Labor of Love by Terri Butler

Author:Terri Butler [Butler, Terri]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522872262
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2017-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

8

Engaging with the world

It might have been winter, but it was hot in the IDP camp in Rakhine state, in the northern part of Myanmar. I was there as part of an Australian delegation; the first to visit the region in a long time. ‘IDP’ stands for ‘internally displaced persons’, and there sure were a lot of them.

The camps had been operating since 2012, and there were tens of thousands of people living in them. Those who lived there called themselves ‘Rohingya’, but that wasn’t a description that mainstream Myanmar used. Many disparagingly referred to the Muslims from the north as ‘Bengali’.

Our bipartisan delegation had been invited by Save the Children, and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to see the difference that foreign aid could make. We saw the money had gone to practical things, like toilets and education. The kids in the camp gathered around each of us, fascinated. Most of us had our own young children back at home, and it was chilling to think that the kids in the camps, who were the same age, had known, or could remember, nothing different.

We visited what passed for a schoolhouse and counted in English with the kids. The teachers were able to offer makeshift primary schooling but there was no secondary schooling available. This was the most pressing issue the locals raised with us. The question of what the future would hold hung over us as we spoke; there seemed no prospect of any near end to the camps. People weren’t free to leave them, though there was clearly movement of goods across the camp borders, judging by the roadside stalls. The aid workers told us that even getting out to go to hospital was difficult. Who knew when people would be free to leave again? It seemed that until then, most livelihoods would come from motorbike repairs and sewing—an example of massive unrealised potential.

When we visited, the new democratic government been in office less than a year. The preceding government had been elected too, but it was widely accepted that the 2015 elections were the first to be anywhere near the vicinity of ‘democratic’.

In Myanmar before the election, Aung San Suu Kyi’s legend was such that everyone seemed to have their own version of her; one who really would make their dreams come true, if only she received their vote. The Lady, being human and not a god, was never going to be able to compete with the Lady that lived in her people’s imaginations. The same went for the international community. A new de facto leader of a partly democratic government—one in which the military appointed the three ministers with responsibility for the coercive powers of the state—wasn’t going to be able to change the country in a matter of months.

That was obvious on our visit to Rakhine state. In its far north, a few hundred of the Rohingya people had, in coordinated attacks, simultaneously killed nine police officers at three locations, a few months before.

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