Myanmar Water Project History

2005

If the original birth of a Rotary Myanmar project can be traced to a May 2005 decision by then-Newport-Irvine RC President Greg Arbues to encourage Myanmar Compassion Project with a substantive gift, the real "jet bottle" was attached to its underside when I again "chanced" to spend three minutes one-on-one with Carl-Wilhelm Stenhammar immediately after his inaugural address as RI President at the Chicago Centennial. His eyes lit up to learn that Rotary had just started a service outreach in Myanmar, and said Myanmar was one of the several countries he wanted Rotary back into. In that conversation, he strongly encouraged us to continue developing friendships and doing tangible service there.

Three months preceding my June 2005 Stenhammar encounter, and encouraged at that year's Anaheim IA by PRIP Bhichai Rattakul, a volunteer team led by me deployed to video-document, in three of the most-damaged countries, the wake of the 12/26/04 Asian Tsunami disaster. The result was a stark documentary for Rotary called "Aftermath of a Tsunami," showing the destruction in peninsular Thailand (Phuket to Khao Lak), Sri Lanka (Batticaloa to Thampattai), and northern Sumatera, Indonesia (Banda Aceh and environs). After wrap of location shooting covering most of that month, two of us visited Yangon for a few days before returning home.

Final production of the Tsunami video was expertly handled by 22-year-old Kelly Cassell, a film-school graduate and daughter of then-Newport-Balboa RC President Kim DeBroux.

Due to usual governmental secretiveness, we were unable to learn tsunami-casualty statistics there, but were informally advised Burma's own life losses numbered into the many thousands and produced uncounted orphaned children.

But while there, we "chanced" to meet Dr. S.V. Kamcindal, distinguished Professor Emeritus of the national medical college, former Director of Hospitals for the Myanmar National Health Department, and Founder of a private, locally incorporated Myanmar charity called Myanmar Compassion Project, Inc. We learned that he and his wife, a nurse, had established a "back pocket" personal outreach following their retirements in 2000 to provide health care for a handful of six needy private orphanages they knew.

By the time we met them that March, they had attracted other domestic and, largely, US support, and grown an organization then serving 142 private Myanmar orphanages. Since then, "MCP's" served orphanages have increased to more than 200. MCP provides all the medical/dental care for, now about 7000 children and young people growing up in Myanmar orphanages. MCP does not own or control these orphanages, save one personally founded by the Kamcindal's on their own Berea Farm.

After meeting a second time that March 2005 week with Dr. Kamcindal and his co-CEO, Dr. William B. Greiser, an American surgeon, I returned in April 2005 to my Newport-Irvine Rotary Club, and soon thereafter, NIRC contributed $5000 to Myanmar Compassion Project. My club's leadership also directed me to develop further working data on opportunities for Rotary to serve in Myanmar.

2006

John Brainerd, PP of Newport-Irvine RC and DGE of D-5320, decided to adopt further help to Myanmar orphans as his theme international project. In March 2006, he and Mrs. Brainerd, and their attorney daughter Kristen, accompanied me to Myanmar along with Maesai RC leaders and several others, and met with Dr. Kamcindal, Dr. Greiser and their staff. Over the next six months, dialogue between Drs. Kamcindal and Greiser, John Brainerd and me resulted in a concurred decision to create turnkey, complete safe-water systems for orphanages needing them. The two doctors estimated need for such systems at about 60-65 orphanage sites then.

Starting in November-December 2005, our Rotary team coalesced with the Indiana University Department of Telecommunications to create a 15-minute documentary, addressing specifically the work of Myanmar Compassion Project and titled The Asia Compassion Project: Bringing Hope to Children in Need. Rotary and Indiana University presented the completed project as a gift to MCP in April 2006. The IU Foundation dispatched the documentary's Executive Producer, Professor Ron Osgood, to Yangon for that presentation.

In January 2007, our Rotary project team concurred with Dr. Kamcindal to retain a respected, Singapore-educated, Yangon Burmese civil engineer to design a durable, replicable, adaptable, cost-effective, turnkey water management system expressly designed to serve a small- to medium-size residential institution. Following our approval of his very complete design, including full local warranted component sourcing in Yangon, we began quest for funding in D-5320, D-6740 (eastern Kentucky; whose then-DG Thomas Ashford had also decided to adopt the project), and D-6580 (Southern Indiana, where I grew up) provided some limited support, as well.

On a parallel path to the foregoing, at Chicago, PRIP Bhichai and then-RID Noraseth Pathmanand had directed us to Maesai RC in northernmost Thailand as an intended "Host Club" partner for a match grant exception to a non-Rotary country. At 2006 San Diego IA, Bhichai encouraged us to accomplish the first year of the project with local Rotary funding, then to seek TRF approval for match-funding to a non-Rotary country as we progressed toward the second year of the project. He purposely gave us this direction, he told us, with initial substantive project results achieved in anticipation of his own then-schedule to become TRF Chairman on July 1, 2007. After cordial meetings at Maesai in October 2005, that club became our permanent partner on the project, which continues. I addressed the 2007 Annual Conference of their D-3360.

2007

Maesai Rotarians periodically visited Yangon, and one of them, PP Ashok Jagota, CEO of a branch of a family textile export business based in Yangon since 1947, committed to assume financial control of arriving and disbursed project funds. In late 2006 and through 2007, I continued regular trips to Southeast Asia, to gain deep familiarity with the "on-ground landscape," to assemble, then assess our continuing project support team of Myanmar nationals, and to begin to familiarize myself with the local universe of candidate orphanages for Rotary water systems.

But street demonstrations erupted in the Yangon capital in August 2007, resulting from, among other factors, government-imposed doubling of domestically-controlled liquid-fuel and natural gas prices. While atmosphere in, particularly, Yangon, remained tense into October, we continued with Rotary plans already set, selected the first three orphanage sites and began construction on schedule the last week of October 2007.

2008

Despite continuing Myanmar tensions throughout 2007, the first three orphanage water system sites were up and running by end January 2008. I was personally on scene from end October 2007 into mid-December to oversee construction and to, with project team photographer, Kyaw Myo Oo, shoot more than 6000 digital photo images which formed the basis for our second project-related documentary video, completed in Pattaya, Thailand, in February 2008, and titled Myanmar Compassion Water Project Safe Water Systems.

At May 5, 2008, we were scheduled to begin construction of the fourth and fifth orphanage sites of Phase I. Our May 4 flight into Yangon was canceled due to the devastating May 3-4 Nargis cyclone, which ultimately claimed 138,000 lives in Myanmar.

A cyclone is a devastating wind, blowing in a large, circular pattern, and originating over large bodies of water. It does not involve undersea disruption, as with a tsunami. Nor is a cyclone like unto a tornado, which is a tight, funnel-like vortex disturbance, nor also a hurricane, blowing unidirectionally at high linear speed, and usually, across a broad geographic front.

Cyclone winds typically blow longer than a hurricane or tornado; in Nargis' case, from approximately 11:00 p.m. Friday to 1:30 p.m. Saturday, and at sustained velocities measured at up to 212 kph (132.5 mph). Nargis blew in off the Bay of Bengal from southwest to Northeast and, while hurricanes usually dissipate rather quickly as they progress inland from seashore, Nargis all but eradicated the Myanmar Delta "Rice Bowl" growing area, continued crossland to obliterate 40,000 family homes in Metro Yangon, then blew itself out near the Thai border, heaving traversed over land about 410 miles.

For four days, we stood by in Thailand until the Yangon airport reopened and electricity was restored, flew into Yangon May 10, then began work May 14. Despite acute post-cyclone shortages of building materials and labor, accompanied by short-term price escalation, the remaining two orphanage sites in Phase I were complete and operational by late July 2008, even with post-cyclone delays.

Amidst all the foregoing, aided (and post-produced) by a Thai-resident, Norwegian Rotarian professional videographer Jan-Chris Von Koss, in May-June 2008, we shot 1080p-standard, high-definition video so as to complete a second, full-sound-and-motion documentary on the project. This location footage was edited into our third completed project documentary in June 2008. This became Rotary Myanmar Orphanages Water Project.

Meanwhile, arriving on-ground in the immediate wake of the cyclone, we were exultant to discover that Rotary's first three Phase I sites had survived the cyclone without any of them moving one millimeter, validating our design civil engineer's claims of an at least 60-year operating lifespan! Trees of sizable trunk diameter were uprooted in the near vicinities by the Nargis cyclone, while our Rotary structures remained immovable.

Due largely to my own May 2008 Myanmar presence and continuing Rotary project history there, I was appointed by UNESCO to its newly created Myanmar Post-Disaster Committee on the Protection of Women and Children. This committee has since come under the jurisdiction of the UN High Commissioner on Refugees, and I still serve. This service enabled me to network on Rotary's behalf with a number of the other effectively helping NGO's on site at the time. In my judgment, a few multi-national NGO's provided excellent post-Nargis response, including one we discussed with whose leadership I have rather close ties. However, when I return to Burma next Spring, I will commit considerable time to careful review of all the aiding NGO's to assess their respective missions, relative strengths and weaknesses, and suitability for possible future collaboration with Rotary there.

During my several post-cyclone weeks in Myanmar, I sent four long, widely-read journalistic email dispatches from Yangon, detailing the effects of that disaster. I can also provide you copies of these, should you desire.

Meanwhile, we began plans for Phases II and III of the project, necessitating my return to Yangon again in August 2008. At that time, we finalized all details of a requested Rotary Foundation match-grant application which was duly submitted to pay for the next 10-15 water projects. Then-TRF Chair Jonathan Majiyagbe, in consultation with John Osterlund, had informally committed to Mr. Osterlund in April 2008 to approve a non-competitive TRF match-grant and non-Rotary country exception at the October 2008 TRF meeting.

At the June 2008 Los Angeles RI Annual, Mr. Osterlund convened a special meeting of Mr. Majiyagbe, Dr. Mike Abdalla, John Brainerd, James Robinson and me to discuss the project. However, Mr. Majiyagbe became quite ill during the subsequent October 2008 TRF Board week, and was hospitalized until the final Friday session. Therefore, the project did not achieve the promised match-grant, but Mr. Majiyagbe, apparently from his hospital bed, did at least authorize a Chairman's Special Initiative Grant for $20,000 to further the project and therefore, officially validate the Foundation's blessing of it.

But, as you know, no District-Designated Funds can be triggered under a Special Initiatives Grant, thereby depriving the project of more than $30,000 of then district-formula funds, which had been designated for 2008-09 project construction. However, substantial unrestricted monies were received from D-5320 and D-6740, along with very-much-less-than-promised from D-6580.

These, along with some small monies remaining from the prior year and the Special-Initiatives grant, enabled us to construct sites 6-10 between November 2008 and January 2009; then sites 11-15 from April to early July 2009. All 15 sites are now reliably operational. Very few operational problems of a minor nature have been exposed and corrected at any of the sites; these mostly electrical-conduit.

2009

In May 2009, a private breakfast with Andrew Kirkwood, the Myanmar Country Director of Save The Children, revealed the new existence of orphanages, purpose-built in the cyclone-ravaged Delta area to care for children who lost their entire families to the cyclone. Andrew asked if Rotary would be interested in building water systems for these new orphanages, some of which were then already purported to hold 100 or more orphaned children. In an emailed response to my query on this, Paul Netzel urged we pursue this new option.

To be sure, there are still orphanages, longer-extant on our list for potential sites for which we ought eventually to build, but as project initiator and Director, I believe we should immediately validate and strategically respond to these newer orphanages' need. To that end, our on-ground team is vetting some 19 of these new orphanages to determine viability. We expect to complete this process with onsite detailed inspections at end of rain-season in October-November. We should have a preliminary report on these in the next several weeks and, if adequate Rotary club and district funds become available, we can begin construction on some or all of them by March-April 2010, with completion by early July. We do not know how many will meet our established minimum criteria, but I'm estimating at least 7-8.

Paul Netzel, you and others have advised we secure as much club financial support as we can during 2009-10 to be sure we can maintain momentum and build these 7-8 orphanage sites this Rotary year. You've then counseled our conception of a larger-scale humanitarian effort in Myanmar, consonant with our prior results, by expanding project scope, such that we would seek a substantial Competitive-level TRF match-grant very early in Year 2010-11. You further suggested Rotary might seek a co-partner collaboration with another "brand name" NGO, such as Save The Children. We are excited by this possibility and will pursue dialogue and attempt to develop strategy options to that end.