Over the past week, as the humanitarian crisis in Myanmar has deepened -- tens of thousands dead in the wake of a cyclone, as many as 1 million people homeless and starving, donations of food and water piling up at the airport while a xenophobic military regime bars foreign aid workers -- my heart has grown sadder and sadder.

Finally, I pulled an old photo album from the shelf. It’s full of pictures from a magical five weeks I spent in Burma almost a decade ago. As I turn the pages, memories resonate. I found such peace there, meditating in an ancient monastery that overlooked the Irrawaddy River.

Burma is the original name of this beautiful Southeast Asian country, before a junta siezed power and started imprisoning and torturing people, refused to allow the democratically-elected government to take office, placed the leader of that government, Aung San Suu Kyi, under house arrest (where she remains today, despite winning the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Nobel Peace Prize), before they brutally crushed last September’s pro-democracy marches.

Burma is a place of heartbreaking contrasts: devout spirituality and cruel repression; deep poverty and gentle people; a landscape of gleaming gold stupas and billboards urging the use of condoms to fight AIDS.

In my album is a photo of a Burmese child wearing a sweet smile and a ragged man’s shirt fastened with safety pins. I met her outside a pagoda. She was 12. I fell in love with her.

Today -- if she’s still alive -- she’d be 21, lost in a sea of suffering people. Here is my journal entry from Feb. 20, 1999:

“She’s one of a horde of children who beseige us, selling T-shirts, postcards, beaded bags, postage stamps. “Hah-looow,” they chorus, crowding around us. “You want to buy? Beautiful, like you. Please, sister.” Their hair is matted, their eyes luminous.

This one, for some reason, latches on to me. When I tell her I’m not buying anything, she stops pleading and hands her sheaf of postage stamps to an older woman. Then she asks me, in English, where I come from. We have a nice little conversation. She learned English in school -- just down the road, she says. She smiles often as we talk. She’s about the size of an American 9- or 10-year-old, but she tells me proudly that she is 12.

When the bus is about to leave, I pull her away from the other children, so they can’t see. I fish in my bag and give her a felt-tip marker. She grins. She takes the pen, removes the cap and writes “LayLay” in the palm of her hand. “That’s my name,” she says.

I take her hand and the pen. Under “LayLay,” I write “Jeanne.” Then I draw a little heart between the two names. She laughs.

I pull her close, for a hug. She’s so small, she comes only to my waist. An old woman approaches with a cooler of soft drinks.

‘You buy me a present?’ LayLay says. The woman thrusts the cooler at me. LayLay takes out a can of Coke.

‘You buy for me? Two hundred kyat.’ That’s about 60 cents. I nod.

The Coke is bought, and LayLay slips it into her shirt pocket. ‘I take home to my mom,’ she says. ‘Present for HER.’

Then I’m herded onto the bus. LayLay presses up against the window where I sit.

‘Bye! Bye!’ she shouts, a huge smile on her face. She raises her hand to wave and I see the two names and the heart, in navy blue ink.

I’ll never see her again.”