It is the month before the Buddhist equivalent of Lent begins, a time when people refrain from overindulgence and seek to make merit. The rains are due any time now, but it has been stifling in central Burma for the past few weeks. A dry wind blows through the center of Mandalay, pushing yellow dust across the road.
A former political prisoner and student activist sits on a plastic stool in a bookstore and opines on the apparently bleak future of the pro-democracy movement in Burma.
"There is no movement," he says. "There is no organization. We are not organized."
Aung San Suu Kyi, whose National League of Democracy party won elections for a parliament in 1990, turned 61 on June 19. Since she was detained in 1989 by a junta that seized power in 1988, she has spent nearly 11 years under house arrest or with restricted movement, not all consecutive.
Student leaders held a prayer meeting in front of the National League of Democracy headquarters in Rangoon to commemorate her struggle - a few doves were released and that was it.
After crushing its citizens' hopes of constitutional reform for more than 18 years, the military junta has kept Burma a pariah state. A national constitutional convention created by the junta in May 2004 has ground on for two years without any conclusive advance towards democracy, partly because of the junta's insistence on limiting participants to junta-approved delegates and its rude treatment of pro-democrats.
Democratic reform, say dissidents, is stalemated also because pro-reform members of the constitutional review process are hopelessly out of touch with reality in Burma. They stand accused of being isolated from the citizenry and failing to unify the reform movement, which is increasingly scattered across the world and splintered inside the country.
Interviews with Burmese from Mandalay to Rangoon, with refugees and ethnic former anti-junta fighters living in northern Thailand, have turned up doubts about the movement that made the Burmese democracy struggle a worldwide sensation and won Aung San Suu Kyi a Nobel Peace Prize in 1991.
A Rangoon doctor believes that Burmese youth have also lost touch with the political reform process and now lack the conviction and political nous for a long struggle.
"The wind has gone out of the sails," says the doctor with exasperation. "That is exactly the phrase that I use."
The young are too focused on diversions like football, he says. He points to a group of boys sitting at a table watching a re-run of the previous evening's Ukraine match during the World Cup. But 695 kilometers away, in Mandalay, a former Communist Party supporter says western observers and the junta especially should not take quiet on the home front as an indication of lethargy in the democracy movement. But that also does not mean the West should disengage from Burma. He asks when will US President George W Bush send in the troops.
"Burmese people are timid," he says. "We are afraid of the [State Peace and Development Council], but Burmese people are like a straw fire. Just a little heat at the bottom, and the whole thing can go up."
There are other issues that deeply irk Burmese apart from harsh political suppression, an all-pervasive fear of the junta security machine and the lack of a free press. They include desperately inadequate health care - a lack of protection and rights for rapidly multiplying AIDS sufferers and lack of appropriate medicine for people suffering from illnesses ranging from cancer to tuberculosis. It is common practice, say Burma watchers and doctors in the country, that patients suffering immense pain are told by doctors to buy heroin and opium on the black market.
The doctor points out that on Mahabandoola Road, a Rangoon thoroughfare, children ranging from seven years old to their late teens tend food stalls, tote tea trays loaded with steaming kettles and work counters at grocery stores. Often these kids are not immunized against dangerous diseases.
The doctor says the junta's stranglehold on the economy is keeping pharmaceutical companies out of Burma, thus restricting availability of low-cost pharmaceuticals. He says he doesn't trust government figures on inoculation, because they only include school children.
The World Health Organization's reporting of national figures on inoculation show that by 2005, no more than 76 percent of children were inoculated against diseases like diptheria or measles, nor had more than 73 percent of children received the third round of polio vaccinations. And while the country has an immunization program, the WHO counts as unsafe the methods used to ensure sterility in needles and delivery of inoculations.
The European Commission's ECHO project site says that one in every five children in Burma is underweight. Eighty percent of Burma's population lives in malaria-infested areas. And submissions by the United Nations in 2002 indicated that 43,000 children were AIDS orphans inside Burma. The doctor believes that that number is skyrocketing.
Ill health goes well beyond the children.
According to Eight Seconds of Silence, a recent book about the brutal conditions under which political prisoners live in Burma, the leading causes of death in the country's jails - excluding torture - are malaria and dysentery-causing diseases that are rampant in overcrowded conditions that lack running water.
"The [SPDC] does not care about public health, or AIDS or chicken flu. It is only concerned with consolidating its power," says one former dissident.
The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma) says in Eight Seconds of Silence that part of this consolidation is the hauling away of pro- reform activists to jail, where they are killed after brutal torture.
Many get no health care while they languish in crowded cells or are interrogated for days on end.
In all, the association counts 104 deaths under interrogation, or while in prison, of democracy activists held on suspicion of crimes or for crimes never proven.
Still, in what seems to be a city swirling with disease and brutal military oppression, families in Rangoon try to eke out their lives.
One of those families would be considered terrorists by the junta, were it not for the fact that they no longer shoot at the military.
In one home, three daughters of two former ethnic rebel soldiers watch a Burmese soap opera while showing off the family photo album. The guns once toted by the formerly Mao-suited mother and father have been traded for professional careers for the daughters and a regular life in downtown Rangoon.
But on the balcony, a close family friend reveals heartache and tension. The friend points out how frustrated people feel in the big cities like Rangoon.
He believes that the government moved its headquarters recently to Pyinmana in central Burma because it fears the kind of open rebellion that occurred in 1988, when students and Buddhist monks took over parks and government buildings, shutting down the city.
They were shot in their hundreds, imprisoned and hunted down through Burma's jungles.
The relocation allows the government to manage a military strike against protesters, without worrying about losing infrastructure control, he says.
He looks out over the darkened city and says that the street's quiet does not indicate that all is right with Burma.
On the other side of the border, in Chiang Mai, people feel this tension, though they are often only able to discern it through smuggled literature, quiet e-mails and furtive phone calls over the Internet.
Burma's famous poet U Tin Moe, who lives in exile in Norway, said in an interview in Thailand that people are living "without hope" in Burma.
Overweight and coughing during a morning chat, he sits cross-legged on the floor of another former political prisoner's home smoking a pungent cheroot.
"They've lost their hope," says Tin. "They don't have any vision of what will happen next."
He spent five years in a 7.6-meter by 7.6 meter [25 foot by 25 foot] cell in the notorious Insein jail, near Rangoon, cheek by jowl with many other prisoners. He says he met great people there with wonderful stories. But life in Burma now is as dangerous as in that prison, he says. "They live in an unsafe world."
Nor does leaving Burma guarantee safety and success. Some "unofficial" refugees, who do not live among the 140,000 official refugees living in the nine registered camps in Thailand, claim they live hard lives working illegally and are excluded from the political process.
In the Shan hills of northern Thailand, a group of former rebel soldiers now subsist on a donated tract of land where they grow crops and seek work in surrounding areas. One soldier, who requested anonymity, said that he feels political groups, militants inside and outside of Burma and political consultants need to be more unified in their approach to political change.
The former soldier for the Shan State Army (South) sits on a small block of wood in front of his house just kilometers from the Burma border. He and his friends - one of them missing an arm from a landmine blast - work the land planting rice and cutting grass.
"We must be united," says the soldier. "There is too much separation, because leaders and soldiers are pursuing self-interest."
The Burmese Army is weak, he says. But he says he knows soldiers in the Shan State Army who would much prefer political negotiations over bullets.
"In my opinion, [anti-junta soldiers] don't want to shoot the enemy, but they have no choice," he says.
"The enemy persecutes and rapes and destroys the [Shan] people by gun. This government does not negotiate."
Eyewitnesses say the junta is pushing thousands of Shan and members of other ethnic groups in Burma away from their villages deep inside Shan state. It is forcing villagers to live next to highways, within easy military reach in case the junta needs to quell an insurrection.
The European Commission says: "Hundreds of thousands of Myanmar's [Burma's] 53 million population have been forced to flee from their homes or to relocate due to constant conflict between ethnic groups and the army ... An estimated one million work in menial jobs in Thailand, often illegally."
Some of these illegal jobs are in orange groves in northern Thailand. Refugees say that truck drivers often carry up to 30 people a day out of strife- ridden Burma to work as orange pickers. Many of these pickers rely on connections in Thailand to secure more stable and anonymous work elsewhere in Thailand.
Because Thailand has not signed the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol and does not have laws establishing asylum procedures, many refugees live agonizing lives of secret, hard, underpaid and unsafe labor to avoid being sent back home.
And ethnic groups trying to participate in constitutional discussions are frozen out by the junta's participation requirements, they say, leaving them in political limbo.
The junta's roadmap for democratic reform states the military must play the lead role in any new form of government.
The junta demands that government officials must have 10 years' military experience to take a role in the political process, meaning that no civilian can attain a decision-making role.
And at least 25 percent of any government must comprise serving members of the military.
The NLD has refused to directly join the constitutional process.
From his place on the hill, the former soldier says that if one day the NLD and ethnic communities could join real political discussions it would benefit Burma and pave the way for real change. But for now, it's all militancy.
However, he says: "The enemy can't destroy the revolution."
So far though, the lack of change means that rebels and the former rebels feel abandoned by negotiators and locked out of the political process.
One political consultant in Chiang Mai, Thailand, who advises groups participating in constitutional discussions, says that criticisms of consultants and the pace of regime change are understood but not fully warranted.
The democratic process has never been institutionalized in Burma and never will be, says Toe Zaw Latt, director of the Bahu Institute.
The claims of lack of unity are the natural order of things in any discussion of democracy in Burma.
"We're the new generation, we were there like them [the earlier generation of democracy activists]," he says. "We thought the same."
Toe says one must not easily bow to the junta's demand that democracy be ordered and in strict accordance with its demands.
"Can you discipline democracy? It is a projected need [to control democrats]," says Toe.
It is also vital, warns Toe, that rebel groups and democracy advocates abandon any hope that the United Nations Security Council will adopt any resolutions that put pressure on the junta.
"It is a false hope," says Toe. He adds that those who complain about disunity and who feel left out of Burma's democracy struggle have to know that the generations before felt the same way.
"Nobody keeps one chair [open] for you, you have to climb up yourself," says Toe, a former activist and soldier. "It is a long process."
One thing that must be remembered, says Toe, is that people inside and outside Burma are doing everything they can to counteract the junta's stranglehold on the economy and the people.
Toe says that he reads books written by Burma's freedom-loving scholars and he can tell that the movement is still alive, subtle as it is.
State-owned newspapers recently aired renewed charges against pro- democracy groups, saying that groups were out to attack the junta near the Martyr's Day celebrations honoring fallen heroes in Burma.
In late July, the junta announced that members of a political party it did not name were organizing a rebellion.
The likely candidate, the NLD, denied such activity was taking place, according to reports on Burma Net, an online source of Burma news.
When the junta comes down hard on people, it is only because of fear, says Toe.
He claims it is just a method to seek control, but that control is falling apart because of the junta's overweaning paranoia.
"It's always personal. They fear themselves," says Toe.
Douglas Crets is a freelance journalist living in Hong Kong. He is graduate of the Hong Kong University Journalism and Media Studies Center