Just Enough

The survey is winding down. Fewer surprises now. These days, we simply savor the lovely places where we’re privileged to interview.

Yesterday we landed at a quiet, simple, “just-enough” village. In Myay Pyo, near Taunggyi, the Buddha image in the meeting room is just big enough, the photos on the wall showing community efforts are just varied enough, and the tobacco they grow is just lucrative enough.

As in many of the villages we visited, we were treated to lunch by people who wouldn’t hear of our paying for the food. Yet their answers to the questions about what they eat, earn, and grow, suggest that they don’t have anything to spare.

I had a few minutes to sit with the young leader of the efficient team that gathered the data. He and I had met briefly a few weeks earlier at his training session. Like many of the surveyors, this fellow comes from a different class of people than the folks he’s interviewing. He grew up in a town, not a village. While not wealthy, he finished school, and some day would like to get an advanced degree. He can speak at least four of the local languages, in addition to having pretty good English.

Now he and I had a chance to look back at the highlights of our efforts. At first I thought we would discuss what we’ve learned about the amount of food stocks most villagers keep on hand—happily, it’s several days’ worth. I thought he might also want to talk about where people search for casual labor when crop problems compel them to leave home for a short time. And I was looking forward to hearing more details about how he handled the handful of checkpoints he hadn’t been allowed to pass.

But instead the young team leader reflected on the diversity of customs and conditions that make up his country. Sometimes, what he enjoyed seeing most matched the things that had caught my eye about village life—the expert bullock-cart-driving skills of the young people, the impressive financial savvy of the rural women, the rarity of white hair among the elders.

We discussed the strange dialects his team members had encountered, and the times they were moved by generosity or saddened by addiction. Then he mentioned what for him had been an unexpected outcome of doing this work. At age 25, he had never had a real conversation with a Muslim in Myanmar until he met the driver we hired for his team. The two of them had sat next to each other in the car for two weeks straight, and of course they had lots of opportunities to compare notes.

The survey will really help policymakers pinpoint programming. We did a good job getting a specific picture of people’s diets. This guy’s team was especially expert at talking respondents through the complicated bits of the questionnaire—those that dealt with income and borrowing and financial management. Such things work differently in villages than they do in towns.

It’s great that the UN has been able to achieve this project’s goal of assisting Myanmar’s government ministries and the region’s development agencies as they take the next steps toward reducing poverty in this country. It’s just as great that the survey helped grow understanding between people of different religions.

CRUSH

Outsiders sometimes come here to Myanmar predisposed to look for evidence of past wrongdoing or present paranoia on the part of the country’s leaders. It’s not hard to find those things if you’re oriented that way, especially at institutions connected to the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s armed forces. For example, I passed a sign this morning boasting that:

THE TATMADAW AND THE PEOPLE COOPERATE
AND CRUSH THOSE HARMING THE UNION

I shuddered at the starkness of the message. By contrast, the Burmese colleague I’ve traveled with nonstop for six weeks consistently exhibits a spirit of reconciliation and pride regarding the country’s history. He acknowledges poor governance during the recent past, but mostly faults former leaders only for sticking too long to policies that clearly weren’t working. As a person who has lived under the Tatmadaw his whole life, he explains that the military sees everyone as either a friend or an enemy: “There’s no in-between. If you’re an enemy, you must be destroyed. It’s not the same as the political way.”

My colleague’s background is part economist, part diplomat. He grew up in one of the provinces where we’ve been surveying. Over dinner in the evenings, having listened to villagers describe their lives all day, he and I sit and make sense of it all.

The two of us have arrived at solutions to most of the planet’s ills... Not to mention authoritatively chosen the best movie ever made in our home countries, endlessly divided the world into two kinds of people, and settled on the characteristics of an ideal colleague. In his words:

  Everyone should strive to drive the wheel rather than stick the spanner.
  Wheel drivers keep their eyes on the goals of a task; they don’t allow small
  problems or minor issues to prevent the machine from moving forward.

Of course he’s not talking about crushing those who would harm the union. In fact he doesn’t even always follow his own maxim. For example, in keeping with Asian tradition, he defers to my age—though I’m only a few months older. “You’re the decision maker,” he says, even in situations

where his language and experience make him much more qualified than I am to drive the wheel.

We’re pleased with the progress of the survey, and the skill of the teams we oversee. Yet recently permission to survey has been hard to get in some sensitive villages. These locations were chosen by computer to ensure that the data will represent the province as a whole. We're not sure if our interviewers will be stopped from reaching those places by one of the region’s many powers that be—including the Tatmadaw.

Because we have a central government ministry as our project partner, we know we can’t officially negotiate with the ethnic rebel groups. But we feel our survey’s mission is neutral, and that both sides will benefit from having the information we plan to collect about food security and poverty.

The lines of control shift frequently. We have contacts on both sides. Nobody has given us a green light. We have a deadline. The longer we wait, the more we suspect that nobody will ever tell us we can’t go there. Should we simply send our teams down the road toward the disputed areas and trust fate? Will we be putting them in danger? Will we be harming the union?

Roadblocks

Security issues have loomed recently during the survey we’re running in the northern border states. Fighting between the Myanmar army and several different armed ethnic groups is unfortunately not rare here. Interview teams whose assigned villages lie in areas beyond central government control are sometimes blocked at checkpoints, even though we deliberately hired question askers who come from those townships.

Every so often politics get in our way. We have our doubts, for example, about one of the companies we hired to provide interviewers. This firm claimed during the bidding process to share our interest in collecting high-quality and representative data. They talked about using the information to create targeted follow-on projects of their own. But now it appears the boss may have another agenda.

You see, visiting every township in a province is a good strategy for an election campaign as well as for a survey. With important national leadership questions to be decided in 2015, now is a good moment to build a voter base. We’re hearing from the interviewers that during village focus group conversations, the boss has been asking more for votes than for information.

And why not? Since Independence, folks here have learned that self-reliance succeeds more often than help from outside. If you had lived under this regime during the past few decades, wouldn’t you also be tempted to take advantage of the chance to spread your name using UN money?

There’s some good news about this self-interested company boss. If he wins his election bid next year, he’s going to deliver on his promises. He belongs to the local ethnic group, and would suffer serious loss of face if he didn’t make good. And he’ll at least have reliable data to base his new programs on… if he can convince his campaign survey teams to work Sundays, that is. The looming national census means we’re on a tight time schedule. Many of the interviewers in this heavily Christian part of the country say they need to attend church in their home towns.

Many Villages, One Survey

It’s the third week of the UN food security and poverty survey. We’re gathering good information, despite some difficult conditions. Families appear happy, even honored, to talk about their food and spending patterns. If they’re skeptical about our explanation that new, better-targeted development programs will result from the data, they haven’t said so.

We think they may be holding back on some answers, however. Farmers who work somebody else’s land without the owner’s knowledge might be leery of telling everything. Or if poppy growing provides the bulk of their income, they may prefer keeping that fact to themselves. Considering the heavy-handedness of Myanmar’s security apparatus over the past several decades, such caution is justified.

The survey teams stress that nobody in the government will ever see individual households’ responses, and that no names will be collected. At the beginning of the interviews, we tell people we’re partnering with the Ministry of Livestock, Fish, and Rural Development. Then, to build trust, we ask about the weather, the children, the football matches.

We also emphasize that we’re not part of the national census, which begins just after we finish. The census, overseen by a sister UN agency, is controversial mostly because it asks about two hot-button issues here, ethnicity and religion.

Though our survey doesn’t ask such questions, we’re certainly seeing the wide diversity in this crazy quilt of cultures that calls itself a “Republic of a Union.” Language has been our biggest challenge. Two or even three translations are routinely needed in the villages to get information from, say, Shan or Chin or Pa’O interviewees to a paper questionnaire that is printed in only three versions: Myanmar, English, and Chinese.

During the seven-day training for the interviewers, we tried to form each team of four so that at least one person could speak one of the 10-15 languages we thought we would encounter. Even with that attempt, we find we sometimes need to enlist translation help from village schoolteachers, who can usually speak something besides the local dialect.

The remarkably varied villages, sometimes just one valley away from each other, were chosen at random using GIS software programmed to exclude towns and cities. All of them grow most everything they eat, but that’s where the similarities stop. Lack of water and transportation mean that many places we’re surveying subsist much the same way they always have. Others are moving away from cultivation into service provision. Irrigation and new crops provide a few villages with more income than ever before. And a handful of places exist largely on remittances from relatives abroad.

It’s generally gorgeous landscape: forested, rippling countryside gouged by rivers and sprinkled with hilltop temples. Surveyors often have to drive or walk four to five hours from the previous night’s stop, then that far again after the half-day’s worth of questioning is finished.

Checking in with other interview teams is tricky in this land of few cellphone towers. We almost never connect on the first call. Usually it takes five or six tries, each separated by an hour or so, to reach somebody who’s moving around the rural areas of Myanmar. The most remote teams will be outside cell range for about 10 days.