How Many Village Elders Does It Take To Screw in a Lightbulb?

The shouts! The murmurs! The laughter! All in response to the first and perhaps simplest of 26 focus group questions about food. We’re sitting on the floor of the village chief’s big open receiving room. Surrounding us are smiling, barefoot adults.

How far to the nearest market?

It’s the first of about 40 days we’ll spend surveying in rural Myanmar. If this beginning is any indication, the process will be amusing and worthwhile.

What are the normal yields per acre?

The main task is collecting information on hunger and poverty for an arm of the United Nations. Native speakers will do the actual questioning in 500 villages throughout the country’s four northernmost provinces. A Burmese colleague and I will travel from Monywa to Hakha to Lashio to Myitkyina, trying to keep the mission moving while minimizing unexpected dramas. When the numbers are all crunched, they’ll become the basis for a Myanmar food security atlas that will help drive development priorities.

Ours is the biggest event today for the 250 people who live in this sandy community. Nearly half the adults turned up for the focus group. Arguments are flying back and forth about the most important crops in the village, the number of female-headed households, the commonly seen diseases. Each question triggers a flurry of facts and counterfacts. All of the elders say they know best.

What we mostly want to learn is what they eat, earn, and grow. The last time anyone systematically collected data about hunger and poverty was several governments ago. It’s been even longer than that since a government cared to do anything with that information.

Results from two other sections of the country, sampled last year, didn’t show extreme hunger. In Myanmar poverty is a major problem, but it doesn’t always translate to chronic food shortages, the way it can in some areas of the world. Here, a lack of irrigation issues, casual labor, and credit all contribute to occasional food gaps. The UN and the Myanmar government wonder how long those gaps last. The diversity and remoteness of this border region surely holds some surprises for us. It’s not even clear that we’ll be granted permission to reach all of the locations that our geographic software randomly selected for us.

When we’re finished with the village profile that’s causing all the hilarity right now, we’ll pull 12 names from a hat. Those households will get a visit for the hour-long chat that is required to complete the entire 15-page form. I expect no shortage of shouts, murmurs, and laughter over the coming few weeks.