FPB Staff Training January 2009
Foundation for the People of Burma
Burmese Staff Training
16-22 January 2009
near Bago, Myanmar

Report by Alan Senauke

Summary

With help from the San Francisco office and their people in Yangon, I led a week-long residential training in the countryside, south of Bago. Eighteen staff, including almost all members of the office team, wash and sanitation, oral hygiene, nutrition, and child emotional health teams took part in work that focused on team-building, diversity, and communication. The overall aim was to build greater staff cohesiveness, trust, and share effective tools for open communication.

The emphasis of our work was personal storytelling and cultural sharing as an approach to build cooperation, communication, and deeper understanding of diversity. From the evaluations I have received, from what I could observe, and from conversations both with staff leadership and other participants, it is clear that the staff as a whole took a large step in this direction.

Please note that I have edited out people’s names, precise places, etc. for the sake of safety and security.

Challenges

1. From the start, our greatest challenge was how to handle translation. Though some of the staff has very basic English, in order to work effectively we had to go freely back and forth between English and Burmese. Several staff members had good English skills. But our original intention was to allow both of them to participate fully in the retreat, free from translating responsibilities that would conceivably separate them from other staff members.
   
   We had a fully bi-lingual friend from my previous visit to Burma lined up to be translator. My hope was that she could also be a kind of partner in this training, based on her extensive NGO experience in Burma. Two days before I arrived, she had to cancel in order to take part in a church audit for her congregation. (In retrospect, I suspect this was a foreshadowing of the recent crackdown that has closed 80% of Rangoon’s churches.)
   
   A monk in the U.S. suggested that his cousin might be able to help us. After meeting with her for several hours, I realized that this was beyond her skills. Meanwhile, we had found a tour guide with very good English, and so we traveled to Bago with her and began the retreat. At the mid-morning tea break on our first day, the translator’s husband showed up driving a police car. Understandably, this triggered fear and quick thinking on the part of the staff, who told me to go into one of the bedrooms and close the door. We will never know exactly what was going on, but the story was that our translator’s mother was ill and that she had to return to the city right away. She found us another tour guide on day two, but she was also in over her head. This woman was sincerely interested, curious about our retreat, and supportive of the cyclone relief work, but we sent her home on day three.
   
   I had underestimated a crucial element. Thinking that we were not dealing with the complexity of “technical” language and translating, I failed to see that our work in the realm of feeling and thinking involved an “inner technology” that was new to the staff and to translators who were used to the business of explaining Burmese history and geography to foreign tourists.
   
   In the end, we relied on the staff leaders to translate By the time we settled on the project coordinator, it was also clear that there was no way she could easily step aside from staff leadership. The mostly younger members respect and depend on her, with good reason. She and I worked well together, and I tried not to overburden her, particularly as it became clearer how much of the organizing she had done and was doing. Another team member gave her breaks, translating for particular exercises and activities. Even though our original intention had been different, translation was handled very effectively.
   
2. The teams confront trauma from day to day in their work. The destructive force of Nargis continues to play out in the delta, an agricultural region that had been historically self-sufficient, unused to poverty, homelessness, and the presence of numerous NGOs and aid organizations. Some of the staff, which draws from Burmese, Kachin, Karen, Shan, and Chin communities, themselves grew up with insurgency, and the Tatmadaw’s violence. So the devastation of Nargis and the repression of the Saffron Revolution, not many months earlier, reinforced the pain and displacement deeply affected the staff. Trauma is not easily met and is follows an internal path of its own.
   
3. Though my training and approach is essentially Buddhist, and though we were working in a predominantly Buddhist culture, this was intentionally not a Buddhist retreat. The staff is evenly divided between Buddhists and Christians of various ethnic backgrounds. In the divisive environment of Burma’s many ethnicities, Buddhism has been used by the SPDC government as a tool of cultural oppression. I made it clear that I was a practicing Buddhist (of the Mahayana variety, the implications of which are not obvious in a Theravada culture), but that my interfaith experience was extensive and inclusive.
   
4. Our first choice for a retreat site was co-opted by one of the junta generals for a party, so we I went back and forth for a few days between a site in Rangoon and a more rural location. I was initially skeptical about the Bago site, and more so when we arrived. The retreat site, about a ¼ mile down a dirt road off the highway, consisted on one unfurnished building with a main room, two bedrooms, and screened-in porch. Cooking was done at an adjoining outdoor kitchen. The staff had to organize and bring virtually everything: cooking pots, plates, bowls, silverware, floor mats for sitting, office supplies and materials, and so on. We also brought our own cooks from Rangoon, and had to do all our daily shopping. It took me several days to realize just how much had to be organized.
   
   But this venue was exactly right. It was remote enough (I think) to escape scrutiny from the authorities. The young staff members were comfortable there, very free and relaxed the whole time. And we could work long days with few distractions.
   
   Though I was not able to stay with them — I lodged at a hotel twenty minutes away in Bago — each morning I was glad to return to our space. It became comfortable and familiar, and together we made sure that we took care of the environment, picking up trash, regularly cleaning and organizing our space.
   
5. Lunch on the retreat’s first day did not agree with me. I became ill almost immediately after eating, and just managed to hang on until we completed our work around 4:30. Staff helped me find a hotel in Bago, and I slept fourteen hours straight. In the morning, my stomach was still delicate and unsettled, but I felt a little better. I worried, though, about how to take care of myself for the rest of the week, and what I would safely be able to eat. On top of the pressure of effectively working alone to lead the training, feeling ill so far from home was daunting.
   
   Another staff person also felt ill after that lunch. She speculated that we were reacting to chemicals that had not been properly washed away before cooking. The speed of my reaction also suggested toxicity rather than spoiled food. We gave clear instructions about thorough washing of vegetables, and I carefully resumed the staff’s diet (which was tasty, by the way). I had no further discomfort.

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Work

As mentioned above, the broad intention of our retreat was to work on staff team building, communication skills (both among the staff and with villagers in the communities where the staff is working), and basic diversity training. From the start I had several approaches in mind, and one pitfall to avoid. On the positive side, I wanted to incorporate culture (music, dance, food), personal story-telling, didactic exercises and games, training in council process, and meditation or prayer. And it was clear that I did not wish to lecture.

We kept, more or less, the following daily schedule:
7am — wakeup
7:30 – 8:00 — silence, prayer, meditation
8:15 — breakfast & cleanup
9:15 — training session
10:40 — tea break
11:00 — continue training
12:15 — lunch, cleanup & break
1:15 — nap, silence
1:30 — training session 2
2:45 — tea break
3:00 — continue training
4:15 — reflection on activities
4:30 — end of formal training; time for exercise, bath, rest
6:00 — dinner & cleanup

We created a volunteer planning group — an equal number of women and men — who consulted and discussed the day’s plan with me. Each day began with thirty minutes of silent reflection, meditation, or prayer. This was one of the building blocks of our retreat. Other regular elements in the schedule included eating together, taking care of our living/working space, and 15-minute “power nap” (Joanna Macy’s idea) at the end of the lunch break. Each training session began and ended with a song, dance, or musical activity. The staff seemed to have a limitless supply of these.

The exercises and activities (all of which are available from me, if you wish to see them) were culled from a number of sources. I met with Joanna Macy in early January, and drew a number of exercises from her book, Coming Back to Life. I made good use of a training manual assembled by Ouyporn Khuankaew and Ginger Norwood of the International Women’s Partnership for Peace and Justice. Jill Jameson of BPF-Australia had good suggestions based on her extensive work in South and Southeast Asia.

On the first afternoon, I asked people to draw their own “River of Life.” The idea is to think of ones life like a river. Where has it come from? Is there a source? Along this river there are people, places, and events. I suggested each person draw their river in his or her own way. Then each person presented their life and responded to questions from the group over the next two or three day. Though they had worked together in the Delta, there was much the staff did not know about each other’s life or background — ethnic experience, family, education.

This activity went hand in hand with other exercises (like Crossing the Line or Power Walk) that revealed the particularities of each person’s life and the commonality of the group.

Training games and exercises — The Human Knot, Crossing the Toxic River, Walking Together, Dragon, etc. — were great fun to play. And each of them had a hidden agenda which gradually people came to see. In order to complete any of these activities — whether they were competitive or a whole-group game — the players had to devise strategies and agree on them. Debriefing after each game, I asked them to reflect on their problem-solving strategies and how the strategies were formed. Who took leadership, how was leadership agreed on and accepted? What authority accrued to a “leader” by virtue of gender, verbal ability, etc.? Who was passive and willing simply to go along? Was there a gender component involved? And so on. This was fascinating to unpack, and to see as an evolving awareness that can help teamwork in the field.

I taught the staff an invaluable tool of “council circles,” a non-hierarchical mode of group communication, rooted in Native American traditions and developed at the Ojai Foundation. This is now widely used in Buddhist centers and other communities as a tool for exploring and surfacing deeply held concerns and views in an open, non-judgmental fashion. We had two long councils in the course of our retreat, and I encouraged the staff to try and use it regularly when they come in from the field, simply to process the feelings and challenges they carry with them from the Delta.

Early on I realized that these were very long working days for me, so most days I went back to Bago for the evening to rest and plan for the following day. (With the happy exception of Day 6, when I prepared a kind of hybrid Burmese/American spaghetti dinner, with help from others on staff.) As close as we became over a week together, I also wished to give the staff considerable free time together for bonding and re-creation. Everyone seemed to enjoy the spaciousness of our retreat, a break from the hard field work.

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Reflections

From day to day I grew closer with the staff, appreciating each person’s character and strengths, admiring their collective spirit.  I have attended and led countless retreats and workshops over the last twenty-five years.  There is always someone who will not get with the program, someone who is habitually late or doggedly contrarian.  In our week together every time the bell rang to call our group together for an activity, every single person showed up.  Unprecedented!  There is a thirst for knowledge in Burma that cannot be quenched, nor can it be repressed.  Though I did not lecture and did not suggest note-taking, almost all the participants kept notebooks through our whole training. 

The Foundation’s program director asked me on the phone last week about ongoing challenges.  I see several, none of which is insurmountable. 

1. There is a need to build self-esteem.  I was surprised during one of our activities, when I asked who thought they were well-educated, not one staff member responded in the affirmative despite the fact that almost all of them are university graduates with professional training.  So how can we help them see the plentiful talents and ability that is obvious to those of us coming in from outside?
   
2. This staff is a precious resource, and their collective work over the last months has begun to turn them into an efficient group of teams.  They are uncertain about the future.  The FPB’s funding, I believe, is for a year.  I would hope that we see this staff as a solid base for the foundation’s work in the future.  Among these young people are real leaders and potential leaders.  If we can commit to them for an extended period of time, and develop a strategic plan for our work in Burma, all beings will benefit. 
   
3. Towards the end of our retreat, one person asked me, “How is it that all of our discussions come back to the subject of politics.”  I said that for me “politics” expresses how we view and organize our society.  Therefore, everything is political.  Further, the repressive circumstances of Burma’s military rule mean that even simple acts of humanitarian support and empowerment risk intervention and punishment.  It is difficult for us in the west to grasp this pervasive and painful reality.  But we do our best. We have a responsibility to let our Burmese staff (and others) know that we see the conditions of their life.  And we need to continue our support for them. 

The Yangon office staff generously translated the evaluation forms I gave out on the last morning.  The responses were largely positive, and in some cases this is confirmed by emails I have received from staff members since the retreat. I think the team sees itself as functioning more smoothly, knowing and trusting each other more deeply.  One issue that came up in evaluation is that several people wished there had been more consultation with the staff on its needs and the direction of our training.  This seems right to me.  In the future, now that we know each other, I would certainly do needs assessment right at the start.  In this case, two factors made this difficult. 1. The fact that we did not yet know each other. 2. The unfortunate distraction of having to deal with the translator question until the third day. That, in particular, was a distraction. 

But it has been a great opportunity to offer this training.  Usually, in my travels, my role is often limited to bearing witness and brainstorming about possible resources back in the U.S. that I can bring to bear in the country or situation I’ve come to. To journey to Burma and offer training, offer some of what I have learned over years of practice, is a privilege. I hope there will be a chance in the future to continue working with this staff.  The ground has been tilled and green shoots shine brightly in the sun.