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by D.J. Condon

Special to Tropical Breeze from Myanmar

Above, sdurvivors lie up for the delivery of relief supplies in a village called Hmawbi in the Irrawaddy delta of Myanmar. Below, the remnants of a home after the cyclone.

When Cyclone Nargis swept through the Irrawaddy delta in Myanmar on May 3, it cut a swath of destruction never before seen in this troubled Southeast Asian country. By last count, the number of dead or missing exceeded 135,000 people and the potential for an equal number of post-cyclone deaths due to disease or starvation looms ominously large. Meanwhile, the Myanmar government, already considered one of the world’s most brutal dictatorships, has proven itself willing to sacrifice tens if not hundreds of thousands of its own citizens in order to protect its position of power and privilege. One of the world’s worst humanitarian crises thus presents itself. Fortunately, some current and former Safety Harbor residents have been able to play a role in alleviating the suffering associated with this tragedy.

Many Tropical Breeze readers undoubtedly will remember “Peace by Piece, Peace on Earth,” the Christmas holiday art installation staged at the home of local artist-humanitarians Todd Ramquist and Kiaralinda. Inspired by their visit to Myanmar last fall, where my wife, Catherine, and I have been living and working the past two years as international school educators, Todd and Kiaralinda not only made a strong artistic statement about the need for peace in our world, they also raised thousands of dollars for Myanmar charities.

(See “Peace Dollar Dividends,” Tropical Breeze April 2008 — online at Images and Video/Reader Photos at TropicalBreeze.com)

Initial recipients included two elementary schools operated by local Buddhist monasteries, one outside the town of Pyay on the Irrawaddy River, one in Payar Village outside the town of Bago, and the Colorful Flowers Orphanage in Yangon (Rangoon). In doing community service work in Myanmar, one thing we quickly learned is that good intentions are not enough. One can easily do more harm than good if one doesn’t pay close attention to local customs and modes of operation. For example, rather than simply handing over large sums of money, which can easily attract unwelcome attention and invite corruption, it’s best to buy needed supplies and then give these to the village head monk, who can be trusted to see to their distribution, according to the needs of his local community. And so this is what we did — bought textbooks, notebooks, readers, pens, pencils, etc. for the monastery school outside Pyay, the same supplies along with tin roofing sheets, lumber and bricks for the Payar Village school, rice and cooking oil for the orphanage. Of course this approach considerably slows down the process of distributing the funds raised, but it also means the funds will absolutely go to help only those most in need, with absolutely zero overhead. We felt our efforts were quite successful.

But then Cyclone Nargis hit and all was changed, changed utterly. First we had to crawl out from our own broken homes where we discovered that Yangon now looked like a war zone. Stately old trees across the city lay toppled like fallen monuments. We had no electricity, no water, no phones. But, we were okay. We also knew that if conditions were bad in Yangon, they were even worse out in the Irrawaddy delta, the low-lying rice growing region of southern Myanmar. There we knew thousands of people had already died and thousands more were in immediate danger. Suddenly school supplies seemed quite unimportant.

The money remaining from “Peace by Piece” was immediately used to buy desperately needed rice, cooking oil, dried prawns and beans, sugar, salt, candles, and drinking water. These were distributed to the village of Tu Chuang, where we learned the hard way that the presence of foreigners actually leads to more disruption than relief. A near riot erupted over these food supplies as the villagers, so hungry that they also ate the peels of the bananas we had brought, surrounded the vehicle, clamoring for more food.

This was our first operation as an amateur disaster relief organization. Thereafter we got much better at it. Our group of international students and teachers quickly organized ourselves, taking advantage of global contacts to appeal for funds and our local contacts to convert those funds into supplies. Then, by flying a monastery flag atop the trucks donated to our group by our school’s parents, and by having well-known monks sit in the front seats, we were able to get our local trucks and drivers past the military checkpoints and into the villages where the need for relief was so desperate and overwhelming. This has been going on for nearly four weeks now, and I’m happy to say that it has made a difference, undoubtedly only a small one in the grand scheme of things, but for some villagers, a very significant difference nonetheless.

I’m sure it comes as no surprise to anyone who knows Todd and Kiaralinda that they also immediately sprang into action. Within days they had raised a significant amount of money which we were able to immediately get to Myanmar through some channels that need to remain anonymous. In turn, within days these donations were converted into much needed supplies and then distributed.

Our operation continues. We have named ourselves ISAID — International School AID. To date, we have raised and distributed over (US) $50,000 in emergency relief supplies, all with absolutely no overhead, i.e. each donation going directly to help those who need it most. This work has been heart-wrenching and noble, a testament to the enormous good that people of good will, working collaboratively and selflessly, can do for the sake of others. Unfortunately, the need for such work in Myanmar is likely to remain for months, if not years.

DJ and Catherine Condon are former Safety Harbor residents who lived in Myanmar the last two years, where DJ was Secondary School Principal at the International School Yangoon. They were scheduled to leave the country in May to assume new jobs in another Southeast Asian country.