At age 52, Tulasi Shrestha, whose parents wouldn’t let her attend school because she was a girl, is finally learning to read. Shikha Gauchan, after receiving training on a computer, has vastly increased her business to foreign trekkers by promoting her guesthouse on Facebook. Children who once couldn’t pass the entrance exams to further their education have so excelled that the community built a secondary-level school to accommodate them.

It was such a serendipitous meeting. While strolling the gilded Shwedagon Pagoda, Myanmar's most sacred Buddhist shrine, we stopped to talk to a monk. A very chatty fellow of 51, and a monk for over 25 years, he was very eager to show us the photos from his recent trip to Japan – yup, on his Smartphone. When he actually invited us to lunch at his monastery two days hence, things got even more interesting.