to see so many vehicles accompanying the president on his trip. “Ridiculous,” she said. “All those big cars in my little garden.”

It’s now four years since Myanmar’s 2010 general election – stage five in the seven-step roadmap to democracy unveiled by General Khin Nyunt on August 30, 2003. Currently the country is taking the final step of building a modern, developed and democratic nation – discipline-flourishing, of course.

It’s hard to believe that when the roadmap was launched by the SPDC more than a decade ago it was broadly dismissed as a publicity stunt. Exactly three months previously, on May 30, 2003, Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD convoy had been viciously attacked by a bunch of regime-backed thugs near Depayin, Sagaing Division. More than 70 people are thought to have been killed – though in fact we have no clear picture of the events of that night, because no full investigation has ever been undertaken. To all of us in the commentariat, the roadmap was a feeble junta attempt to turn back the tide of hostile reaction in which it had been engulfed for three long months.

Yet it turned out to be a great deal more than that – so much so that it remains the defining strategic plan for the current transition. Along the way there’s been a rigged constitutional referendum in May 2008, a general election in November 2010 that was anything but free and fair, and a set of by-elections in April 2012 that saw the NLD become part of the mainstream political process. Today, the 2008 constitution and the 2010 election continue to set the framework for national politics.

You have to say that, to date, it’s been nothing less than a stunningly successful performance by a military elite that in the dark days of mid-2003 looked utterly bereft of support, ideas and direction.

This week I’ve been teaching at the University of Yangon and living the high life at the Sule Shangri-la (formerly Traders) – a rare pleasure. There are many reasons to like the hotel – the best wifi in town is certainly one of them. My favourite reason is the six fabulous Ba Khine paintings displayed in the ground-floor restaurant, just off the lobby – a real touch of class. To anyone in the neighbourhood, my advice is to step in and take a look. Even at Studio Square gallery, run by Ba Khine and four compatriots, it’s usually not possible to see such a fine array of this artist’s great work.

Most of what Neruda has to say about Rangoon in his Memoirs, published posthumously in Spanish in 1974 and in English in 1977, is picked up by his diligent biographer Feinstein. But a couple of passing remarks are left on the page.

This is how Neruda describes his arrival (p.75): “From the deck, as the ship drew into Rangoon, I saw looming ahead the gold funnel of the great pagoda, Shwe Dagon. A multitude of strange costumes clashed their vibrant colors on the pier. A broad dirty river’s mouth emptied there, into the Gulf of Martaban. This river has the most beautiful name of all the rivers in the world: Irrawaddy.”

This is another take on colonial life (p.86): “These two worlds never touched. The natives were not allowed in the places reserved for the English, and the English lived away from the throbbing pulse of the country.” British friends gave kindly advice when Neruda crossed the divide – and expected him to take it. “These were final warnings. After that, they stopped greeting me.”

There’s also more on Neruda’s “troubled home life” (p.87). But I have no need to say anything further about Josie Bliss.

Perhaps the most lasting memory Neruda took from Burma was of a love affair with Josie Bliss – the name he gave, in his letters and memoirs, to a local woman who for a while worked as his secretary in Rangoon, and who from April or May to November 1928 became, in his words, his “love-smitten terrorist”. To this liaison Feinstein devotes about five pages (63-68).

One consequence of his relationship with Bliss was that Neruda was alienated still further from colonial society. “[W]hen the white colonials learnt of his affair with Josie, they refused him admission to their clubs. He does not appear to have minded this – it was scarcely a sacrifice for him to be forced to avoid the company of people he largely despised for their snobbery, their deliberate act of distancing themselves from the society in which they lived.”

Another was that he became scarred for life. Feinstein provides the context: “This ‘Burmese panther’ became intensely jealous of any other females attempting to grow close to Neruda – and there were many.” Indeed, even though the honorary consul stole away from his lover in secret and sailed far away to Colombo, Ceylon for his next posting, she succeeded in tracking him down in his new home. Convinced to return to Rangoon, Bliss then persuaded her former lover to see her off at the dock.

This is Neruda’s own account of the farewell: [S]eized by a gust of grief and love, she covered my face with kisses and bathed me with her tears. She kissed my arms, my suit, in a kind of ritual, and suddenly slipped down to my shoes, before I could stop her. When she stood up again, the chalk polish of my white shoes was smeared like flour all over her face. I couldn’t ask her to give up her trip, to leave the boat that was taking her away for ever and come with me instead. My better judgment stopped me, but my heart received a scar which is still part of me. That unrestrained grief, those terrible tears running down her chalky face, are still fresh in my memory.”

To take a deeper look at Neruda’s time in Burma, I turned to Adam Feinstein’s Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life, published by Bloomsbury in 2004 – he covers the ground in roughly 15 pages (50-65). The basic point, that this was a “hellish” interlude, is fully confirmed – “fifteen desolate months in Rangoon” is the summary description. Yet it was also a period of considerable interest.

Neruda arranged this diplomatic posting before leaving Chile. At the Foreign Ministry in Santiago in the first half of 1927, he was fortunate to secure an interview with the minister himself – who, holding out a list of vacant positions, invited Neruda to pick one. “The name of the Burmese capital, Rangoon, meant nothing to him – and perhaps for that very reason, he chose it.” Following several train journeys to Buenos Aires and a two-month sea voyage via Europe to Asia, Neruda arrived in Rangoon on about October 25, 1927 – taking the name Ricardo Reyes for his consular mission.

The work was not pressing. “My official duties demanded my attention only once every three months, when a ship arrived from Calcutta bound for Chile with hard paraffin and large cases of tea. I had to stamp and sign documents with feverish speed. Then another three months of doing nothing followed, of solitary contemplation in markets and temples.” For around 10-12 weeks at the start of 1928 Neruda travelled to Shanghai and Yokohama with a Chilean friend. Towards the end of the year he went to Calcutta. For most of the rest of the period he was in Rangoon.

There he had no time for colonial society. “I led a life which was separate from the English. I attended their parties only very rarely, because there was no one interesting among the colonials. They were monotonous and even ignorant.” Again he writes: “Those intolerant Europeans were not very interesting and, after all, I had not come to the Orient to spend my life with transient colonisers.” Burmese Buddhism was also failed to charm. Feinstein writes that “Neruda found the religious element brutally inhuman and alienating”.

Only mundane daily existence was vital and vibrant. “The street became my religion. The Burmese street, the Chinese quarter … The Hindu street … All this engrossed me and drew me gradually under the spell of real life.” Ultimately none of this was enough to sustain Neruda. “Life in Rangoon is a terrible exile, I wasn’t born to spend my life in such a hell.” Nevertheless, the portrait of the poet that emerges is quite compelling.

In the US, determined efforts are increasingly being made to get good, but poor, students through college – students who excel in school, but for one reason or another fail to graduate from university. Many school districts now help every high-school junior take the SAT. Delaware has a programme for advising needy students on college application procedures. A coalition led by Bloomberg Philanthropies is about to fund 130 full-time college counsellors and enlist 4000 part-time student advisers to build for all university applicants the kind of support network that students from affluent backgrounds routinely take for granted. This is all reported in this week’s New York Times.

In Myanmar, Thabyay Education Foundation leads the way in offering this kind of service to local students wanting to study abroad. Maybe, though, as donors think through ways of assisting in filling still enormous gaps in the country’s higher education system, they could focus on issues like this – not simply providing scholarships, which are of course essential, but also seeking to boost access by making a daunting application process just a little easier for good students from marginalized communities.

Yesterday morning I came across a lovely travel piece on the BBC website – Dave Seminara’s exploration of Chile through Pablo Neruda’s eyes. I visited Chile a couple of years ago and really liked the country – so I tweeted the story. In response, my friend Professor Kanishka Jayasuriya at the University of Adelaide sent me a link to a 50-page MA dissertation written at the University of Texas at Austin in 2011. This is it: “Neruda in Asia/Asia in Neruda: Enduring Traces of South Asia in the Journey through Residencia en la tierra“ by Roanne Leah Sharp.

I’ve long known of Neruda in Burma, but never much about this episode in his life. Here, then, was a chance to fill the gap. It’s a very interesting dissertation, arguing that the period was critical to Neruda’s development both as the poet who in 1971 would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and as the committed social activist who would experience the Spanish Civil War, become a lifelong Communist, and in the mid-1940s serve a term as a Chilean senator. It is by no means uncritical, painting Neruda’s work as Orientalist, and Neruda himself as racist and complicit in imperialism.

Burma was Neruda’s initial experience of Asia – in 1927. On the way he stopped in Singapore, but it was in Rangoon that he first alighted for several months, working as an honorary Chilean consular official to make money. His impressions were largely unfavourable. In an early letter to a friend, he wrote that “everything is charming the first week. But then the weeks pass, time goes by”. Sharp’s contention is that heat, fever and the monotony of Rangoon life all contributed to a general disenchantment, persuading Neruda soon to move to other parts of the region before leaving Asia altogether in 1932.

There are other accounts of Neruda in Burma, including his own poetic statement in Isla Negra: A Notebook. Among these, Sharp’s is well worth reading.