NARGIS LIBRARY RECOVERY PROJECT NEWSLETTER #9, NOVEMBER 2009
I promised a newsletter at the beginning of each month, but was delayed by our tour of delta libraries and our directors’ round table on October 31, then another week of meetings in Yangon. Fortunately, Jack Simpson filed photos and notes. Here is my take on NLR events since our last newsletter.
Thanks to the generosity of two corporations—Thrift Books and American President Lines—we are sending large numbers of books to Myanmar; our cost works out to a nickel a book. Our operation holds promise of continuing this efficiency for the next two years. The issue facing us now is how to safely house and distribute these books for potential readers, so our meetings & round table discussion focused on reconstruction of libraries. Criteria for rebuilding or expanding a library includes: 1] a pre-existing committee or board of townspeople sustaining the library with donated land for the structure and sufficient funding to pay the salary of one or more librarians and the utilities; 2] volunteers willing to assist the librarian; and 3] evidence in the community that the library is needed and will be well-used.
Dr. Thant Thaw Kaung arranged for Sue and Jack Simpson, Hector Rivas, Thant and I to meet groups in the delta with these criteria in mind; Exotissimo Tours handled our logistics and gained permission from the Home Ministry for our travel. On both substance and arrangement our hosts were very successful. Travel was slow & bumpy on the unpaved road, but the few local police guards stationed alongside bridges waved us through. We did stop for a few village and town full-moon celebrants who shouted midst gala drum/horn music for donations to local monasteries and good causes. Our trip took us past miles of ripening paddy in huge fields bordered by drain canals all the way to Pyapon, Bogalay and upriver to several villages.
We left Winner Inn in Yangon at 6 am and reached Pyapon around 10, where we visited Saya Zawgyi Centenary Library. Zawgyi, a writer of national consequence, was honored by his community who dedicated this library him after he returned from Yangon and donated his books. The president of the Library Committee is U Myint Aung, a local businessman who greeted us with his three-member library staff. The following afternoon in route back to Yangon we stopped to take photos of other board members, who also volunteer to serve patrons, shelve books and raise funds; meanwhile, that first day we drove on to reach Bogalay by noon and check into a very non-tourist, three-story inn, a huge relief to get out of our mini-bus however spartan our quarters!
Our host in Bogalay was U Aung Nyunt, brother of Daw Ah Win, librarian adviser to our project. Aung Nyunt and his wife, Daw Kyin Nu, operate five sawmills along their river which is one of the Irrawaddy’s many outlets. He is a cancer survivor weakened by chemo-therapy; however Daw Khin Nu’s huge energy compensated for his subdued condition. After serving us a wonderful delta lunch, including laphet and my favored balachaung, she led us upriver in a locally built motorboat to Myin Ka Gone village, a two-hour ride, during which we passed hundreds of similar craft, both large and small. These delta towns are enshrined on the water. We met teachers and a librarian who already are using our donated books; they now hope for a rebuilt library adjacent to their school, which serves several thousand villagers up and down the river. I remind the reader that community and school libraries are not a responsibility of the government; to exist they must be privately funded by local donors.
Our night in small rooms on very firm mattresses was undisturbed by insects or town celebrants, at dawn I was out walking the main street in search of Burmese coffee and that delicious hot stick of donut-like fry bread served in every teashop. As first customer I squatted in my longyi by a little table under a tarp left from cyclone relief; within minutes a dozen locals were doing the same. Few spoke as we sipped & shared appreciation waking to another day; suddenly I visualized all as survivors surrounded by ghosts of drowned family members. Eighteen months before the cyclone had raged from 6 pm to 4 am, devastating towns, obliterating dozens of villages and killing 140,000 that dark night. Yet, here we sat where water surged from the river and wind collapsed walls & blew off roofs, with no trace of wind, water or mire that had been so daunting.
Tomorrow I will upload a few of many photos taken by Ashin Dhammapiya, a monk who repeatedly led recovery teams into the delta, the first within days of the catastrophe. He is now helping our project and contributed his photos revealing the speed of recovery during those critical first four months. More on this extraordinary monk later.
In the morning Daw Kyin Nu led us to an important event she arranged, a donation ceremony for our books at the Bogalay Community Centre. Jack Simpson already has filmed and posted his impressions. We all were moved by the support of town elders, senior monks, and hundreds of school children who likely appreciated release from school to participate. On the heels of that formal event, we visited two monasteries: the Mingala Kantha Monastic School led by Sayadaw Bandanda Konnanka, and the Magkin Yeiktha Kyaung led by Sayadaw Bandanda Konnasarya. Over 600 primary level students are enrolled; many are orphans from the storm.
Sue Simpson expressed her appreciation to the children [and assembled monks] by springing to her feet and leading the kids in reading and exercises designed to stir their spirits. It was a brilliant display of effective communication by an experienced teacher with no command of local language but with mastery of a child’s world. Sue herself was so moved by her experience that she wants to bring college students from Baylor University, a Baptist college in Texas she supports, for three month internships to teach English in delta libraries. Thant and I were hard-pressed to explain how complicated it is to bring foreign teachers into Burmese schools at this time; which seemed counter-intuitive to Sue since our trip into the fearsome delta progressed so seamlessly: no military was in sight and we were welcomed with open arms by local authorities.
Bogalay is one of the larger delta towns with a teachers training college established three decades ago. The Principal, U Mya Kyaw, led our tour of his tiny library, several classrooms and the computer–training laboratory. All 72 desktops were in use, save two that were broken-down; neither instructors nor students looked up as we circled the classroom, they had no time to waste. This collapsed an enduring myth, that the government is opposed to students using computers and the internet. In this distant town, as well as in larger cities I visited in recent years, private companies prosper by teaching business & government employees and students to access the internet highway.
Before leaving Pyapon on our final leg back to Yangon, we visited U Myint Aung’s primary school, a tidy six-room building that survived the storm. It has need for a small library adjacent to the school, a similar situation to what we discovered in Myint Ka Gone village. This mix of public-private education with a library to serve both students and the community may be commonplace in the delta where libraries function as private institutions operating near schools on land donated by the local community.
We returned to Winner Inn, hot showers and a lovely dinner hosted by U Thaw Kaung and family. The following morning Thant joined us to meet the US chief of mission, Larry Dinger. This was an especially busy occasion as the State Department’s mission to Nay Pyi Daw arrived and expected in depth briefings about every feature of Burmese society. But Ambassador Dinger gave us our full hour. Each NLR director described their involvement in our project, especially moving to me was Hector Rivas’ recounting of how and why he and his corporation decided to make such a major commitment. Sue Simpson described her Hyderabad slum project, Jack Simpson gave a summary of his street-children’s recovery program in Nam Rang, near the Cambodian border, they then explained their decision to help Nargis Library Recovery. Dr. Thant Thaw Kaung, our only Burmese board member, delved into our long relationship—back to when he was a schoolboy and I was his father’s colleague—then revealed his optimism about support from the Tripartite Core Group, chaired by Ambassador Robert Chua. Larry Dinger was engaged by our presentation and arranged for a meeting with the US economics and commerce attaché, Marc Porter, who hosted Thant and me at lunch; he also asked Richard Mei, Public Affairs Officer, to arrange for my lecture at the American Center several days later. The attitude in the embassy towards support for private initiatives seemed transformed from my previous visits after 1990, when the elections were held but not recognized by the junta.
While in Yangon we visited and were briefed by founders of four additional libraries NLR has already helped with book donations: the Esme Foundation’s school directed by Ko Nay Min; the ICE-Youth Library led by very bright college students; Myanmar Egress, a program designed by Yangon business leaders; and Nelson International School, a private elementary English-language program with over 1,000 students, most from minority ethnic groups. Nargis wreaked a lot of damage in Yangon, which sits in the upper portion of the Irrawaddy delta, yet these private educational programs have carried on with great success. We are privileged to be associated with each of them.
To be continued!
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