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.