''RUSH, OFFICIAL Absentee Balloting Material, First Class,'' read the official-looking envelope that was handed to me by an impressed hotelier in Burma, 10,000 miles from home. I, like thousands of other Americans, was out of the country on Election Day; in my case in a country that has had no troublesome recounting problems, no cliff-hanging days with the winner in doubt. The last Burmese election, 10 years ago, was simply ignored when the country's rulers didn't like the results.
The dawn was just breaking over upper Burma when night was falling and the polls closing in the United States half a world away. The mist still hovered over the hollows, and women quietly smoked their huge cigars, as Burma women do, over little cook fires. Red-robed, shave-headed monks carried their begging bowls to a nearby pagoda, leaving bare footprints in the unpaved road.
There can be few corners of the earth left where an American election means next to nothing, but the Shan States of upper Burma, east of Mandalay, is one of them. It is a land of minority highlanders hard by the borders of Laos and China, with opium poppies growing on the mountain slopes and a simmering, 50-year-old rebellion against the central government, now in quiescence since the drug lords started making deals with the country's military rulers.
To my good fortune, the only other Americans staying in the hotel that morning were a distinguished novelist and his wife, friends who had managed through their connections to corner the only satellite dish within miles with a television set attached to it. Their smoke-filled and coffee-cupped room became election headquarters for anyone who was interested up on the Shan plateau.
The only Burmese I met that day who was interested had been a candidate in his country's last election. His party lost, and so there followed a year and a half of prison. The authorities used to put bags over the heads of the political prisoners and take them to a place - they knew not where - in which they would be asked to write endless versions of their political beliefs.
''Gore is winning,'' I told the baffled but polite room boy whose smile would have been the same as if I won the lottery or complained about a cockroach under the bed. Later on I overheard a French tourist say ''C'est Booosh.'' And so it would go throughout the day.
At midday I took a walk up a hill to a woodland monastery graced by bougainvillea and the scent of pine. The monks' monotonous chants intoned a creed that was the opposite of American impatience. Maybe the American election wouldn't be decided until some afterlife when the ambitions of politicians would be rendered meaningless, I thought. Maybe, as according to Buddhist belief, both Bush and Gore would one day be reincarnated - perhaps as two of the frogs croaking in the marshes. Evening dropped on us like a bat's wing and the light was gone. But CNN flickered on, still without a president-elect.
The next day I began my long trip back, passing through checkpoints near the provincial airport manned by a soldiery whose government does not trust its people.
Upon reaching the capital, a city in which people have been known to disappear off the streets when the government needs slave labor to work on distant projects, the American election was still undecided.
The headlines of newspapers bought on stops around the world as the flights droned on toward home screamed of an American political crisis. But imperfect and litigious as the election process was, it is still the envy of so many in what Rudyard Kipling once called ''the dark places of the world, full of unimaginable cruelty,'' where ballots are meaningless pieces of paper no matter how clearly the choices are marked and where there is never a need for a recount.
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.
