A young woman with long black hair walked up to her. A cotton skirt covered her entire lower body, wrapping around her ankles. Keegan handed her a leaflet, and the woman looked her in the eyes and thanked her.
It was the last thing Keegan saw before a police officer grabbed her right arm.
``I handed him a card,'' Keegan said. ``I said, `I thought you would want this.' ''
When the officer refused it, Keegan flung the rest of the cards into the air. As she was being led away from the market, Keegan saw that the young woman was smiling, pleased with Keegan's pro-democracy message.
* Sitting at a wooden table in the living room of her Hamilton, Mercer County, home, surrounded by flowers, cards and balloons, 19-year-old Michele Keegan cannot point to one, specific reason that compelled her to travel to Myanmar, also known as Burma. It was there that she and 17 other activists were arrested Aug. 9 for passing out pro-democracy leaflets - an act that landed them in a Yangon detention center and yielded sentences of five years of hard labor.
It could have been that first meeting of the Free Burma Coalition she attended as a freshman last year at American University in Washington, where about 30 people had gathered in a dormitory lounge to talk about oppression in a country ruled for the last three decades by a military dictatorship.
It could have been the stories she heard from natives of Myanmar who had fled the country after a bloody uprising in 1988 that ended with the death of about 3,000 people.
It could have been the literature she took home with her after that meeting.
``It was real,'' Keegan said simply of the speeches she heard at the meeting. ``It was really personal.''
