Nargis Library Recovery

Captain Myo Myint Aung collected $1400S from fellow mariners for our project this January, here is his response to our blog today. Life has not been gentle in Singapore, or Myanmar—

June 30, 2009—Sorry for a long pause. Fully agreed with your comment. Knowledge is important and propagation of knowledge is more important. Libraries can bring knowledge beyond schools.

I have been busy these days but I read every email you send and forward to my circle of friends. Times are tough for everyone here, Just a week ago, one of the ship management companies went bankrupt. Some 2000 Burmese officers and crew working on their ships face unpaid wages and loss of jobs. Friends at management level in the Singapore office risk losing their jobs, even with the recent slight economic recovery….international trading is slow, as is shipping.

I hope Obama and his team’s stimulus package takes effect soon so we get out of this difficult time. The Singapore government says that unless US and EU economies gain momentum, we have no chance of early economic recovery in export-oriented countries like Singapore. And right now, we are in the middle of an H1N1 scare. No one has died from H1N1 in Singapore but we have over 500 positive cases and the number increases daily. I am also down with flu – but thank God it is not H1N1 , just seasonal viral flu.

Thanks again for your great work and your team- from Myanmar and abroad–especially in the US.
I will do my best to help this great work..from time to time, as I can. Brgds/Myo
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From: myo myint aung
Sent: Tuesday, 23 June 2009 4:58:30
AIDs from Fruit stall @ Waterloo Street, Singapore

Never knew the spread of AIDS is so powerful. Now better not buy ‘already cut’ fruits. Cut your own fruit and be safe! A 10 year old boy ate pineapple about 15 days back, and fell sick the day he ate it. When he had his health checked… doctors diagnosed that he had AIDS. His parents couldn’t believe it… Then the entire family went under a checkup…. none of them suffered from AIDs. So the doctors checked again with the boy, asking if he had eaten out…The boy said ‘yes’. He had pineapple before the evening he became ill. Immediately a team from the hospital went to the pineapple vendor to check. They found the seller had cut his finger while cutting the pineapple; his blood had spread into the fruit. When they had his blood checked….the guy was suffering from AIDS. But he was NOT aware; unfortunately the boy now suffers from it.
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When I first learnt about HIV and AIDS it was early 1983 from TIME magazine. It had a cover photo of a test tube filled with blood. I was Acting 3rd Mate on Yick Fung Shipping -with all Hong Kong Chinese officers & crew . A young Hong Kong Captain was the only one on board who could read, speak & write good English. He taught me navigation and seamanship and gave me English magazines he read.That is how I got to know about HIV and AIDS -just a few months before going back to YGN for the 2nd Mate exam in 1983.

Few in Burma knew about AIDS at that time, except for my wife’s uncle, Dr U Khin Maung Tin, who was Director General & head of the government medical research lab in YGN. We talked about AIDS and he asked if Burmese seaman aware of it and whether they should educate to warn seamen?

I told him very few Burmese seamen were aware of it, but in many ports-Malaysia, Singapore and Australia -port health officials were visiting ships and passing out AIDS health guides and putting posters on ship notice board. I said we need to tell Burmese seamen about potential danger of this deadly but slow-developing threat. Later, he said he had requested the BSPP Cabinet to make this problem known to the public, but they turned down his request -saying that AIDS is disease of GAYs and drug addicts, not to worry about the general population. The Health Minister in question, Col Kyi Maung, was serving under General Ne Win.

Within a year the first Burmese HIV positive patient appeared. Sadly, it turned out to be a seaman who was neither gay nor a drug addict, just a working seaman a long time away from home and family. Now Burma has nearly a million (official report is 1/10 of that figure) HIV cases. They include people from all works of life – including military personnel, even air force pilots and naval officers. They all lost their jobs!

How many young children are HIV infected in YGN alone? Go see them at the Shwegondaine Orphanage and see, where my wife Maw assisted as an NGO volunteer there along with French, German, Japanese and Brazilian ladies from our expat community in YGN. I followed her and saw poor little HIV-infected kids abandoned by their HIV parents. They wanted to hug us…to have warm human touch because no one in that orphanage touched them. But only European ladies were hugging them, whereas we Asians were careful not to touch them or let them hug us, except to touch our clothes. They had no direct skin contact, even though we knew HIV was not transmitted by touching, it was really a heart breaking sight. I couldn’t follow Maw any more, whereas my own daughter, about the same age as those kids, often went along to play with them.

INDIA has an HIV population larger than all of Africa; thanks to long-haul truck drivers and cross-border trade, the virus has spread rapidly from India through northern Burma into China and vice versa. Our virus even has mutated into a new strings not known before. The number of HIV-infected people entering and exploiting our innocent and unaware people has rapidly expanded our HIV-positive population.

The BSPP is long gone…and so is their conservative approach to public health and HIV; now big billboards warn people about HIV and AIDS in most road intersections. But do you ever really look at them when driving? Even with our basic knowledge of AIDS- we have difficulty understanding those billboard signs. A few years ago a girl working in our house asked my wife about HIV:-”Aunty – how big is that HIV bug?”
Is Burma doing enough to reach out 55 millions people? Yes, libraries can help a lot. Thank you for this project.

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Dear Myo, Another reason for good local libraries in Myanmar, where ordinary people can learn how to avoid AIDS. Thanks for this message and for your donation. We are assembling books today for our third container to be shipped early August–50,000 more. American President Lines is donating cargo space between Seattle and Yangon for six containers over the coming 12 months. 300,000 books, some to be sold to pay for Burmese texts, delta libraries greatest need. John

Thanks. We are very happy to see the condition of these books. Thanks to Hector, Heidi and Thrift Books. She added about 17 sets of Encyclopedia and they are in very good shape.

It will be a good idea to visit a library in Delta in December. We can go day trip. We can build our first library if Simpsons and other donors are ready to contribute. But, if you all want to build a library, Yangon will be more suitable. This is because English language books are more suitable for Yangon people than rural area. Thanks. Thant
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Dear Prof. John Badgley,
We received 500€ from our fleemarket yesterday in Munich (germany). We (the house)would like to support the Mynmar Book Aid with the money. Please let me know how I could transfer to you.
Yours sincerely, Christina Terfloth
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Dear Christina Terfloth,
In the name of the readers who will benefit from your consideration, my deep appreciation. Today I will post news of our 2nd container’s safe arrival and the sorting of its 50,000 books into appropriate library shipments. Our Myanmar Book Aid and Preservation Foundation will again host a book charity fair, selling about 10% to raise funds to buy Myanmar language books for school and community libraries. The monsoon prevents us from organizing this as an open air event until September when the rains let up; meanwhile we will continue distributing rice bags of books as we did through the Pyapon monastery to delta schools in March. Perhaps you read a description of that process on our myanmarbookaid.org blog?
Please wire the $500 Euros to United Overseas Bank (UOB) % Nargis Library Recovery….John

I recently attended a Washington D.C. roundtable on the topic “Burma/Myanmar–Views from the ground and the international community.”  Chatham House rules keep me from citing the participants; however I am free to report on the prevailing views which directly relate to Nargis Library Recovery project.

Modes of successful engagement for recovery dominated the discussion. Ambassadors, senior US, UN and foreign ministry officials spoke of their country’s experience in administering aid, both before and subsequent to Cyclone Nargis. A consensus emerged that this is an opportunity as much as a tragedy, for joint efforts with domestic NGOs have demonstrated existence of a strengthening civil sector. There was general agreement among those administering projects in Burma that the humanitarian situation is dire, a problem accentuated by the global economic recession, and that aid projects would benefit from greater collaboration and significantly increased resources.

A Burmese participant recently released from an extended prison term contributed this compelling observation:

If I may conclude with an analogy, in surgery the second or third operation for the same ailment is always more difficult, if only because of the scar tissue from previous operations. Well, earlier surgeons working on Burma/Myanmar have botched the job badly. Not only is there more scar tissue, but the original ailment persists–with added complications.

How much justification would there be anymore in looking to past leadership to pull Burma/Myanmar out of the mire? Some individuals in that category are going to fade from the scene soon. It is a new game now–a new, complex and urgent game. Both the two present major players know only one game and they play it ad infinitum. With a multiplicity of lessor players [in other words, a true pluralism], they become off-balanced. 2010 and beyond does open up more political space which can be utilized for reconciliation in both the democratic and ethnic divides. As such, 2010 could become an opportunity for prevention of further conflict in a land that has known little else for close to seventy years.

This is the context that explains my sense of urgent opportunity motivating our library project. Burmese are accustomed to using their libraries for all the old-fashioned reasons, now we can offer access to global information, knowledge crucial to understanding issues that under gird any modern society.

Your comment is welcome.

Our second 40 foot container with 50,000 books is wending its way this week from Singapore past Malacca, Penang, Dawei [Tavoy], and up the Hlaing River to Yangon. Its coastal voyage is along shores rich in lore of Buddhist teaching monks from India & Sri Lanka. They created pagodas and congregations in the deltas of Burma’s great rivers not long after Roman legions conquered Gaul, and Han armies subdued lesser lords and tribes to unify China. Centuries later Muslim traders built mosques and converted believers along Burma’s 1500 kilometer coast from Sittwe [Akyab] south to Kawthoung on the Kaw Peninsula; to be followed by British soldiers, merchants and missionaries who established forts and churches near these ancient town centers. English names replaced the local ones in the 19th Century; then, late in the 20th Century Myanmar’s leaders returned the Pali-derived names to evoke powerful cultural traditions.

This past month we’ve overcome two challenges: moving our second container of books from Seattle to Yangon, and creating our own tax-exempt NGO—Nargis Library Recovery Project. The Institute of the Rockies offered shelter to move quickly after Cyclone Nargis hit, now we have a separate tax-sheltered non-profit corporation. Our project will require years of independent effort. The books we sort & distribute [some we sell to fund Burmese language titles] flow bi-monthly, our next container should arrive in July. Since September we have raised $27,000, much for this purpose, and Thrift Books promises a million books to fill the conspectus designed by our companion NGO—Myanmar Book Aid and Preservation Foundation. The University of Washington and Cornell University libraries donated over 6,000 academic titles and texts, and individual donors continue to step forward with valuable contributions.

All this activity sets in motion an enduring process to replenish libraries devastated by Cyclone Nargis. Now we have framed a second goal that requires much more money: reconstructing the libraries destroyed or badly damaged by the storm to preserve the books we are donating. An average $15,000 is needed per library, plus funds for equipment, staff training, and laptops as well as creating a reliable electric source for fans. $30 million is our goal; we need capital for this separate project.

While books and buildings are the heart of a traditional library, in this century citizens, students and scholars must have internet access. Our twin projects are designed to empower Burmese with knowledge of their past, and of the world today so they can they secure their future with knowledge of literature, global affairs, science and technology.

Bear in mind that each dollar contributed will ship five books to our Yangon warehouse from a Thrift Books warehouse, $100 pays for 500 books to be sorted by our volunteer librarians in Burma. This is a great project for students or Rotary or a faith-based group with humanitarian focus.

Meanwhile, we continue to submit proposals for re-constructing damaged libraries and training local librarians in computer literacy; no large investor has stepped forward.  We urgently need good suggestions and volunteer organizational skills to carry out these dual goals. For more information contact us.