It’s time for an update from Myanmar. I’ve been discouraged to see the type of coverage coming out of CNN and BBC and others regarding relief efforts underway there. And despite the fact that I am in the US, I’m still in daily contact with our people in Yangon, and therefore may be able to continue to provide a better sense of some aspects of the realities of providing relief in Myanmar than you will get if I leave you to fend for yourselves with nothing but television news as your guide! So here goes…

Among the biggest challenges to relief efforts right now is the distribution issue. This is the impression being given by international news agencies, but the perspective they take in reporting it is different than mine. Let me back up and give you some history. Before the cyclone, there were quite a few international, non-UN development organizations, as well as some local development organizations, working in the Ayewaddy Delta. These organizations had field offices in many of the main towns and larger village areas and had built up working relationships with local authority structures and local community members. When the cyclone hit, these agencies and their staff remained in place. Their international staff may not have been allowed to go out to those field offices post-cyclone, but the local and international staff who were already there were able to remain. This was threatened for awhile, but in the end, their continued presence was successfully negotiated. Certainly the lack of ability to put additional people in those field offices and out into the surrounding communities was a problem, but there was a presence.

CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO HOPE INTERNATIONAL

What you are hearing on the news would have you believe that, until the UN agencies get in there, there is nothing and can be nothing happening. THIS IS INACCURATE. There has been a lot going on, and it isn’t just because of the UN agencies, it is because the other local and international agencies who were already there doing other things have used their own networks to help, plus which a number of other organizations who did not have a presence there (like HOPE) have found a way to help and provide support. In any disaster, the UN actually relies on the smaller, non-UN agencies to do a lot of the distribution of supplies – the UN agencies get supplies out to central warehouse locations that they establish as distribution centers, and then the non-UN agencies act sort of like subcontractors and help distribute from there. (For example, HOPE is currently working to get some of the first helicopter loads of UN-FAO supplies delivered to areas where our local partners can distribute it.) Whether through orderly distribution of UN supplies or the orderly distribution of supplies like the 600 bags of rice that HOPE purchased on the local markets and then coordinated to be delivered to several areas just in the past few days, most aid delivery is done in a responsible fashion, with good coordination and cooperation between international and local agencies and community people. Those 600 bags of rice were distributed to several communities and represent rice to feed 9,000 people for a week. The delivery of rice was greeted with joy, but there was no frenzy, as you can see from this photo.

When I see footage on CNN of people lining main roads and aid workers throwing small packets of food supplies out of the backs of trucks while the people lining the roads scramble and scrape and fight one another for the crumbs, I cringe. This is NOT the norm. There are lines of people begging along some main supply routes, but they do not by any means represent the bulk of needy people, nor is this haphazard, conflict-heightening method of throwing food out the back of a truck to distribute aid the commonly used approach. The news agencies do not seem to recognize that giving handouts (sometimes throwing out handouts) along the highways is a fairly destructive way to distribute aid. How aid is provided can either contribute to building unity and helping people reestablish their communities or can undermine community unity and functioning. Our aim and the aim of most organizations operating out in the Delta is to help communities rebuild so that their social fabric is stronger than it once was, rather than weakening the already damaged bonds.

So where do these CNN and BBC photos come from? What our local colleagues describe to us is that the closer to a main Yangon-Delta supply route people live, the more likely they are to be waiting for relief, begging on the side of the road and relying on the outside to rebuild their lives for them. Once our colleagues get off the main supply roads and start going down some of the smaller roads or especially the smaller rives, the people there have much less access to outside aid, but also much less expectation that someone else is going to take care of them. Therefore they have much MORE of a sense that rebuilding their lives is what they need to do. The survivors in these settings are taking any initiatives they can. This is frankly much healthier in the long run. The difficulty for HOPE and other organizations is walking that fine line of making sure people have the basics so that they can go ahead and take initiative and start rebuilding their own lives, without providing them too much, so that they become dependent on outside initiative and aid. The people along the road are genuinely in need, but the way their needs are being addressed has already created dependence. In some sense, this is robbing them of their future, rather than preserving them for their future.

We at HOPE have confirmed that we are helping our local partners serve areas that are not being reached by anyone else right now. So we are already hearing stories of small villages working together to rebuild rough housing for each other. We’re hearing stories of draft animals who survived the storm, returning to their now abandoned farms. One of our colleagues even saw a farmer who had recovered one draft animal and was working to get his fields ready for planting! How is this possible? Many times, the more vulnerable survivors are sent to the temporary settlements while the remaining, most able-bodied survivors try to return to their homes to rebuild.

CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO HOPE INTERNATIONAL

There’s a steep price to be paid for choosing this option, but less costly options don’t really exist. A little girl displaced by the storm is having her upper arm measured by one of the local health team members we are supporting, in order to determine her nutrition status. She has outward signs of malnutrition. Her parents both survived the storm and are among the able-bodied who have returned to their village to try to being rebuilding their lives. The little girl was left at a temporary shelter, along with her aunt and the aunt’s two-year-old. That way, the aunt can have access to food, etc. The aunt is breast-feeding both her own two-year-old and this little girl, who is younger. Because of the aunt’s current nutritional deficit, she is struggling to provide adequate nutrition for both of these children, and the food supplies at the temporary shelter are also very limited. The shelters are filled with old people, expectant and nursing mothers and very small children. This leaves them very vulnerable, but not as vulnerable as the whole family would be if the family tried to stay together. There are no easy choices and every choice involves threats to survival for some family member or another.

Now reflect on the fact that we, along with all our HOPE colleagues, have been very actively encouraging our local partners (who include both Karens and Burmans) to provide assistance to all in need, not just to those from their own backgrounds or groups. This is the right thing to do. But it is a very difficult thing to do for people in these areas who have suffered because of being from one of these people groups or the other. The long history of trauma in these communities makes the cooperation and trust we are trying to encourage a very difficult thing to do, and our insistence on looking past ethnic identity reawakens memories and emotions in local community members that we have no life experience to compare to so that we can understand adequately. When our local partners go out there and try to work, there’s so much more required of them than simply delivering supplies and providing instructions on how it is to be distributed. The situation is one of multiple layers of dilemmas on top of one another. The need for trauma healing support is immense, more so than we even first understood.

Just to let you know the situation at our house and office – after having power restored to our house last week, we quickly started experiencing long power outages on a daily basis. The same is happening at the office, so the generator is running there more than we would like. Apparently all the bugs aren’t worked out of the power production and supply systems yet. And the phones at both the house and the office aren’t working reliably, even though they were working well enough for a short while. The lines themselves were damaged during the storm so those will have to be replaced – it isn’t a simple matter of reconnection. So in the meantime, internet and phone access is very difficult and the cell phone is the only way anyone can be in touch.

I’ll be back in touch soon, since I have a lot more news, mostly of the human interest variety. Thanks for continuing to read. Usually we think of crises as being short-term, but not this one – the crisis in Myanmar is a long way from over.