ever hear of Burma? me neither

This is going to be completely out of order, so keep up :)
So we had two classes today of...essentially Thai culture. A super old guy (80 years old?) talked to us about Buddhism. He is apparently like a guru of Buddhism. That was interesting, but not very enlightening :)
I have my first monk chat today, which I think will just be a test chat to see how well their English is, and what kind of information I can get from them. The guy in charge of the HIV hospices comes to talk to us either this week or the next. Then, I'll hopefully be able to start setting more meetings up to gather info for my independent study.
We had our first class with Drexler on the patio last night from 7-9pm. We set our class time to be 7-9 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which made yesterday a really long day. We chanted nung sung saaam ci...(our numbers), in the morning, and learned about the rice goddess in the afternoon. Then we had a couple hours break before we dived into discussing old Northern Thai culture, or Isan culture. I have definitely missed class discussions with Drexler since he poses the most interesting questions. Afterward, Alex, Hailey and I went to Tesco Lotus in search of Ben and Jerry's (we would have even settled for Haagen Daz), but we had to settle for weird Nestle ice creamm or in Thai, i team(Thai desserts aren't as sweet...or chocolaty as in the U.S.)
Then, this afternoon Ajaan (Thai word for prof.) Pippa talked to us about her Burmese Relief Centre, and the situation in Burma. I was thinking back and my entire life has consisted of Burma being that iffy country. If it was mentioned, I knew that bad things were going on...but it wasn't that bad, cuz it wasn't in the newspaper and news that much.
Guess what? It's super sad. So Ajaan Pippa told us all about the crappy military regime that has been in control since the 60s, and all the protests and demonstrations that keep get squashed. Apparently Thailand has like 140,000 people on the border who are in refugee or illegal camps for the people who are fleeing.
The thing that really blew my mind was that Thailand has FOUR MILLION Burmese migrant workers, alot of them with work permits or illegally here. That's a lot of people from Burma (sorry, Myrammar).
Anyway, so there are all these pipelines in Burma that are owned by various countries. For example, China just started building an pipeline a few months ago. The U.S. company Chevron owns one, and Thailand owns a part of one, or all of one. Anyway, so all of these countries have investments in this crappy country.
Apparently, now there are rumors that North Korea is possibly helping them (Burmese military dudes) develop nuclear weapons.
The conclusion that I came to was that I hope they try, then countries will stop being greedy and help fix things. Which, obviously won't happen quickly, but Burma's been trying to get it together for a super long time now. I've grown up thinking it was in turmoil and not caring. So maybe if the military tries to get nuclear, things will get done.