Andrew Purkis, Chair, ActionAid UK

Myanmar was hit by a terrible cyclone in 2008, and the British public responded by donating millions. Myanmar’s security forces have not previously been keen on NGOs, so ActionAid has had to build its multi-million pound program very quickly from almost nothing. I became Chair of ActionAid UK in December 2009 and we chose this trip to help me understand why ActionAid is different from other aid agencies. It worked. I was bowled over by the confidence and ability nurtured in young people by ActionAid.
 
The ‘fellows’ are young people given intensive training and then deployed to run programs with volunteers (who are themselves then carefully trained and supported) in villages with support from ActionAid. When AA fellows first meet the village communities they seek to serve (and where they will stay for many years to come), they are often asked: “What have you got to give us? Money or what?” and the reply is: “Nothing. But if you want me to help you to decide what you want and how best you can build a future for the whole community, this is the kind of support I can offer you.”

When villages were asked carefully to discuss and define their priorities, they could often be different from what donors were expecting. Many villages in Myanmar, for instance, prioritised kerosene over food or other materials, so that they could light lamps and see during the dark nights. In other cases, a small flask for tea (made with boiled water, safe for drinking) was an unexpectedly prominent request.

The future of Myanmar is in young people like Ohmar Myint, who, in spite of losing her family to the cyclone, has brought new hope to the area she lives in. You can read her story here.

This is the journey from aid dependency to empowerment, from lines of supplicants under an aid agency's banner to helping people free themselves from poverty permanently. This is ActionAid.

In May 2008, when she was just 18, Ohmar Myint's life was devastated by Cyclone Nargis as its 120 mph winds and tidal surge tore through the defenceless bamboo huts of her home village.

Ohmar happened to be in the capital Yangon (Rangoon), doing some nurse training and staying with her grandmother. After thirteen days of waiting, she learned that her father, mother, her only brother and sister and twenty other members of her wider family from the village had all been killed.

At first, she tried to resume her schooling, but after a few months there was no more money and she had to drop out and return home: "It was so terribly sad. Everything had changed. It used to be such a lively place, with its community feeling supported by its temple, but its spirit seemed to have died. At first I was so overwhelmed that I fainted. But then, if I just left again, how could I help rebuild it in memory of my family?"

As she struggled with her grief, she came across staff from ActionAid partner Ever Green Group who had arrived in the village to discuss with the village leaders how they might help them. They were asking each village to choose someone to receive special training and act as a key contact for the advice and resources of ActionAid and its partners. Villages were grouped into five, with a supervisor responsible for guiding their volunteers. Ohmar applied for the supervisor role and got it.

Like many young ActionAid volunteers, she had to overcome the natural nervousness of a 19-year-old woman in trying to offer leadership to village headmen and others much older. But she found that if she explained honestly what the assistance was and how, for it to work, she needed their help and support, they came to trust her.

She said: "My feelings were that my family were gone and I couldn't get them back, but I am a Buddhist and believe that if you do good things in the name of loved ones who have died, such terrible things are less likely to happen to other people in future.

"And I wanted to make sure that, by raising awareness and helping the community to be more prepared for the future, others might be spared such a terrible experience as my family's. I had to encourage myself from within, with my own will-power. I was determined to build up my community again."

She now feels hope for the future of the village. There have been huge achievements, with the most vulnerable people identified by the villagers themselves, cash grants made available to the most needy for specific purposes enabling them to build their own future with the volunteers' help and support. Some villagers have learned to grow vegetables for the first time, others have resumed their fishing.

Awareness about how to avoid and mitigate future disasters is much better. Different villages are helping each other, too, passing on the lessons of successful recovery. "The most important key to these achievements is that the people find unity. They learn how to collaborate with each other and co-ordinate their efforts with others from outside, to get things done. And it is based on self-reliance, we don't sit and wait for others to do something for us, we get on with it."

Her role as ActionAid volunteer supervisor had another happy consequence for Ohmar. She and another volunteer from a different village cluster, meeting at their networking and training sessions, fell in love. They are now married.

Ohmar wants to stay and work for the further development of the villages. She is full of hope for what the self-help groups might be able to achieve, and looks forward to the rebuilding of the Buddhist monastery that had been an important part of her childhood. She wants to make sure that the villagers pass on the Disaster Risk Reduction awareness from one generation to another.

I asked her what message she wished to give to ActionAid's 170,000 supporters in the UK. She said:

"Nargis destroyed nearly everything. Lots of people died. All these opportunities to get hold of the knowledge we needed, to work with other villages and outside agencies, to rebuild our communities - they could only happen with the support of ActionAid and its partners here. Thank you."

(Ohmar was speaking to Andrew Purkis. Photo: ActionAid)

Jean-Claude Fignole, ActionAid Haiti Country Director

The exodus from the ruins of Port-au-Prince is in full flow. People are streaming from the broken city to their relatives in the countryside, and the countryside is struggling to cope.

I visited Grand Anse, a region in Haiti’s southwestern peninsula where ActionAid works. Over 120,000 people had come from Port-au-Prince to the main port by boat alone. Yet more had come, by foot or by bus, uncounted.

I went to the village of Abricots, which used to house around 2,000 people. Now it’s five times that. Families of five are sharing their houses with another 25 people. Food inflation is rampant: a bag of yams which used to cost £1 now costs £8, and markets which were open all day now close after just two hours, when they run out of goods to sell. Worryingly, we have already heard reports of burglary.

We are doing all we can to improve the food situation. This month brings us even closer to the start of the spring planting season, which makes up over 60 percent of Haiti’s food production. ActionAid is working with partners to develop an agricultural programme to help 4,000 families. We’ll be giving them seeds and helping them with new planting methods which will increase productivity. We’ll be writing contracts with small farmers to stabilise prices and ensure a steady supply of food to the vulnerable people in Port-au-Prince.

This is all being done against the clock: March is the key planting season in Haiti. The catastrophe is in the past, but the next disaster could be just around the corner.