4. Myanmar Bago community project visit

The final day of the working week in Myanmar involved a very early start out of Yangon to visit a HFH Myanmar project in Bago, the fourth largest city of Myanmar.  It was an opportunity to move out of the capital and see some rural parts of the country, where approximately 70% of Myanmar’s population still live.  HFH Myanmar has been working for the past 2 or 3 years with corporate partner Nissan, who have been responsible for the delivery of water, sanitation and housing interventions in 18 villages on the periphery of Bago, a highly rural area with ricefields and other agriculture all around.

Each village has its own buddhist pagoda, a place of worship with very beautiful and ornate architecture with the highest golden temple rooves dotted across the flat landscape.  In the pagoda that we visited, a new water treatment system had been built to purify water that was already being pumped significant distances from fresher water areas, but had not been suitable for drinking. Nissan’s corporate social responsibility program funded the project, working through World Concern for the water/sanitation component of the program, resulting in vast quantities of drinking quality water that serve the entire village and beyond with excess water being shared with neighbouring villages also from time to time.  The Nissan project also included a significant housing construction component which HFH Myanmar delivered, with around 100 rebuilt bamboo housing in one of the 18 villages.

During the visit, we had the extraordinary honour of being invited into the pagoda by the head monk who set up a banquet of sorts with tea and snacks, where we were able to speak with the water/sanitation community committee which had driven the project locally and which will continue to maintain the physical interventions. What a privilege to be welcomed into the beautiful surrounds of the pagoda, with such a serene setting, both visually and audibly, the bird songs being the primary source of sounds around where we sat together.  We also were encouraged to drink glasses of water that the new treatment system produces, which had the colourless, odourless and tasteless qualities that are the primary indicators of safe and healthy water – I for one drank heartily!

We also visited the village where around 80 homes have been rebuilt through the Nissan project and through the HFH Global Village volunteer program, which involves teams of volunteers coming at different times from different countries to fundraise and help build the houses alongside the families. The community committee responsible for transparency and fairness in selecting beneficiary families and looking after communal matters were waiting to meet us.  

While HFH Australia has not yet to my knowledge sent any Global Village teams from Australia to help build the houses, I represented HFH generally and was moved by the joy expressed by the community, after a brief meeting and sharing of experiences, racing to show me their improved houses, involving:

-          increased house floor space

-          division of spaces within the house itself to increase privacy for parents and children

-          higher floors from the ground to reduce the risk of flooding during the rainy season and to provide cool spaces below the house to hang hammocks

-          improved out-house toilets with sewage collection tanks

-          rainwater collection tanks

-          improved bamboo materials less prone to degeneration through action of mites

-          additional housing extensions being built by the family themselves following HFH Myanmar’s intervention to continually improve the living conditions of the families

-          construction skills and income gained by numerous members of the community during the house-building process itself.

The beneficiary families expressed how they are now able to concentrate on the important matters of education and income generation now that they can count on the quality of their homes to keep them cool/warm, healthy and safe.  They also expressed how much they miss the Habitat volunteers that had come to build housing but built unforgettable relationships with the people in the community.

The HFH Myanmar team based in Bago are doing extraordinary work with the community and volunteers from all around the world.