I just successfully purchased four round trip tickets on Air Asia from Bangkok to Yangon, Myanmar. Sue and I are going there with two Australian friends to do teacher training under Nargis Library Recovery. You may have been hearing lately how Myanmar is opening up at least a little, no thanks to continued US and EU sanctions. We are taking advantage of that and will be among the first foreigners to work with school teachers there. I’ll say more about that when we return to Thailand mid-January.

After purchasing those tickets I feel like I really accomplished something. The process turned out to be as breathtaking in scope as it was extreme in complexity. First of all, I got everyone’s names, birthdays, passport numbers &expiration dates as well as other personal information – Air Asia wants it all. They also default to charging for extra legroom seats. Uncheck that and you get the normal seats, which they still charge extra for! I finally found a button to uncheck all seat selection, which is no extra charge, but warns you that your party will not sit together. To get even for that I suppose they will put each of us in a center seat between to big guys that smell bad. They charged for each of us taking a checked bag. I unchecked two of those but found out 3 screens later that I had to uncheck it separately for the return trip.

Anyway, it went on like that until time to pay. They declined my normal credit card, so I called the card company. Fortunately calling 800 numbers from foreign countries via Skype is free. They said everything was fine, so I called Air Asia to find out that they simply do not accept credit or debit cards from the US due to their higher fees. I have seen that on a few other websites in Europe, where the drop down list of the card issuer’s country has everyone (even Afghanistan and Iraq) except the US, Myanmar and North Korea.

Hector Rivas of Thrift books and Thant show a monk teacher new curriculum Nargis Library Recover can supply.

Do people in the US think that the card companies supply them with kickbacks from their rewards cards for free? Either the card holder or the merchant has to pay for that. In this case the merchant, Air Asia, decided it won’t.

As much as I admire their stand, the only alternative I had to using a card was getting to their office Suvarnabhumi airport which means going an hour outside of Bangkok. So I tried my Bangkok Bank card.

This was the first time I tried using my Thai card on the internet. I use it here because it has none of the rather stiff fees (some originating from the US) that the foreign debit and credit cards now have in Thailand. What an experience! It included phone calls to automated systems where I entered account, code, pin and other numbers, entering codes returned via SMS, other codes returned via my email account, thinking up my own 8 digit codes and writing them down and entering them twice, etc. I got timed out of the system several times, but of course each time I was that much faster when I came back. I learned a lot that was not worth learning.

It finally worked, but the codes produced by all this are good only for eight days, so next time I’ll have to do it all again! I’ll forget everything I learned in this process by then.

I wish I could use my US card. Of course there are some US credit cards that are not rewards cards, but the merchant can’t tell which those are. I know, because we process credit card donations on our foundation website, and cannot tell what the charge for an individual card will be until after the transaction is done.

Maybe the card companies will have to change. The world economy is changing. Airlines especially are looking to charge an extra fee or save a buck wherever they can. Those where US business is a small minority may just choose to get rid of it altogether, like Air Asia did.

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.

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.

I have used this title before. Sue and I again went to Myanmar and visited a number of libraries supplied by Nargis Library Recovery as well as our first new library building. The building was opened in Thingangon which is very close to the southern end of the delta area, downriver from Pathein. The building is in a village of seven thousand on Middle Island, a large island in the delta. The library serves the entire island of about forty thousand people.

Pathein, Thingangon and Middle Island can all be found on Google maps, but both Thingangon and Middle Island shown there are not where we went. First find “Pathein, Ayeyarwady, Myanmar” then look due south and about two thirds of the way to the ocean you will see Labutta. Thingangon is in the Labutta township and is southwest of Labutta on that same finger of land.

After our boat delivered us to the pier, a few minutes walking through the village streets brought us to the new library. The second plaque above the door says “Donated by United Nations Women’s Guide of Vienna, Myanmar Book Aid and Preservation Foundation and Nargis Library Recovery.” The first of these three is a group of Women from Vienna who donated $8000 to us. This, along with local help for labor and some materials, covered the cost of the new building. Myanmar Book Aid is the Myanmar organization which is the counterpart to Nargis Library Recovery, which is a U.S. NGO.

Daw Ah Win, a native of the region and now a U.N. librarian in Vienna and member of the group who donated for the building, was traveling with us. We met with the local library board and had a ribbon cutting ceremony to officially open the building. You can read more details about this library here. Now that the building is built, we will do what we have been doing elsewhere in Myanmar, supply books for it.

Thingangon cyclone shelter.

Thingangon is one of the places where the government built a large cyclone shelter, so this area was hit by Nargis with considerable loss of life. The shelter is built on very sturdy columns so that flood waters can flow underneath while the people are protected on the second floor.

Some teachers at the school gate.

A boys classroom in the school.

The school library.

After visiting the shelter we went to the school that serves this and surrounding villages. It has three buildings for elementary, middle and high school. We visited some boys classrooms and got a good reception from the students. The library for these schools was housed in a couple of cabinets. For English I found about six copies of one book “Money for a Motorcycle”. We’ll have to get more books to this school as well.

Village power plant fired by burning rice husks.

Before leaving we visited the power plant that supplies electricity during the evening hours. This will allow our library to stay open until 10 PM.

We had a great visit. All of us, especially our four new people, returned with a better sense of the needs of the delta area and how the little we have done will be stretched to serve a large number of people.

I do have a few hotel/restaurant pictures to show. We stayed at the Winner Inn this time. It was fine: a clean large room with air and hot shower. The staff was friendly and we found we could order, get served and finish an American style breakfast within fifteen minutes if necessary. Normally if I am staying in Yangon I like the Park Royal, shown in the second and third pictures. It is even more downtown than the Winner, large and reasonably luxurious for $55 per night at the moment. I would compare it to hotels in Bangkok in the 150 to 200 dollar range. Meals at its buffet were always good, even for someone as picky as me. I stayed there for a week on my previous visit.

Thant took us to a number of really nice restaurants. Again, in Myanmar you will find prices sharply lower than Bangkok or other Asian cities, but the quality and variety of these Yangon restaurants could not be beat.

We ate lunch at the Feel restaurant our first day back from Bogalay. Everything was good, with a very wide selection as you can see. You pick several vegtable/salad/side dishes and hand them to the staff. You also can pick from the various food trays at the main counter. The first picture in the second row shows what our table looked like when we started. We tried all kinds of Myanmar food here, all very good. Later, we picked Myanmar style deserts from the trays outside in front.

There had to be a shopping expedition to the Bogyoke Aung San market, a five to ten minute walk from the Park Royal. It has over 1600 shops. Hector got some jewelry for his wife in the second picture. The driver’s seatback was held up by wire wound between the headrest stem and the upper seatbelt stay in the cab we took to the market. Note the end of the door in the cab Sue and I took to a laquerware shop later - no latch. I discovered this as I was riding in the front seat. Nearly all cars, cabs or private, are quite old (see video) in Myanmar. On the balance, I still think its safer to be in a car in Myanmar than in Thailand. Nearly all the cars were built before air bags had been invented, but driving is slower and traffic is much less.

Sue and I were there with to other board members of the Nargis Library Recovery project, John Badgley, Hector Rivas and Dr. Thant Thaw Kaung.  John is an “old Burma hand”. He has been in and out of Myanmar almost since I was born. He knows a lot about the country and has many friends there. He also has a keen insight into the problems there and what can practically be done to help. Hector is CEO of the largest used book company in the world. He has a number of warehouses throughout the U.S. and sells on the internet. If you have ever ordered a used or out of print book through Amazon, chances are his company fulfilled your order (plug: you can get a better deal if you go direct – www.thriftbooks.com). Thant is our main Burmese board member, John’s counterpart in Myanmar. He manages our activities there.

From left to right, Jack, Sue, Hector, Thant and John. The Bogale, Myanmar library board is behind the table.

This was Hector’s first time to Myanmar and he said he was a bit concerned about safety and what the government there might do to him if anything went wrong. After having been there a few days he realized that the problems he had imagined were simply not there. Those of us old enough to remember the grey pall that hung over the old Iron Curtain countries, how an American talking to a local person could result in that person being questioned or arrested, will be relieved to see that at least the appearance of Myanmar is completely different. The atmosphere appears very free and open, and will be that way if you follow a few rules that are easy for most of us: do not openly oppose the government, hand out anti government leaflets, etc. If you see some sort of political demonstration (we never have) go the other way. While the press has some limits, conversations between individuals is generally quite free and open.

The greatest danger to life and limb in Myanmar is the same as when traveling in any other country – a road accident. For Myanmar you are likely safer than most other places because there are fewer cars. When traveling south of Yangon it was common for us to be the only four wheeled vehicle on the road, with maybe one or two motorcycles within view and about fifty bicycles.

So what is Myanmar like? I think of it in contrast to Thailand. I was talking to a tourist who was just back from Koi Samui, a southern beach tourist place. He lamented that it was not like he saw it twenty years ago. Now it is high rise condos and high real estate prices. What if you could visit Thailand fifty years ago? That is what Myanmar is like.

Shwedagon at night.  You cannot come to Myanmar without seeing this.

The people are invariably friendly. The only place they might be a bit testy (one waved me off when I tried to take a photo) might be around Shwedagon, the greatest pagoda in Myanmar. I can see that since one hundred percent of the Myanmar tourists go there it may get a bit old to some of the locals. Even there any problems are minor compared with anywhere in say, Tokyo or France. The Burmese people are uniformly thrilled to have Americans visit. There certainly are few of us that I have seen. I have run into a few Germans and other Europeans, but in my four trips cannot offhand remember any Americans that I ran into on the streets or at any of the major cultural sites.

 The trip was only six days, but a lot happened. I will tell more in future posts.