Dear Sayas and Colleagues,

I just received a letter from Saya U Myo Win (a) Melvin from Down Under. Due to conflict in schedules, Saya would not be present at the RIT Reunion. Hw will send his representative Ko Tin Aung Win [his brother in law]. Initially, Saya planned to send photos and a letter with Ko Tin Aung Win, but after getting a flood of e-mails, Saya decided to join the crowd.

With metta,
Hla Min

After reading all those good works and news you and the team are doing, I really started to feel guilty about my inability to attend the Saya Pu Zaw Pwe because of my previous commitments. I know that I am missing one of the biggest gatherings of overseas Myanmar engineers.

With this letter, I would like to do and say three things:


First of all:
---------------

Let me pay my respect, homage (ka -daw) and thanks to all my "sayas" who taught me "life-long learning and skills."

• Saya U Ba Than (Strength of Materials, Mohr's circle still makes me go in circles),
• Saya U Aung Khin (Heat Engines, a very hot subject, from a very cool and calm lecturer),
• Saya U Tin Mg Nyunt Agric. Engineering, I still get my feet dirty with mud),
• Saya U Tin Hlaing (1) (Machine Design & Fluid, lectures well lubricated with joke),
• Saya U Sein Shan (Math, at last I can go to my lectures with a chalk and a duster only like he did ),
• Saya U Ba Toke (Math, an engineer without math is like a mechanic without a tool),
• Saya U Num Kock (Soil Mechanics, soils ain't soils),
• Saya U Kyaw Tun (Electricity, I was not smart enough to win his prize. At least my brother-in-law got one.),
• Saya U Min Wun (Surveying, we spend more time on surveying the girls' hostel),
• Saya Dr. Aung Gyi (Civil engineering: taught me how to catch ducks silently using a string and a brick),
• Saya Simon (Workshop, we got our marks through sweat and blood but unfortunately our glue was not strong enough to patch our cracked carpentry work from his hammer-check)
• and Saya U Chit (Blacksmith, no marks for burnt hands and hairs).

Note: You guys, you are the best mob in this business.


Secondly:
-------------

Accept my heart-felt congratulations to the RIT Saya Pu Zaw Pwe organizing committee. All of you have earned "gold" medals, more precious than the Sydney Olympic "gold".

and


Finally:
-------------

My best wishes (health, happiness and luck) to those Myanmar engineers and their spouses who are attending the reunion. You guys and gals are the best professionals Myanmar has ever produced.


The Future
---------------

I will be 60 years young next April and have two options for my remaining 25 years of working life. Either retire to do full time gardening and cooking or keep on teaching and giving headaches and fun to my students. Since I enjoy working with my students (most of them are matured students from the industry), I most probably keep on working and concentrating more on volunteer consultancy.


Request
-----------

One special request I would like to make to Myanmar engineers attending the "reunion" is to bring up discussion topic on:

"How can we (Myanmar engineers working in industrialised countries) contribute to Myanmar engineering education and engineering industry development - without going into political arena (difficult but not impossible)"

I am sure some of our engineers are already doing something. I am also trying to develop irrigated agriculture training program for the Department of Agricultural Planning in Myanmar with my University.

For those engineers who do not know me, I started my teaching career at RIT in 1965 and left the country in 1979. Those years at RIT were the best years of my life. Since I left Myanmar I have trained about 3000 "Myet-Hna-Phyu" students, 200 Bruneians and 200 South Pacific students. During those years at this University, it was unfortunate that I did not have the opportunity to teach or train my own Myanmar students. Not in a distance future, we hope that we will get the opportunities to impart our years of experience and knowledge of the Western technology and skills to our Myanmar students.

I would like to honour my sayas and fellow engineers with a joke about what Myanmar engineers are good at solving problems: (familiar joke with slight modification)

Joke
-------

A priest, a doctor and a Myanmar engineer are playing golf on a beautiful but hot summer afternoon. After the 3rd hole they were held up by another group of golfers in front of them. So they check with the greenkeeper to see what is holding them up.

The green keeper said, "Oh! Those are the three blind firemen who saved our club house fire last year. Now the club let them play anytime they like, free of charge."

Then the priest said, "I feel sorry for them. I will make a special pray to get their sight back when I get back to the church tonight."

The doctor with a scientific mind said, "Your prayers will not work because it not scientific. They need to be operated. I will consult with my friend, an eye specialist, for their eyes operation."

The Myanmar engineer could not stand his friends lack of practical solution and said, "You guys intentions are good but not practical. The prayers are normally not answered because God is always busy and the eyes operation will be very expensive and those guys couldn't not afford the cost. I have a simple solution with no extra cost and fix this problem in no time. Why don't we let them play at night!!! They will have two special bonuses: - it is much cooler at night and they can have the whole course to themselves."

Wish
-------

With this note I wish you all the best of health, happiness and luck. Please enjoy and have great fun at the reunion. But let us do something for Myanmar before we distance ourselves further and our children born overseas will naturally become totally cut off and have no empathy for Myanmar.

Kind regards,
Myo Win