I should have seen it coming
I should’ve read the signs
Anyway…
I guess it’s over

[Chorus:]
Can’t believe that I’m the fool again,
I thought this love would never end
How was I to know?
You never told me,
Can’t believe that I’m the fool again
And I who thought you were my friend,
How was I to know?
You never told me.

[Bryan:]
Baby
You should have called me
When you were lonely
When you needed me to be there
Sadly
You never gave me
Too many chances
To show you how much I care

I should have seen it coming
I should’ve read the signs
Anyway…
I guess it’s over

[Chorus]

[Mark:]
About the pain and the tears,
oh oh oh,
If I could I would,
Turn back the time

[Shane:]
Ooh yeah
I should’ve seen it coming
I should’ve read the signs
Anyway…
I guess it’s over

[Chorus x2]

ပက္ပုံးမွာ ညေန ေျခာက္နာရီေလာက္ဆုိ လူေတြ စည္စည္ကားကားျဖစ္ၿပီ..။ ေျခာက္နာရီကေန မုိးလင္းခါနီးအထိပဲလုိ႔…တစ္ဆင့္စကားေတြကေန ၾကားရတာပဲ..။ နာမည္ေတာ့ ေတာ္ေတာ္ၾကီးတယ္..။ ကိုယ္ေတာ့ ေန႔ခင္းဘက္ပဲ ေရာက္ဖူးတယ္..။ ညဘက္ သြား မၾကည့္ဘူးေသးဘူး..။ ေန႔ခင္းဘက္ေရာက္တာမုိ႔လားမသိဘူး..စည္တယ္ဆုိတဲ့.. လမ္းၾကား ေတြက ဆုိင္ေတြ အကုန္ပိတ္ ထားတာ နဲ႔ပဲ ၾကဳံတယ္..။  အခုပဲ တစ္ေယာက္က ထင္ျမင္ခ်က္ ၀င္ ေပးေနတယ္..။ ပက္ပုံးမွာက ႏုိင္ငံျခားသားေတြ တဲ့..။ ထုိင္းေတြက ေငြရွာတာ.။ ဆုိေတာ့ ထုိင္းေတြ က ဒီလုိဆုိ အပန္းေျဖဖုိ႔ထက္ ေငြရွာဖုိ႔ကုိပဲ ပုိအားသန္တဲ့ သေဘာေပါ့..။  အခု ကုိယ္ ဒီပုိ႔စ္ကို တင္ေနတဲ့ အခ်ိန္က ည ဆယ္ႏွစ္နာရီထုိးေတာ့မယ္.။ စက္တင္ဘာ ဆယ့္ကုိးရက္ေန႔ ေပါ့..။ မ်က္လုံးေတြက အိပ္ခ်င္ေနေပမယ့္ ..စာေရးခ်င္ေသးတယ္..။ ရွားပါးဖုိင္လ္ေတြ ကို ေဒါင္းလုပ္ဒ္လည္း ဆြဲခ်င္ေသးတယ္…။ ျမန္ႏႈန္းျမင့္လြန္းတဲ့ အင္တာနက္လႈိင္းေတြကုိ အားက် လုိက္တာ..။ အျပင္မွာ လူေတြ လႈပ္ရွာေနတုန္း..။ ဘယ္အခ်ိန္ေတြမ်ား အိပ္ၾကပါလိမ့္..။

မနက္က မဟာခ်ိဳင္ကုိ ေရာက္တယ္..။ မဟာခ်ိဳင္ ဆမုဆက္ခြန္( ရြာ ) ကုိ ဘန္ေကာက္ကေန ကား တစ္နာရီေလာက္ စီးရင္ေရာက္တယ္..။ ရြာလုိ႔သာဆုိတာပါ..ၿမိဳ႕ သာသာပါပဲ..။ အင္တာနက္ အျမန္ႏႈန္းလည္း ဘန္ေကာက္နဲ႔ ဘာမွ မထူးဘူး..။ အတူတူပဲ..။ ရန္ကုန္ မွာ ရွိေနတဲ့ ကုိယ့္သူငယ္ခ်င္းေတြ အိပ္ေနၾကၿပီလား..။ နယ္က အဘြားေရာ ေနေကာင္းရဲ႕လား..။ ဘယ္ေလာက္ပဲ ျပည့္စုံေကာင္းမြန္တဲ့ ဇိမ္ခံပစၥည္းေတြရွိရွိ..လူဆုိတာ ကုိယ့္အသုိက္ ကုိယ္ ေပ်ာ္ ၾက သူေတြ ခ်ည္းပါပဲ..။ လွည္းတန္းက ကုိယ့္အေဆာင္က အခန္းက်ဥ္းေလးထဲမွာ အခုေလာက္ ဆုိ ဖုန္ေတြ ထုတက္ေနေလာက္ၿပီ..။ စာအုပ္ေတြလည္း ပုိးဟပ္ေတြမ်ား ကုိက္၀ါးပစ္ကုန္ၿပီလား.။

တစ္လေလး လာ တာေတာင္ ဒီေလာက္ ျဖစ္ေနတာ …ဒီမွာ ႏွစ္နဲ႔ ခ်ီ ေနၿပီး အလုပ္လုပ္ေန သူေတြ ဆုိရင္ေရာ ဘယ္လုိေနမလဲ..။ မနက္ကေတာ့ ပုဇြန္ေတြ ခြာေနတဲ့ အန္တီၾကီး တစ္ေယာက္ က..“ သမီးရယ္..ျပန္ခ်င္တာေပ့ါ..ျပန္ရင္ စရိတ္က ၾကီးတယ္ေလ..ျပန္မယ့္ ပိုက္ဆံ ကုိ ..ဟိုမွာက်န္ခဲ့တဲ့..သားသမီးေတြအတြက္ ပုိ႔ေပးလုိက္ရင္…သူတုိ႔အတြက္ အမ်ားၾကီးအသက္ ရွဴေခ်ာင္တယ္ေလ..၊ အဲလုိတြက္တြက္ၿပီးေနေနလိုက္တာ..အခုဆုိ မျပန္ျဖစ္တာ ေျခာက္ႏွစ္ ေတာင္ ေက်ာ္ၿပီ..” တဲ့..။ သူ က အဲဒီလုိ ေျပာေနတာ ေပါ့ေပါ့ပါးပါးပဲ…။ အန္တီၾကီး အိမ္ျပန္ခ်င္တဲ့အခ်ိန္ေတြအတြက္ ၀မ္းနည္းမႈေတြ ရွိမွာပဲေနာ္ ..လုိ႔ ကုိယ္အေတြးထဲက ေမးခြန္းဆက္ထုတ္ေနမိတယ္..။  ေရၾကည္ရာ ျမက္ႏုရာ ဆုိေပမယ့္…ျမက္ႏုႏုအတြက္ ရင္းရတာက ခါးလြန္းပါတယ္ေလ..။ မဟာခ်ိဳင္မွာ ႏုိင္ငံတကာ အလုပ္သမားအဖြဲ႔အစည္း..(International Labor Organization /ILO) ရဲ႕ ပံပုိးမႈ နဲ႔..Labor Rights Promotion Network /LPN ဆုိတဲ့ အဖြဲ႔အစည္းတစ္ခုကို ေတြ႔ခဲ့တယ္..။  ဦးေဆာင္ေနတဲ့သူက အသက္ေလးဆယ္ေက်ာ္ေက်ာ္ေလာက္ပဲ ရွိဦးမယ္..။ မြန္ထုိင္း မ်ိဳးႏြယ္ပါ..။ ထုိင္းစကားကုိ မိခင္ စကားလုိ ေျပာေနသူမုိ႔ ျမန္မာ စကား အနည္းအက်ဥ္းကလြဲလို႔ ေကာင္းေကာင္း မေျပာတတ္ ပါဘူး။

- Norman Cousins

(Vietnam News -25/03/03) Nguyen Truong Chuong, a 51-year-old farmer in the southern central province of Ninh Thuan, is known as the “King of Grapes” by local growers after turning a wasteland into a flourishing orchard. Originally from Ninh Hai District, Chuong used to be a po or farmer without his own land to cultivate.*

After setting out to find a patch of dirt to call his own Chuong found some waste land in a deserted area near Ca Du mountain. Local authorities gave him permission to reclaim the land for farming in 1997.

Determined to turn the 1.5ha of barren soil into a high quality orchard he laboured for six months, struggling under the hot sun, hoeing the rocky land riddled with snakes and centipedes. Eventually Chuong turned the area into arable farming land.

With a VND40 million loan from the local Agriculture and Rural Development Bank branch, he built a water pumping system and the first day water flowed into his orchard Chuong burst into tears.

He planted mango and longan on two thirds of the reclaimed land and used the rest to grow red grapes. However, the grape variety he planted yielded only 15 tonnes per hectare and fetched a paltry VND5,000 per kg at market.

In June 2001, he heard about a new, high-value grape variety being planted in Tuy Phong District in nearby Binh Thuan Province. After his own investigations Chuong spent VND10 million on 700 Italian grape vines and 500 Black Queen vines. Unfortunately, d rought and a lack of experience proved fatal for his first crop, which he lost last April.

Since then Chuong has slowly learnt how to successfully grow the new grape varieties. Last September, his second crop was successful. The Black Queen vine yielded 30 tonnes of fruit per hectare and the Italian produced 20 tonnes.

He harvested more than 10 tonnes which he sold before the Tet (Lunar New Year). After selling his product to the local Sedex agricultural company for VND13,000 per kg he and his family earned a tidy VND100 million (US$6,472).

Now the provincial Crop Seedlings and Livestock Company, the Agriculture Extension Centre and Sedex all use his vineyard as a model for new grape varieties for local farmers.

Sedex agronomists have reported the Black Queen grape has a much higher sugar content compared to traditional grape varieties planted in nearby Binh Thuan Province. Chuong believes the secret of his success is the use of lime water eight to 10 days before harvesting, which he says washes away alum and acid in the soil, helping raise the sugar content in the grapes.

“As I have experienced losses, I am ready to help other farmers. If you want to avoid risks in grape growing, please come and see me,” he said.