The beggar woman
of Kaunas

By Boris Vytautas Bakunas

It was bitterly cold in Kaunas that December of 2003 during my first visit to the land of my ancestors. Driven by gusts of bone-chilling wind, I sought warmth inside a delicatessen just off Laisves Aleja.

The old woman stood so close to the door that I nearly crashed into her. Snow swirled in behind me like a white cape, sending its flakes towards the last-minute Christmas shoppers inside. Several cast glances at me, and seeing nothing unusual, turned away.

I could barely hear the muttering, hushed tones the old woman spoke...She was so small that I had to bend my head to see her. A frayed white headscarf tightly hugged a wrinkled face – a face battered by at least 70 years of hard living.

Her lips were moving in cadence with her head, which bobbed up and down ever so slightly as if she were saying her rosary. But there were no beads in the cupped hands that stretched towards me. It was then that I understood she was begging.

I had seen beggars before. I remember one legless beggar sitting in child’s little red, steel wagon in front of a dime store in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood where my family moved just as soon as my grandfather found work in the steel mills. No matter how poor we were, my mother always found a quarter to give him, and he always greeted her gleefully when he saw her coming his way.

I fumbled through my pockets finding only a few litai. The old woman took them. Then she humbly clasped my hands in hers. Her hands were old and gnarled like the roots of an ancient oak clutching the earth.

“Dekuj, dekuj,” she muttered, her head bowing in gratitude. “For what?" I wondered. “A few litai?”

A wave of anxiety swept through me. You know that sinking feeling which calls up a memory flash so brief that you forget the details, and all you are left with is cold dread.

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Klaipėda has got a crisis centre for women
that is probably going to be a pioneering
example for such centres worldwide

Text and photos: Aage Myhre
Editor-in-Chief/M.Sc. of Architecture
aage.myhre@VilNews.com

Let me today take you to the new crisis center for women in Klaipeda. The building opened a few days ago, but still there is no furniture and staff in place, hence the centre will be ready to accommodate 'patients' only later in the fall. I myself have been involved in this project for more than three years now, and I wanted to share with you some thoughts on how this center has evolved and today stands out as something rather exceptional, in Lithuania but also on an international scale.

When we started the project, there were three main messages we wanted the center to signal to women who would come here to get help in an emergency situation:

•         Here you are in safety
•         Here you will find warmth, care and understanding
•         Here you will be taken care of by professionals

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By Aage Myhre, editor-in-chief
aage.myhre@VilNews.com

A new concept for senior apartments, with focus on warmth, dignity and joy. Custom apartments around an outdoor, enclosed patio - plus a large, common 'lobby' for food, reading, music, good talks, therapy, training and more.

Some friends of mine have a large estate just north of Vilnius centre, about 20 minutes drive from the old town and less than five minutes from the Le Meridien Hotel, with its beautiful pool, spa complex, and a great new 18-hole golf course.

The plan they have under consideration right now is to build an elegant senior complex on the site, for potential buyers both in this country and from abroad.

Quality and service will be very high, still at prices one can hardly dream of the United States, Western Europe or Australia.

The planned complex will consist of around 50 apartments and a large public centre-building that can best be compared with an international hotel lobby.

In this 'lobby' one will be met by colorful life as soon as one enters. Dining room, restaurant, cafe, bar, library, piano music, as well as rooms for health, therapy, manicure and sports is that which meets the residents which shall dwell in this totally extraordinary senior complex.

Seniors who buy an apartment here, will in other words not just get a nice place to live, but a total package of food, drinks, activities, care and necessary health care measures in accordance with their own state. Nurses will always be present in the center, and doctors will come here on short notice.

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I love Lithuanian girls!

I let Giedrė Jotautaitė represent the thousands of beautiful Lithuanian girls and women
who are not only well-formed by nature, but also do their utmost to keep
their bodies in shape through proper diet, moderate use of alcohol and regular exercise.
Many of these girls know very well how to dress and behave, and
they are fully on a par with their male parallels in terms of intelligence and
ability to cope with challenges at work and on a more general basis.
Lithuanian girls are at the very top in the world, in every way!

By Aage Myhre, editor-in-chief
aage.myhre@VilNews.com

I've been back home in Norway for a few days. I chose to drive this time, and travelled via Riga by ferry to Stockholm in Sweden from where I drove on to Oslo in Norway. On the ferry ride back to Riga, I discovered quickly that Swedish high school students filled most of the ship. Graduation was to be celebrated and this was done with good help of huge quantities of cheap Baltic booze aboard the ferry, the whole night through.

I have little against young people dancing the night away in a rollicking party when they have something as big to celebrate as a final exam. However, what frightened me was to see that far more than half of the adolescents were overweight and apparently had done little, in the course of growing up, to keep in shape. Swedish girls who in the 1950s, 60's and 70's were world renowned for their stunning, sexy looks, seem now to have been replaced by fattish, inelegant girls who also do not care much about how they dress or behave. The boys are no better.

What a contrast it was to get back to Vilnius, sit down on a sunny sidewalk café and study the endless stream of beautiful, slim Lithuanian girls who walked by. Like sitting in the front row of the catwalk for a perpetual Miss World show...

Lithuanian girls have good reason to be proud of themselves and the nation of Lithuania has very good reason to be proud of its magnificent girls and women...

I sincerely hope that young girls from Lithuania do not go into the same trap as so many sisters in the west have already done. Obesity, alcohol and unhealthy habits have unfortunately become a hallmark for many young people in Europe of today.

The development is anything but merry, but luckily the girls from Lithuania show the way for those who want to return to the beautiful, healthy feminine ideals...

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Amrita Nadi: When researching for the Wisdom of Laughter Album (soon coming), I had delight of "meeting" Teresa Hsu, 112 years old, who inspires with her simple messages of joy. "if you love everybody with all the love in your heart, then you’ll be happy, ha, ha, ha,” Below is a wonderful report on her meeting with an audience in 2010, from the blog of Tsem Tulku Rinpoche

The power of laughter

Teresa Hsu

By K. Kaewuni Dewi

CENTENARIAN Teresa Hsu kept some 200 people in stitches during her talk on ‘Love All Serve All’ at the Malaysian Buddhist Association hall in Penang last Friday.

For the bubbly Chinese-born Singaporean, who is affectionately known as Singapore’s Mother Teresa, laughter is definitely the best medicine.

Born in 1898, the 112-year-old social worker extraordinaire keeps young and active by happily doing charity work.

Kicking off the question and answer session Hsu said she was born “very, very poor” and the toughest part of her life was when she had to pick grass to eat as she was “very, very hungry”.

“It was at that moment I thought to myself that no one should ever go through what I went through,” she said.

When asked the secret to her longevity and good health, Hsu responded, “Ha, ha, ha! Make sure your heart is always happy”

She also said eating one raw egg every day for breakfast could be another reason for her good health.

“Once someone told me that raw egg is poisonous to which I replied ‘never mind, I thrive on poison’,” she said....

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“Our ancestors always whisper in our ears, they beg to be understood”

Last week we brought an article with the latest statistics from the World Health Organization, showing that Lithuania again is on top when it comes to suicides – with 61,3 men and 10,4 women per 100,000 inhabitants deciding to end their lives this sad way – annually. Dainius Puras, a Lithuanian psychiatrist, explains how it is the uncertainty and unpredictability of the economic situation that have such a detrimental effect: "People don't like change,” he says, referring to Lithuania’s 20-year period of dramatic social and economic change since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991”.

Response from Vijole Arbas in Kaunas:

This cannot be the only explanation -- we are plagued by bad spirits of our past, we can't seem to "clean up", to make amends.

Jūratė Sučylaitė wrote a novel (can't recall the exact title Pokalbis su Ragana, somthing like that). Her thesis (if I may call it that) is that our ancestors always whisper in our ears. They beg to be understood. That does not mean to glorify but understand, realize why, forgive, make amends. People want to drown out those voices of the dead by alcoholism, suicide. It is a haunting story that rings very true to me.

On the other hand, the ancestors of American Lithuanians also whisper, also had the sins of betrayal against one's fellow man as well as of victimization. Why don't they hear those ghosts?

A film by V. Landsbergis Jr., When I Was a Partisan, also deals with this sort of concept.

Irene Simanavicius: There is so much more to this...so much more. Those of us that grew up in North America and have visited Lithuania got to know and love people we have met during our visits. People young and old shared some of the stories that were heart wrenching. I agree with Vijole Arbas 100 %.

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Lithuania has the world’s
highest suicide rate

Latest statistics from the World Health Organization show that Lithuania again is on top when it comes to suicides – with 61,3 men 10,4 women per 100,000 inhabitants deciding to end their lives this sad way – annually.

Dainius Puras, a Lithuanian psychiatrist, explains how it is the uncertainty and unpredictability of the economic situation that have such a detrimental effect: "People don't like change,” he says, referring to Lithuania’s 20-year period of dramatic social and economic change since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991”.

He describes the reaction to freedom in 1989: "Many people could not manage to cope with this change, with this huge societal stress . . . [they] regressed to destructive or self-destructive behaviour." The stress, he says, prompted an unprecedented crisis of mortality, one that still exists. In Lithuania, with a population of just three million, 5,000 people die every year because of "external causes" - suicide, homicide, violence. He describes it as an epidemic.

Lithuania - a prophetic microcosm of the global crisis?
Puras sees Lithuania's experience as a prophetic microcosm of the global crisis: a society undergoing enormous stress because of the effects of a toxic system, culminating in an “explosion" in the form of a financial crisis. He also points out a strange trend: the more severe the threat to human life, the better societies and individuals seem to fare in their mental health. "History shows that when it is a real crisis like war, or when people are starving, there is a huge decrease in mental health problems, including suicide. During the war you have to survive physically; existential problems are not so important. Suicide is mainly the price we pay for civilisation."

Figures for the UK support his theory - during the First World War, the suicide rate dropped to 8.5 per 100,000. It then leapt to 13.5 in the interwar years, and fell again during the Second World War to 9.2. Immediate, life-threatening crisis, Puras says, creates a sense of purpose: there's not as much time to worry about yourself.

( From an article in “New Statesman”, by Sophie Elmhirst)

Suicides per 100,000 people per year
The following is a list of suicide rates by country according to data from the World Health Organization, in which a country's rank is determined by its total rate deaths officially recorded as suicides in the most recent available year, last updated in 2011.

Male and female suicide rates are out of total male population and total female population, respectively (i.e. total number of male suicides divided by total male population). The total rate of suicides is based on the total number of suicides divided by the total population rather than merely the average of the male and female suicide rates, because the gender ratio in most countries is not 1:1. Year refers to the most recent year that data was available for a particular country.

Other articles:
http://www.elnet.lt/psychoanalysis/psychoanalysis/Vilmos2.htm
http://eurpub.oxfordjournals.org/content/10/2/101.full.pdf

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Text and photos: Aage Myhre
aage.myhre@VilNews.com

The quiet resort village Nida is based at the Curonian Spit (Neringa) near the Kaliningrad border, less than one hour’s drive from Klaipeda at Lithuania’s seacoast. With beautiful Baltic Sea beaches on the west side, the large Curonian Lagoon on the east side and the largest sand dunes of Northern Europe on the southern side, this is a truly unique place for a relaxed vacation. You should spend one or two weeks in a self catering fisherman's cottage or a few days in a guest house or hotel. Nida is the place to take it easy!

Here is what a visiting family wrote after their visit:

"We have never visited anywhere that had such a relaxing effect on us as the view from the sun clock on the Great Dune in Nida. The silky-smooth lagoon to one side of the golden spit and the sparkling waves of the Baltic Sea to the other side was breath-takingly beautiful. We did lots of walking, running and cycling including a walk along the Baltic Sea beach from west of Preila back to Nida”.  

The Nida home of the German writer Thomas Mann,
today the Thomas Mann Museum.

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