20.4.2011

Burmese lessons

YLE reported - just before the election day last weekend -  that the civil servants in Lapland met a challenge on a Burmese language lesson. They even learned that a sentence like "I love you" could be rather indiscreet in Burmese culture.

It might be news for them that the situation is same in Finnish culture: Finns don't use the l-word so carelessly. But that is perhaps beside the point.

The point is: somehow, to me this piece of news has very similar echoes to the fate of Hiroo Onoda, who kept fighting the Second World War, on the remote Philippine island of Lubang, until March 1972. He just did not know that the war had ended almost 30 years earlier.

I bet the Finnish civil servants will also go on with Burmese lessons - at least as long as someone signs the paycheck.

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