Nothing changes if nothing changes

" Nothing changes if nothing changes. The American idiom and the Burmese phrase harmonize beautifully. 

If you want to live this way, live this way. If you don't want to live this way, then don't.

My little poems were written while listening to the topics discussed in class. By looking at these poems, you can probably guess what we are studying. To be honest, it's a bit of an earful. (Can you read the text in the image?)

There are about four 45-minute classes per day. After each class, we have to sit for 15 minutes to write a "Reaction Letter," reflecting on what we remember and what we understood, which we then submit to the office. Those points are very important. The privilege of submitting a movie list for the movie room in the training center depends on those points. That is just an example; the more points you have, the more privileges you get.

A unique feature of the training: There are 45 students in the training. Anyone is free to leave at any time (except for young people who were caught using drugs, spent about 3 months in prison, and were then sent to this training center under a "Second Chance" program, where they must complete the 6-month course). If those young people choose not to go home, they are placed in shared housing owned by the training center and continue to take online classes for another 6 months. There, they receive a "Substance Abuse Counselor" certification, and training centers like this one often hire from that pool.

However, only about 3 people have chosen to leave on their own during the course. Among the students, there are engineers, a web developer, a Christian minister, a mother, a "night owl," a student, a trans person, a former gang member, a doctor, and long-haul truck drivers. Among them, a long-haul truck driver who was very friendly and used to help correct my pronunciation had been imprisoned for a drug offense; while he was sent here due to good behavior, he had to go to court for a second case, and he was sentenced to 3 years in prison before I finished my training. He always used to tell me: "Agga, your American pronunciation is perfect when you get angry."

By the way, I need to mention one thing here: some of the Americans in our class cannot read or write English. They are worse at it than I am. When I spontaneously write English quotes on the whiteboard like "˙ʇsɹoʍ ǝɥʇ ɹoɟ ƃuıɹɐdǝɹd osןɐ ɯɐ I ʇnq 'ʇsǝq ǝɥʇ ɹoɟ ƃuıdoɥ ɯɐ I," they find it fascinating. As for spoken language, well, don't even try to compete with them. For their Reaction Letters, the guides have to write down what they say for them.