Myanmar Reflections
MYANMAR | Wednesday, 24 June 2009 | Views [89] | Comments [1]
Mother and Tanaka-powdered Baby
Myanmar
After 2 months of waiting for my visa to volunteer with ADRA, I am finally here!
Wow, what a country! I see why people say they fall in love with it – I have already, both the people, the culture and the contrasts. The people are truly what make it so fantastic – they are gentle, friendly, kind and genuine. I have barely met anyone wanting anything from me except conversation and friendship – hassling is virtually non-exixtant. However my eyes continue to be astonished by the sights, sounds and experiences – which quite surprised me, as I thought my time in Mae Sot had adjusted me to Burmese sights and life. I can’t imagine how it would have been without that!!
From the Buddhist Shwedagon pagoda in it’s stupendous glittering-gold stupa glory, to the colourful Hindi temples; from the impressive colonial-era buildings to the tarpaulin-covered ‘restaurants’; from the high-rise modern hotels to the dilapidated, grime-encrusted apartment buildings, Yangon is a city of contrasts.
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The city of Yangon greeted me with bleak grey skies, threatening to empty the contents of the clouds on the already water-laden streets. The ADRA driver grinned and waved at me when I acknowledged the green ADRA logo on a sign he held up from the glass windows as I was clearing immigration. Stephen, an Australian project manager working for ADRA met me the other side of immigration, obviously having gotten special permission, judging by the tag he returned as I cleared customs. Turns out we would have met in the Solomon Islands when we were kids, as both our parents were missionaries in the Pacific Islands!
Our $30,000 car waited, parked just at the front entrance of the regional-style International airport – a right-hand-drive 20+ year old run-down subaru for a right-side-drive country!! To get a newer but still second-hand car, such as a pajero, requires more like $100,000. Yet to fill the car (most use natural gas) costs under $5! As we drove, the streets were conspicuously absent of the motorbikes that lace the streets of most Asian cities. Instead, rick-shaws and tri-shaws peddled by men in brightly coloured longyis ferried tanaka faced parasol-toting passengers. Sometimes the whole family, carrying the day’s groceries, piled on the side-cart of the tri-shaw. Other times, a single man would sit facing the front in a one-seated side-cart. A variety of styles of ‘shaws’ allows for different styles of transport. Most of the tri-shaws, though, have back-to-back passenger seats on the right-hand side of the bicycle.
Every so often, our driver had to stop to fill the leaking radiator with water. The radiator wasn’t the only thing leaking – as the skies began to leak, so too did the window of the car, sending rivers of water across the plastic-coated seat.
All the while, Stephen gave me insights into Myanmar, Yangon and the language. The roads used to sport tram tracks in the colonial era, but now have been roughly covered in tar, more-often-than-not revealing where they still lay. Leafy, green trees stand like aged-centennials shading once-upon-a-time-impressive colonial buildings - some converted into government buildings, some left completely abandoned - whose somewhat faded stately facades bear testimony to their former grandeur, and the history they have lived through.
Moving closer to the ADRA office involved negotiating through foot-deep water pooling on side-streets, and necessitated more frequent radiator stops until finally, the driver indicated we should take a taxi the rest of the way, as he needed to take the car to the mechanic!
Out in the rain, we hailed a taxi, and piled into the rusty, leaking sedan, and headed to ADRA, via a hotel where I was supposed to meet a friend of a friend. Finding he wasn’t there, I headed on to ADRA with Stephen and Anita, a Ugandan ADRA worker who stays at the hotel, and who immediately took me under her wing when we bumped into her in the hotel - having read my Ugandan reflections about the mud-hut, I think we immediately shared a connection. Somehow or other, the other ADRA car was waiting to take us.
The ADRA office is in the 4th floor of an apartment building that is still being completed, causing noise headaches to some. It is surrounded by many government buildings, which ensures a fairly regular electricity supply, unlike many other areas of town which receive sporadic supplies at best – maybe 8 hours per day. (Electricity in my hostel periodically goes out, though it is quickly replaced by noisy generator power.) The office is down a side street lined by wooden-booths that house morning markets, and the odd tarpaulin-covered make-shift eatery, replete with children’s size plastic chairs and charcoal-fired stoves. In the evenings, candle-light flickers from wooden windows, illuminating women preparing the evening meal, while children play on the streets and men kick about a ratten ball in an attempt to keep it in the air as long as possible, or, when it is raining, gather around a communal TV.
I was warmly welcomed by the staff, and introduced to so many faces and names w my sleep-deprived mind refused to remember. The typical Myanmar handshake involves holding your left hand across the front of your body to touch your right elbow, as you shake their right hand. The same stance is assumed when giving or receiving anything.
Almost immediately, I was ushered into a meeting for volunteers – several students from the local American Institute, and their teacher had arrived for a meeting, and were keen to find out what they could do to help ADRA. It provided a very insightful introduction and overview to ADRA and their work in Myanmar. It also provideed my first task with ADRA – to produce a ‘job description’ for the role of the volunteers in helping ADRA with translation of policies from English to Burmese.
After a brief break, where I managed to connect to the internet, only to discover that connection is sporadic, and many sites are blocked, I was requested to attend a second meeting: more volunteers from the American Institute! But what this group was able to offer was significantly different, and potentially very useful to ADRA and their projects that involve training trainers. This meeting also included more specific details on ADRA projects.
ADRA has projects in many different areas of Myanmar. Myanmar consists of numerous states that are home to particular ethnic minority groups, including Shan, Karen, Chin, Kachin and Rahkine. Projects in these areas centre around helping rebuild livelihoods and improve food security rates in very poor communities, especially those who used to grow poppy crops, which are now illegal. ADRA also has projects helping support and improve education, by helping improve schools, provide stationary and fee support, and also provide Food For Education, encouraging students to regularly attend school by providing rice. They also run ‘train-the-trainer’ programs, providing training in health, agriculture, livestock and business, with the intention that these trainers then teach others.
The delta area, still in recovery phase after the cyclone of May 2008, is the site of many of the projects, mostly centering around WASH (Water, Sanitation and Health), and helping to rebuild communities there.
By the time this meeting ended, it was 1pm, which was in reality 1:30 to me, still running on Bangkok time (yes, strange I know, Myanmar has a ½ hr time-zone!). I was VERY hungry, by this time having eaten only yoghurt and banana bread since being up at 4:30 for my 7am flight! The team were quite concerned about where to take me to eat, as they were worried about me eating street-food. I assured them that I had been eating Myanmar food for the past 6 weeks at the orphanage, and my stomach was quite well adjusted to street-food.
Even so, my eyes still bulged, and my mind boggled at the make-shift eateries, barely protected from the monsoonal rain by roughly constructed tarpaulin-covered structures, rain dripping from the sides onto wooden desks-aka-tables. A charcoal-fired stove cooked local food that was served to us : stringy unrecognizable-to-western-eye greens, served with green mango and pungent, fermented fish-and-chili liquid in a bowl; plates of beef and fish cakes, both served in oily tomato and chili sauce; rice; and fishy-tasting soup with limp greens floating on the top. Worried that I wouldn’t have enough to eat, being vegetarian, Oliver also ordered an omelette for me. Not that they needed to worry – by now, after my orphanage and mission-trip experiences, I am well used to picking around meat, and can tolerate most flavours, though fish still is not my favourite, and my nose still turns up at the smell of the fermented fish sauce J By the end, I was so full, I was convinced they may have to roll me back to the office!
Back in the office, I was requested to attend another meeting – this time about my role with ADRA. I was certainly not expecting the task they have requested me to do, nor do I feel in any way equipped to become a stand-in ‘project manager’ for a WASH (water and sanitation) project in the Delta region! However, I’ve come here to be of service, and I know I will not be left on my own, nor will I be without support, both from the office staff, and from God.
The situation that has led to me becoming project manager is that due to the eminent elections, all visas for expats working here have been held up in a pile on someone’s desk. Hence almost all expats here are on expired visas, and will overstay until their visa situation is resolved. However, that means they cannot travel to the project regions, as that requires special permits to travel. The fact that I even have a visa is a miracle!
Hence, I will be helping to implement a project in the cyclone affected delta area. It will involve traveling 9+ hrs overnight to Labutta on monsoon-affected roads that are bad at the best of times, and untravelable by the larger, more comfortable buses during the rainy-season, which officially ended bus travel last week. Or, I can hope my travel schedule will line up with the now-sporadic helicopter service that takes 1 hour!!
The project centers around fixing/rehabilitating 230 cyclone-damaged fresh-water ponds that provide drinking water, refencing them, and providing ‘jetties’ to keep them unpolluted as people come to collect drinking water. After the cyclone, the salt water, debris and dead bodies rendered them unusable, and there was no time to fix them before the dry season. So it is vital these are repaired ASAP while it is still the rainy season, so they can fill up. It also involves supplying over 2000 house-holds with water storage pots and jerry cans which were damaged or washed away during the cyclone. From what I have heard, some of the villages which will benefit from the project have been neglected in the emergency work as they are in a region not considered to be part of the cyclone-affected area – in reality, a region border makes no difference to storms, and they are no less affected than the bordering regions.
Exactly what my role will be is yet a mystery to me, but there is another similar project that is partly underway, which will help give me insight, hopefully! From what I can gather, I will be helping the local staff follow the proposal, stick to time lines and budgets, and helping to solve any potential problems that occur, as well as providing reports on progress. This week will bring a lot of reading, learning and talking, before I head down to the delta next Wednesday, all going well.
So I left that meeting with a very full head, and had a short break before meeting with the project manager and implementation officer of the similar project, to give me some insight into that particular project that will hopefully guide me in my role. Not that I was able to take much in!!
Finally, about 3:30, well after most of the other staff had left, I was kindly escorted by Stephen and the driver to ‘Motherland II’, the guest house on the other side of town where several of the expat staff live when they are in Yangon.
The drive through down-town Yangon had my eyes wide and brain boggling at the sights, sounds and smells – the rattle of age-old trucks-converted-into-buses, people literally crammed in and hanging off the back like monkeys; markets sprawling on the foot-paths, causing pedestrians to spill onto the pot-holed and puddled main-road; the savoury smell of chapatti and roti being cooked on charcoal stoves by Indian vendors; hundreds of black-grey pigeons perched on powerlines that connect in a tangle of knots to drab grime-encrusted facades of 8-story apartment buildings, made colourful by washing and clothes hanging from the balconies,and people standing, staring down at the mass of humanity below; people playing badminton in a side-street. I was amazed at how much the city reminded me of Russian rural towns, with the lack of care to infrastructure and facades of the buildings. Yet it also reminds me of Africa in some ways, and there are definitely Indian influences. A strange blend of cultures J
I checked into my guest-house, and was warmly welcomed by the tanaka-faced girls at the front desk. We have become good friends, and I am learning a lot about the language from them. My room is on the second floor: a simple room with a double bed and a table. The first night I slept, when my room trembled, I thought Myanmar suffered from gurrias (mini-earth tremblings). But I’ve since figured out that the trembling always correlates with the rumbling of trucks outside my window, which thankfully faces the side of the building, reducing most of the noise of the street-front, which is in reality quiet compared to down-town. Bathrooms are shared, and are the typical Asian style of shower-over-the-toilet. At least now I have figured out how the hot water works! Not that I need it in this climate, although I am pleasantly surprised at how comfortable the temperature is: the clouds keep it to a bearable level, though the humidity can be intense at times.
After unpacking – YAY for proper unpacking! – I found the local internet café, and signed up for their special deal: 20hours for 5000 kyat (said chat), basically the equivalent of $5US! It was so nice to chat with family and friends.
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And now more than a week has gone by – flown by in a flurry of meetings, proposal-editing, report reading and editing, learning, visa lines, and new friends. Apart from learning about the project I will be working with, I have had my head spinning with editing/rewriting reports and proposals! But it’s certainly not been all work!
Highlights have included:
- Sunday morning wander around town
- Sitting sipping tea with locals
- Interacting with a cute 2-month old baby and her mother by the river front
- Discovering a Hindi street parade, complete with dancing ‘horses’ and a float pulled by tug-o-war-like ropes
- Sabbath with Anita & Don (Ugandan ADRA workers) whose hotel overlooks the glittering stupa of the Shwedagon Pagoda – seeing it at night!!
- Sitting on child-size plastic chairs, eating local food
- Random photos with tanaka faced women, having locals put tanaka on me J
- Trying to direct taxis to the ADRA office!!!!
- Catching local buses, and ending up in the totally wrong direction!
- Learning the language (at least, attempting!!)
- Discovering I will probably get a helicopter down to the delta area!
- Birthday party for Oliver’s wife (he’s program’s director)
- Saturday evening with Don and Anita’s Ugandan and Kenyan friends – chapatti!! It was fascinating listening to Africans discuss differences in culture – their own, and how they find living in Myanmar.
Strange/illogical/funny/interesting things:
- Getting in a taxi and discovering the back of the seat is wet because the windows have been open
- Right hand drive cars for driving on the right side of the road (and then when I actually see a left-hand-drive car, it totally confuses me!)
- Digging out/emptying blocked drains and literally dumping the black contents on the footpath, right next to market stalls selling food
- Women squatting, cooking on charcoal stoves literally next to piles of rubbish
- Drainage systems funneling water ONTO the road, instead of away from it!
- Carrying water in plastic bags
- Pulley systems hanging down the front of apartment buildings to hoist goods up
There’s so much more to write, but if I wrote everything, I’d never send this, and you’d never read it!!
There’s days I miss friends and family, especially days that internet connection is not working well. And then there’s the few days I couldn’t access facebook, that was as much frustrating as inconvenient!! It seems to be my connection to the world-beyond Myanmar.
But most of the time, I am thoroughly loving my time here, the opportunities I am getting, the new friends I am making, the sights to see, language to learn, culture to understand.
By far the biggest danger I face here is tripping over or forgetting to look the right way when crossing the road – but actually, the cars are quite dangerous, maybe because they are only driven by the rich who think they own the roads? Being a pedestrian requires caution – the hold-out-your-hand-as-you-cross-the-road method I’ve adopted in other countries doesn’t hold well here! But seeing there really aren’t that many cars on the road, finding a gap not a problem – remembering to look the right way is!
I am excited to be working with ADRA, as the work they are doing impacts so many. I am especially looking forward to going down to the delta area, where I will work with the locals, and see the impact first hand. I am especially looking forward to my helicopter ride, in an old Russian ‘maverick-like’ copter! Apparently they will literally drop me off in a field, and I HOPE someone is there to pick me up!! Ha ha ha! Latest news is that I will go now on Friday.
So, until my next report from Labutta, I hope and pray that you are well, and that God is your strength and song.
Much love, thoughts and prayers,
Chelle xxx
Some of the ADRA staff at a farewell lunch
for Anita and Don (Ugandans)
Tags: myanmar, burma, adra, world vision, world food program, humanitarian air services
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