We are in the Inya Lake hotel in Yangon, having just returned from our first three day teacher training workshop in Bogalay sponsored by Nargis Library Recovery. Everyone agrees that it went really well. Gayle Holmes taught with Sue assisting. We met Keith and Gayle in Bangkok a few years ago. Gayle is a master teacher from Australia and has been training teachers in Sue’s Indian slum schools for the last few years. Keith is an extremely practical person who can fix or build anything. He has lived many years with aborigines in the most violent place on earth outside of a war zone. He has also lived for a time “off the grid”, using no money, growing, building or trading for everything he and Gayle needed. I’m hoping for his advice and help as we develop Opportunity Village in Thailand.

Two student volunteers from international schools in Yangon, Htet Thiha Zaw and Thaw Phone Myat, went with us to translate and help with logistics. They were great. All the teachers understood everything and got a lot out of out first workshop. It’s good to know we will not be needing any professional translators.

The Bogalay Library

The workshop was at a library a ten minute walk down the same street as our hotel. Nargis Library has previously supplied books to this library on several occasions. We had the entire second floor which was great for 25 teachers planned to be in the workshop. We ended up with 35, so it was a bit tight but worked out OK.

I had thought we would have some monks, who teach elementary students in the temple schools, but instead a number of “laymen” lady teachers who also teach in the temple schools came. Once the workshop started I could see why. Buddhist monks cannot touch women. They can’t even touch anything a woman is also touching. Nearly all the other teachers in Myanmar are women, and it would have been impossible to avoid inappropriate contact during the various workshop activities. Teachers working in World Vision and public schools came In addition to the monastery teachers.

No way can you buy materials when you make $50 per month. Our teachers learn to make them from materials we provide

Since Nargis Library is sponsoring the workshop, it was appropriate that the basic thing being taught was how to read a book and get everything it has to offer. Using children’s books with pictures and a few words per page Gayle showed activities to stimulate thinking in both smarter and less capable students, and make learning hands on and interactive. Children’s books were the basis for literacy games, dramas, crafts and discussions aimed at making students think about the book . . . and beyond the book. Participants were excited that could be so much fun. The story characters, good and bad, were related to people a child encounters in real life.

Activities included making puppets of the book characters, re-writing the ending of a book, and teachers contructing from scratch a book to be used in their classroom. These were repeated using different story books, so that teachers could practice skills useful with any children’s book avaliable in the library.

Returning to our hotel after a hard day’s work

Like a lot of important knowledge, much of what Gayle teaches seems pretty obvious once you think about it. Still, it is very different from the teaching methods used here now, but you could see the lights go on in the teachers as they listened and participated. They were really getting it.

With all our worldly goods on a bicycle, we’re ready at the pier to leave Bogalay

While with World Vision we visited Koun Thee Chaung village. They have constructed a non formal education school here also. We visited the school and the separate small library building. This had more books than the previous school. 147 of them were from us.

Our group walking down a village road.

School to the left, library building to the right. These were both built by WV. They spent about $1500 for the library building and contents.

Dennis, Bill and Thant look at the library books. 147 of these are from us.

The jungle was not quite so dense here as before. Cyclone Nargis hit this area harder than the previous place and ripped most of it out. This village had 1600 people before the cyclone. 600 of them died. We talked to various people whose families were devastated. It’s one thing to hear about it on the news and another to be there talking to them.

Did this family lose a child or husband to Nargis? I didn’t ask. Some we did talk to lost multiple people, both young and old, from a single family.

When I was ten I read a Life magazine article about a famine somewhere, I think in Africa. Life magazine relied on pictures to tell the story. Among them were pictures of mothers holding babies that had died, one of starvation while waiting in line at a feeding center. It was so overwhelming I came to the conclusion that those people just had to be different from us. If that sort of thing happened to the people I knew and was around we simply couldn’t take it. We would fall apart, go crazy or something. No way could we ever recover. As far as I could tell from the article and pictures they did recover, at least enough to go on about their lives. So they must have been different from me.

Of course as I got older I learned that inside we really are the same and losses like this hit us all the same. At that point the physical distance kept up enough space that a disaster way over there did not so much affect me as I lived in the US. For me it’s only when I get over there where these things happened and get to know these people that the full impact of the loss hits. Then I get motivated to do something.

Not that we should not do something right at home where we live. But in the US there always will be a substantial response to disasters. We lost lives in the thousands in Katrina and the World Trade Center, but our response in each case was in the hundreds of billions. Katrina alone had 60 billion in insured losses – losses you know were paid for. The total laid out was much more than that. In Myanmar from what I can find the losses are estimated at around 1 billion, maybe as high as 4 billion at the outside. But how much money is actually applied to them? Again, from what I can find it is in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Ever get the feeling you are being watched? I did all the time.

Again, my figures are approximate, and I welcome correction. What I see is that the money layed out for Nargis was around a thousand times less than for a US disaster in which about fifty times fewer people died.

Some of us need to help out with disasters in the US, but there is plenty of room for those who want to help elsewhere.

Some aid gets to the people of the delta area of Myanmar. For every $50 in international aid, both government and non government, to Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, Myanmar gets $2.50. I was told this by a “Burma expert” and later had to check it out with original UN sources for a magazine article. It’s really true.

This lack of aid is only partially due to the government restrictions on NGO’s operating in Myanmar. The other, and I think major, reason is due to the sanctions on Myanmar by the US, EU and Australia. Most NGO’s are from these countries, and sanctions discourage them. We (Nargis Library Recovery) had to get a special permit from the US Treasury department to do what we do in Myanmar. You don’t need that for other places.

In order to stay in Myanmar and do anything at all, NGO’s normally do not publicly complain about issues with the government. Sometimes a fuss is kicked up. You have to pick your battles. If you want to help political prisoners, monitor their elections for fairness or get government officials to do things differently that is one thing. If you want to help people in non political areas such as food and agriculture or education and libraries that is more straightforward.

By staying away from sensitive issues NGO’s can operate pretty free from government interference. The government does not bother with us. I think most of the money it gets from us is our 10% hotel tax and some airport fees when we visit. It does ask that we do not bring in books about Myanmar governmental issues, with explicit sexual content and religious books specifically aimed at proselytizing. It does not check our books, it expects us to do that.

Given all that, there are some NGO’s doing significant work in Myanmar. One of the best is World Vision. They have 850 workers in Myanmar, with 63 staff in the Bogalay delta area. Among other things they operate some non formal education schools out in the delta villages. Recently they have started helping us distribute our books among 50 libraries they either support or work with.

The Bogalay area director, Naw Maureen Kolay accompanied us in two of their boats to visit schools in two delta villages. These boats had the only two outboard motors I have ever seen in Myanmar. For small boats in Myanmar they were very fast, although most of the runabouts on US lakes would leave them behind.

Some school children await us at the landing at Auk Magyi village.

We could not see the landing for Auk Magyi until we were nearly on top of it, and climbing up to it was a bit of an adventure for some of us. The children and some staff members led us along a short trail to the school.

Sue working with the kids. She’s now talking to WV about coming in with Gail, an Aussie master teacher, to do teacher training in the Bogalay area next year.

A little help while leaving. School building is behind.

It is great that WV is setting up these schools for children who cannot go on a normal schedule because of their work load with their family. It is a great example of how help often must be given in Myanmar: you do what you can. It is not ideal and it could be much better if circumstances would allow. The kids come when they can. Often education is disrupted as the family moves to find work. There were only a few books here, some of them from us. They need both more Burmese and some English children’s books here and at the other WV schools.

Naw Maureen Kolay, director of WV efforts in the Bogalay delta area, talks with Sue.

Way more should and could be done to help. In the meantime, NGO’s like World Vision, Nargis Library Recovery and about thirty others operating in the delta area will do what they can. While it may not be much, there is little enough going on there that it still makes a big impact.

In Myanmar, getting there is half the fun, whether on their hand crafted roads or on the river. Especially the river. Even though Thingangon was a major village (it even shows on Google maps, but in the wrong place) it was accessible only by boat. The nine in our party were based at Pathein, and required a fast boat to reach the island and return within the day. The only boat fast enough was a 20 knot 120 foot river ferry that normally transports 160 people. This allowed us a one way time of five hours. It was a bit pricey for Myanmar, about the same as renting a 19’ runabout in the North Idaho town from where I come, but our price included the fuel and the crew!

Our boat was too long! Throughout the trip I tried to get a photo of the entire boat. I never could back up enough to do it without buildings or too many trees getting in the way.

Even so, we had to start at four AM on December 14, which turned out to be a great time. It was still completely dark by the time we got away from Pathein. There were no lights of any kind along the river, and no light pollution visible anywhere in the sky. This is one nice thing about being in a country which has large areas without electrical power. There must have been a meteor shower going on, because some in our party saw six. I saw four, as many as I saw near Waco, TX when I went out to see the Perseid shower earlier this year. I never could get away from the light pollution of Waco or nearby towns that time.

I just checked on the internet, and found that the Geminid shower peaked the nights of Dec 13 and 14. How about that? The first time I’m in good night seeing in years.

The first few hours in the dark were definitely the high point of that trip. I could see many more stars than I could even in Thailand. I don’t remember stargazing like that since I was a kid out in the country in North Idaho. The weather at that time was a bit cool due largely to our 20 knot speed, requiring a windbreaker. Once the sun was up for awhile we no longer needed the jackets.

Coming into the village where we took a morning coffee break.

Inside the village “coffee shop” on the pier. Clockwise from the foreground. Dave Leuthold, Carolyn Leuthold, Sue, Lyda Adair, Bill Cochran, Dennis Taylor, Daw Ah Win. Arm in the lower right supplied by Dr. Thant Thaw Kaung.

After sunrise Sue took a nap on deck. We passed a few small settlements, but only one or two of what I would call a small village. We stopped at one of these for morning coffee and a snack, after which we resumed our trip to the far south.

When we got to our destination there is only one boat landing which already had a boat at it, so we tied up beside and debarked through that boat to the pier. After a short walk out Nargis Library Recovery group arrived at our first new library building, which I describe in the previous post.

Thingangon Village. We landed through the open area in the center of the large boat on the right.

Our captain and crew.

The return trip got us back to Pathein after dark, in time for a late candle lit dinner under the stars and then to rest for our next day with World Vision to the east.

What we do with many of the books we bring in is give them to the Buddhist monks. I’m not sure whether we make any merit in the Buddhist sense, but many temples in Myanmar have libraries that house our books and are used by their communities. The monks also distribute the books to these at little or no cost to us. They run a number of schools that can use our books as well.

Things are done in the Buddhist way, with appropriate ceremony. Several of these presentations have occurred in the past in various parts of Myanmar but this is the first that I have attended. The monks are in front, the adults facing them in the audience, and the children from the temple school are behind. The banner of Myanmar Book Aid and Preservation Foundation, our counterpart organization in Myanmar, is over the front area. The boxes on either side between the monks and the audience hold our books. The brown boxes are primarily English language children’s books while the white boxes are Burmese language books purchased from the proceeds of selling some of the popular fiction and non fiction books we bring over at book fairs in Yangon.

The actual presentation occurred when Hector, Thant and I handed a small stack of books to a monk. We did this several times to about four of the monks.

After we had presented the books to the monks and the ceremony was over Sue presented a book to to the children. The way they quickly got into position around her on the floor indicated they sit with a teacher this way often. It worked better than I would have thought. I suppose her experience teaching kids in the Indian slums English in part by reading to them helped. Also the book “Goodnight Moon”, like most of our children’s books, has many pictures and few words. I think this helped, and hope it will help the children to learn English as they use these books in their schools and libraries.

I got distracted by Sue reading to the kids but still managed to catch part of the distribution network before he got away on his bicycle taxi.

We stopped at several libraries on this trip. The Saya Zawgyi Centinary Library in Pyarpon on the way back stood out. We met with the library board. These men represent the “grass roots” people that we deal with. They are essential to our success and their country’s education. We went over records, check out proceedure, etc. and saw that circulation was substantial for a library of that size. Many of our books were already in this library, with more to come.

I don’t go to the library much. I buy books I read from a bookstore or online. It was an eye opener for me to realize how important libraries are in Myanmar. They don’t have the money to buy a book, and if they did, where will they get English language books, even in Yangon? Even if they could get online Amazon does not deliver in Myanmar. Fortunately for us, with the help of American President shipping lines, Thriftbooks does.

We took a two day trip in a van to the city of Bogalay which is in the north east part of the southern delta area. We visited libraries and some monastery schools there and in the surrounding area. The highlight of this trip was traveling by a small boat which just held our group to riverside villages in the area. There we again learned about education and libraries in the more outlying areas.

If you’re looking for Bogalay you might try spelling it “Bogale” also. Some spell checkers, and Google maps spells it that way.

The delta area of Myanmar was devastated by cyclone Nargis over a year and a half ago. Most buildings in this area at least lost their roofs if they were not entirely flattened. A lot of rebuilding has occurred in the last year and a half. In some ways it is easier here than other more developed parts of the world since there is less complexity to be rebuilt. Still, we heard stories of how hard it was for children to come back to school and study after they had lost most of their families, their homes, or whatever else a child might have to lose.

The trip down was made by van on the handmade roads of Myanmar. These are made from one to three inch rock placed by hand and then rolled. Because of the rocks they are bumpy in a way that makes a lot of noise and must be wearing on the car, but does not shake the passengers. Potholes do not seem to develop in these type roads. I think if they can put good layer of asphalt over such a base they’ll have some long lasting roads. We saw very few cars, buses and motorbikes but a lot of bicycles and bicycle taxis. At one point we ran head on into a Buddhist Ka-htain donation celebration on the road and had to stop. Men were in buffalo costumes (see video) and other men “fought” them. Ka-htain marks the end of 3 months of Waso (Buddhist Lent) in which monks are not allowed to travel. The monks are now back out and receiving offerings.

The view was countryside most of the time. Many of the photos here were “drive by” from a moving car, so please forgive the tilt and maybe lack of clarity. Often there would be a canal near the road so that access to homes was via a log bridge. This is the delta area, so we went over a number of small and some large bridges. I tried to get these water areas as we passed.

The river trip was made in a small boat shown in the first picture below. It was provided by friends and education/library supporters U Aung Nyunt and his wife Daw Kyin Nu. We started out inside (see video) but soon got outside to better enjoy the scenery (see another video). Most small boats that are powered in Myanmar use a small Chinese once cylinder diesel engine with a long propeller shaft. I guess you could call it an outboard motor, but it is far simpler and cheaper (from $150 to about $300 for larger engines) than an outboard you would buy in the U.S. We traveled a few hours past many colorful boats to the river village Myin Ka Gone. The village had a row of houses along the river, and then a walkway which I think was its main thorofare. It may not have had road access, since this and a few other walkways were all we saw. One of the last pictures you see is a kindergarten teacher standing next to the school library. We plan to help them out.

As we went on this and other expeditions in Myanmar, people from the local area helped us a great deal along the way. In Myanmar the people are always the best part.