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268

Village 
Pwe - outside Rangoon
Feb. 9. Wednesday
[[strikethrough]] September 24 [[/strikethrough]]  

charm, etc.

After 6, we picked up several people working at the American Embassy including Virginia Geiger, who has been in Rangoon over 2 yrs. & is heartbroken at leaving (within two weeks.) Expressed herself as feeling as though her roots were being cut off. She has been living 9 yrs. abroad & wants to come back to Belgrade, or the East after her 2 months vacation at home. She no longer likes living in America. Passen, (American) living in Tokyo, anthropologist & Eastern correspondent for Eng. magazine Encounter is here to arrange conference for Cultural Freedom. Friend of Hacohens.

Well, the trip by bus & jeep over what might be called roads, was itself an experience.

We stepped off a dark bus - in pitch blackness into oozing 


269  

Wed. Feb. 9-
[[strikethrough]] September 25 [[/strikethrough]]

mud - which I later discovered to be a pig-pen - with sound effects delivered by a large grunting pig.

A lantern was finally found, & single file, along mud & rocky paths, over pipes & makeshift planks 2 ft. wide serving as a bridge - we finally found the large compound in which the smaller of the Pue's was being held.

What a wonderful, colorful sight. The children - surely a hundred of them, from babes in arms to their teens, the little ones with shaven heads & naked but for open little shirts reaching to their belly buttons, the older ones clapping hands with the native musicians who created sounds similar to that of a dozen bagpipes. Two sticks of wood clapped together. One musician knocking a stick against a small wooden log with one hand, the other - hitting a small metal