It was around a three hours drive from Yangon to Myaung Mya township. Then, we had to spend the night at Myaung Mya because it is not safe to travel late in the area. The next day, early in the morning, one of the training participants picked us up at our hotel and drove around two hours to the jetty. Breakfast was served at the house of a participant before we took a boat to the village. After that, we took a boat to the village along the river. It was a fantastic experience to ride a boat to the village. The weather was good and we had fun on the way. We arrived at the village around 9:00 am and spent some time talking with our Champion before the training started.

We started the training with an introduction and the Relief Versus Development lesson. There were around 30 participants, including old ladies, young girls and adult men. Both Bway Wah and myself facilitated the lessons. We covered several lessons on that day such as Relief Versus Development, Worldview and Development, the Transformational Community Development (TCD) concept, Understanding the need for TCD, Identifying Needs and Resources, etc. We ended the training at 4:30 pm and headed back to Myaung Mya before it was dark.

The opportunities we found are that our Champion has a big heart for the community to develop their current situation. His term of service in those four villages is five years. He has been serving for one year and found a few challenges in terms of the development process. He was able to make some progress over the year, however, he wanted his community to be educated, self-reliant and able to initiate developing their standard of living. The community members are obedient, yet they never take a leading role to make things happen. Our Champion was glad and hopeful that the training might open up the eyes of the villagers towards sustainable development.

Moreover, the participants from the four villages wanted to get more training next time which is exciting. They found it a bit challenging to discuss their own difficulties, resources, and desires with people from different villages. Instead, they believe that they might make better conversation and discussion with people of the same community. So, they want us to do training for each village next time.

There are some challenges we observed in this area. The participants represented a religious minority and did not have so much interaction with people of other faiths. Due to the current situation, they find it difficult to work together with the village chief. The participants did not represent the whole community. Further, they found it hard to discuss and interact with each other during the lesson.

Our team evaluation is that the participants’ motivation to do some development projects within their small group, first, could be an open door to educate the community through TCD lessons. In addition, we see the need to train our Champion on TCD strategies as his role is crucial in those communities.

Therefore, our plan for those communities is that we will invite our Champion to Training of TCD (ToTCD) training whenever we have a chance so that he is better equipped. We will follow up with the participants and the champion for the next step if they want us to do more training on TCD lessons. We also see an opportunity to do more vision casting to other leaders in the area through our Champion which would help us access more villages in Myaung Mya. Overall, it was a fruitful and exciting trip after some time.

Thank you,