Nyi Nyi Aung was the person who got me interested in Burma in the first place. He’s a democracy activist who’s spent most of the past 25 years living in exile in Thailand and the U.S. He was arrested trying to enter Burma in 2009. I covered his trial and imprisonment, and met him for the first time a few days after he was released and returned to his home outside of Washington, D.C.
It was a bit surreal to, four years later, spend a day with him openly exploring Yangon, seeing spots important to the story of the 1988 uprising and talking about what’s happening in the country today. Here’s the article I wrote for Al Jazeera America about that day.
The folks at Radio Diaries make hands down some of the best radio out there, and it was a real joy to get to work with them on this documentary about the 1988 popular uprisings in Burma. I started learning about these uprisings four years ago while I was working on the first story I ever did about that country. And 1988 came up in nearly every story I did on Burma after that–so much that’s happened in the 25 years since then has roots in those months.
I was thrilled to be a part of this Open Hands Initiative/Global Post fellowship in June that sent 10 U.S. journalists over to Myanmar to work with 10 Burmese journalists, under the watchful eye of a bunch of seasoned foreign correspondents and Myanmar experts.
Here’s the report that we put together for Global Post; lots of good stuff in there. Even better was getting to spend a few weeks exploring a country I’m fascinated by with new colleagues, and to see that country’s young media already thriving and in very capable hands, including those of my new friends at The Myanmar Times, RFA Burmese, and BBC Burmese.
One thing with potential to bring positive change to Myanmar is the Comprehensive Education Sector Review. (Policy types = not so good with punchy titles.) A bunch of experts from all over are digging in and trying to build a qualitative, broad picture of the country’s creaky education system.
I got a chance to see one small piece of that system–a free elementary school run by a Buddhist monastery near Yangon. Here’s the story I did for The World.
I met Ah Noh of the Kachin Women’s Association Thailand (KWAT) a couple years ago when she was in New York for meetings at the U.N. She and Debbie Stothard of ALTSEAN Burma talked to a small group at Columbia about the current situation in Kachin State. I got back in touch with her when I was heading to Chiang Mai, Thailand, where KWAT is based. We met and Ah Noh filled me in on what KWAT was working on, and a few days later she hosted me at her church.
42 members of the National League for Democracy won parliamentary seats in April’s by-election in Myanmar. You’ve probably heard of at least one of them. I got to sit down with another one of them while I was in Yangon in December. Phyu Phyu Thin is a longtime HIV/AIDS activist, and now an MP representing Mingalar Taung Nyunt in Yangon.
One thing that struck me as I got into some of the policy issues at play in Thailand’s migrant worker laws is how similar they are to ones being debated in the U.S., and how Thailand has tackled them more actively and successfully than we have. The Thai system is still a mess, though.
Here’s a story I did for The World about new wrinkles in the Thai system for giving migrant workers from neighboring countries legal status.