Word: burma
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...nearly killed by feuding warlords, and moved into a mountainous area of China near the Burmese border. Ordered by the U.S. consul to leave the region during an outbreak of civil war in 1927, the family made a 70-day trek through snowcapped mountains and malarial forests into Burma. The Morses eventually returned to work again in Yunnan, a remote region of China where cannibals roamed, Tibetan bandits burned villages, and the chief trade with the outside world was carried on by opium dealers. The nearest hospital was four weeks away by foot...
Between 1927 and 1937, Morse established some 30 churches and baptized 2,000 converts. Evacuated to Burma again during World War II, Morse advised the Allies to use a different and safer air route to fly the "Hump" over the Himalayas to Kunming. Meanwhile, young Robert organized tribes to assist airmen who crashed. The family returned to China for a third postwar tour; Eugene was imprisoned briefly in 1949, after the Communists seized power, and his father was held in solitary confinement and tortured for more than 15 months. The family remained undaunted. Says Robert...
Starting over in the Kachin village of Muladi in northern Burma, the Morses and several thousand converts who followed them out of China gradually created one of Burma's most prosperous areas and one that became 90% Christian. "We wanted to show what Christians working together could achieve," says Eugene Morse. In a valley where there had only been jungle, 35,000 members of the nomadic Lisu and Rawang tribes created 30 villages. Malaria was virtually wiped...
...keep themselves in shape or style. Too often they simply mutilated their bodies. For a thousand years Chinese women bound their feet so tightly that a natural "high heel" was formed, and toes were twisted irreversibly under the arch; African women used discs to form platypus lips; in Burma, tribeswomen encircled their necks with so many heavy metal rings that the vertebrae would separate. In the early 19th century, English fashion in female bodies was ethereal, emaciated; a tubercular fragility was considered attractive. Women subsisted on a diet of vinegar and belladonna to achieve the Pre-Raphaelite "fatal slimness...
...American anthropologist named Greenwood spends several years with the Shan people in Pawlu, a tiny village near the border between China and Burma. He marries and fathers a daughter before news of World War II belatedly reaches him, driving him from his remote adopted home to join the U.S. Army and the larger struggle. In 1949, back in the U.S., he receives a letter from Yang Yulin, a wartime comrade who is now a general in the Chinese Nationalist army. Yang has got hold of an anthropological treasure, the bones of Peking Man. He will flee the advancing Communist troops...