The end result is between 1.5 and 2 million Burmese of various ethnicities have been forced to scatter into Thailand. Nearly 300,000 people – mostly representatives of the Karen, Karenni and Mon ethnic groups – live in nine temporary displaced persons camps based along the border. Several hundred thousand members of the Shan ethnic group also reside in Thailand, mostly as illegal immigrants because the Thai government does not recognize them as refugees.

A tenuous life
Burma’s refugees maintain a tenuous status in Thailand. Their rights and protections are nearly non-existent, mostly because Thailand is not a signatory of the 1951 UN Convention regarding the status of refugees, meaning only those displaced from Burma’s conflict zones are permitted to receive humanitarian aid. Of course, Thailand’s government acknowledges the countless other Burmese refugees, but strictly restricts their movement. A report by Suzanne Belton and Cynthia Maung illustrate the lack of freedom of movement for refugees and migrants: “If a Burmese migrant has a work permit, they may travel and use [Thailand’s] universal health insurance scheme but the climate of fear and uncertainty can stop people travelling. Public transport must pass through many road blocks and checks and if passengers are discovered not to have the correct papers they are deported.”

For the Shans and other illegal immigrants, life can be even more difficult than life in camps. These migrants often lack access to basic needs: clean water, sanitation and shelter, as well as access to education and health care. For girls and young women, human trafficking is especially problematic, especially with an estimated 16 brothels doing business in Mae Sot, the largest border town. One report found young trafficked girls “face a wide range of abuse including sexual and other physical violence, debt bondage, exposure to HIV/AIDS, forced labour without payment and illegal confinement.”

Reproductive health education
An often poor, usually traumatized population means reproductive health is a constant issue. However, most people who grow up in Burma have very little sexual or reproductive health education. In fact, a 2007 study of 400 Burmese adolescents who now live in Thailand demonstrated this lack of sexual knowledge. The study, carried out by a local NGO called the Adolescent Reproductive Health Network in Mae Sot, found:

- More than one-third of adolescents interviewed have never learned about sex or sexual anatomy;
- Nearly 25 percent of those surveyed reported being sexually active, usually around the age of 18. However, ARHN interviewers believe girls may have underreported their sexual activity;
- More than half of those surveyed reported awareness of basic contraception practices – condoms, the pill, and injections – but were not aware of emergency contraceptive methods; and,
- Of those who reported having sex, only 23 percent used a male condom and only 9 percent used birth control regularly.

The report also found fundamental differences between the sexes when it comes to deciding on whether to use birth control. Nearly two-thirds of the women interviewed said they had the right to use birth control regardless of their husband’s opinion. However, only half the men interviewed agreed with that statement. Perhaps making matters worse, 55 percent of males agreed that sometimes a female partner deserves to be beaten. More than 36 percent of females also agreed with this.

Peer education
After reviewing the ARHN report, Nancy Goldstein points out the importance of peer sexual education on the Thai-Burmese border in a piece for RH Reality Check.

ARHN owes its ability to connect with young Burmese migrants to its intrepid, fiercely dedicated young peer educators. Inside Burma, any kind of humanitarian work that creates health for people outside of the army is considered political and can get a worker arrested, beaten, or even killed. And Burmese culture itself remains both highly conservative and very private regarding sex and sexuality. Few if any parents in the camps would think it’s cool that their son or daughter works as a peer sex educator, and peer educators have to be cautious about what they teach and where. “Every time ARHN’s peers go out into the community to conduct workshops on sexual safety and health, distribute contraception, or collect survey information, they risk arrest, violence, deportation, and the displeasure of their families,” says Tarjina Hai, ARHN’s current technical advisor.

As one peer educator explained to me, a relatively easy, obstacle-free training session is one that has the blessing of the village leader and religious leader or pastor, and takes place in a church. It involves incredibly expensive travel, but only one or two illegal border crossings, and requires bribing only a handful of authorities. That’s if you’re lucky: if there are too many people around when the educator is stopped at the border, no bribery can take place, meaning that his or her half done and fully paid for trip ends there.

Yet the work must continue. As Leila Darabi has noted, Thailand’s fairly rigorous family planning program is not reaching these young Burmese migrants, who are at significant risk for unplanned pregnancy, sexual assault, and sexually transmitted diseases. Many of these youth are working and living in factories (some legally, most not). They don’t have ready access to contraception, and they’re easy prey for both transactional and coercive sex. Most refugees have scant access to any kind of health care at all, let alone sexual and reproductive health care. Education efforts are stymied by low literacy rates, limited access to television, and virtually no access to the Internet.

Post-abortion complications
Mixing sexually active people without proper reproductive education, abortion often becomes an issue. The UNFPA estimates in Burma that nearly one-third of pregnancies end in abortion. However, by law, abortion can only take place when the mother’s life is at risk. Abortion is not so restricted in Thailand, which also allows it for proven cases of incest and rape. Regardless of the restrictions, however, abortions continue in the refugee community. The Thai health ministry believes the abortion rate for Burmese migrants is nearly two-and-a-half times higher than the rate for the local Thai population. Belton's and Maung's 2002 study of reproductive health outpatient care found:

- 25 percent of women with post-abortion complications underwent self-induced abortions like those common in Burma: drinking ginger and whiskey, vigorous pelvic pummeling and inserting sharp objects into sexual organs;
- Most of the women with post-abortion complications are married and two-thirds of them already have at least one child;
- One-third of the women have already had at least five pregnancies.

Here is a discussion regarding how the issue reproductive health for adolescents is intertwined with abortion on the Thai/Burma border with Cari Siestra, who helped edit the AHRN report.

The Mae Tao clinic
For Burma's refugees, the Mae Tao clinic has helped fill the massive health care gap. It was launched by Cynthia Maung who left Burma when 10,000 student activists fled across the border in September 1988 after the government violently cracked down on pro-democracy protests. Dr. Cynthia, as she’s called, thought it would only be a matter of weeks before she could return to her small Rangoon medical practice. Instead she became appalled by the lack of care at the makeshift refugee camps, where the refugees pouring across the border were suffering from trauma, from gunshot and landmine injuries, malaria and diarrhea. She opened a clinic in the Huay Kaloke camp with only her medical textbook and a rice cooker to clean and sterilize instruments.

Today, the Mae Tao clinic counts a staff of 5 physicians, 80 health care workers, 40 trainees and 40 support staff. This staff treats more than 100,000 patients annually. Two students at Westminster College who participated in a service learning project at the clinic provide a good description:

The floors were uneven cement, covered by mud. It is best described as an outdoor walk through clinic; each service had its own room. The waiting area was overly crowded with exhausted displaced Burmese people. When we walked past the pediatric center we saw immobile malnourished children being comforted by their parents.

The clinic provides service in a number of different areas, from baby vaccinations to creating prosthetics for injuries due to landmines. In 2006, doctors at the hospital delivered 1600 children. The clinic also provides trainings on maternal care. Cathy, who works at Mae Sot clinic, explains some of the issues surrounding the reproductive health trainings.

The Clinic runs an active birth control program, but not everyone has had the education. For migrant women (many thousands working in Thailand in the sweatshops, trying to help their family,) life is not easy. Most women need a protector of some sort. With a baby, it is impossible to continue working. Dr. Cynthia and the Karen Women’s Organization run several orphanages. The Karen has enormous charity for each other. I have not a met a more caring people. Generally, the husbands are with their wives as they have their babies and giving birth is a thing of great joy but often on the other side of the building there are women very sick as the result of botched back street abortions.

Barcamp Yangon Logo

Barcamp Yangon 2010, the first barcamp to be held in Myanmar was a very successful event, with a turnout of more than 2700 people for the two day event.

Barcampers at the Opening Ceremony

The event was from January 23 to 24, and held at Myanmar Info-tech, a software park in Yangon.

According to planet.com.mm,

The number of people who have registered at the website to attend barcamp was over 3000. It has been said that this is the largest amount of attendees among barcamps convening around the world. One of the attendee commented that even though this was the first barcamp to be held in Myanmar, many professionals and enthusiasts has attended, making it a very successful event.

Wi-fi internet access was provided at the venue, so people were able to blog, update their Facebook status, and tweet about the events live.

List of Workshops for the First Day

A few bloggers who have attended barcamp wrote about their experience there. Such as Zaw Zaw, who posted up photos of the event.

Madyjune also wrote about her two-day experience at the barcamp volunteering as a translator.

During the barcamp, six rooms are provided for the barcampers and he/she is given an hour for the presentation and discussions. For the first period, I was sitting in Hall 1 listening to U Ye Myat Thu explaining about how to convert from Win Myanmar font to Unicode without losing format and the original English texts being changed into Myanmar words, but during the middle of the presentation, I had to go to Room 101 where a presentation was given about Podcasting. I had heard about Podcasting before, but I have never really tried it before since I thought it requires high speed internet connection. The presenter said that one of the best ways to look for podcasts is to use iTune software. Too bad I can’t install any software at cybercafés. Otherwise, I could check it out even thought the connection isn’t that good most of the times.

Also, rmlowe, a foreigner who had participated in the event wrote about his experience at the barcamp, and in Yangon, and his impression on Myanmar IT sector.

At one point I asked how many people were actively involved in creating or maintaining Web sites or Web-based applications. Only three people raised their hands. Later I asked how many knew what XML was, and only one hand was raised. In both cases I found the number of affirmative responses shockingly low. My impression was that there were a number of factors that make it hard for Burmese to get involved in Web development (at least on a personal level rather than as an employee of a company or government organisation), including unreliable and filtered Internet access, and difficulty in registering Internet domain names.

A couple of the examples in my presentation used examples that involved e-commerce (although there’s nothing in SAML that’s specific to e-commerce scenarios). Belatedly I realized how inappropriate those examples were. E-commerce doesn’t exist in Burma. Neither do credit cards.

Barcamp Yangon was organized by Myanmar Computer Association and barcamp organizers who are from IT field.

Screenshot of Global Voices website being banned in Myanmar

Htoo Tayzar, one of the bloggers who has his own domain, wrote:

Actually, this is not the first time (that my site has been banned). Since 2007, Bagan (MTP) has banned the entire blogspot.com. At that time, I was still writing in blog, and when I refreshed the page, I first saw that it was banned. At that time, MPT's side is still open. So I moved to the cyber-cafe that uses MPT connection. That didn't last long. After about 2 weeks, MPT has also banned (Blogspot). After that, I bought my own domain.

However, Htoo Tayzar wrote that in the beginning of 2009, he saw his domain being banned, so he sent a request to the ISP to open it back. After about 2 days, his website, including the other 5 websites he included in the mail was re-opened. Today is the second time that it has been banned. It's banned only in Bagan connection but open in MPT.

The ISPs have banned Blogspot and its subdomains since 2007, so some of the bloggers who were blogging in Blogspot bought their own domains so that their readers can easily view them.

Nyi Lynn Seck, one of the bloggers who bought his own domain wrote:

I am sorry. My blog has now been banned by Bagan ISP. I bought my own domain with my own money, and redirected it so that the readers can easily view my site when they (ISP) started banning Blogspot and Wordpress. Now, I can't do anything anymore. However, I have been writing in my blog since 2005, and I will continue to write here. No matter how blogs are banned, because there is Mail to Blogger system, where I can e-mail the posts from any address, I will continue to write in my blog. I value my life as a blogger, for every post I had written, I had put a lot of effort in writing my experiences,

There are currently two service providers -  Bagan ISP (Myanmar Teleport) and MPT ISP. Some of the websites that has been banned in Bagan ISP are not yet banned in MPT ISP and vice-versa.

In a series of posts, we shall trace and examine the increasing role and impact of ICTs in the area of disaster management.

Nobel Laureate R.K. Pachauri, while addressing the 5^th convocation of the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DA-IICT) in January 2009, highlighted the need for ICTs in dealing with natural disasters and other weather-related events that pose a threat to human life and property.

[…] Climate science has advanced at a phenomenal rate largely because powerful computers can now run very complex models that simulate climatic conditions on land as well as the oceans. Our assessment of future changes in the climate as a result both of natural as well as human factors is dependent largely on the power of models that are being used today and our ability to assess the impacts of climate change in different parts of the world. In response to future projections of these events, governments, civil society and even business organizations can take effective measures to adapt to changes that would occur.

Citing an example from 2003, Dr. Pachauri said:

“I would like to give the example of a major heat wave that took place in parts of Andhra Pradesh in 2003, as a result of which almost 4000 people lost their lives according to official records. […]

“When studying this major problem, it became apparent that ICT infrastructure could have saved perhaps all the lives that were lost if it had been put in place properly and utilized effectively. There was, for instance, no early warning provided to the victims of the heat wave. Nor was there any follow up in terms of providing medical advice to those who suffered from heat stress, such as the need for oral rehydration therapy and simple healthcare for those who were affected. Even television channels could have been used to spread proper awareness and information to protect the lives of those who were affected were not used.

“There are several examples of coastal disasters where people affected can be warned on a timely basis and evacuated before the disaster itself takes place. When a hurricane hits the coast of Florida, the infrastructure available is used to provide adequate warning and notice to those likely to be affected, and entire townships are evacuated. When a cyclone of even lower intensity hits the coasts of Bangladesh or Orissa, major damage takes place, because not only is there lack of shelters and infrastructure to house those who are affected, but there are inadequate systems for early warning and guidance.

“Today even mobile telephones could be used as an effective medium to provide early warning and thus save lives and property”.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, speaking at the Telecom World 2009 in Geneva, also highlighted the role of ICTs in addressing key issues, including natural disaster reduction.

“Through good climate science and information sharing, ICTs can help reduce the risk and impact of natural disasters… when an earthquake hits, a coordinated ICT system can monitor developments, send out emergency messages and help people to cope.”

The UN Secretary-General’s statement echoes the paradigm shift in Disaster Management mentioned in the 2005 presentation by Sujit Mohanty, namely:

• From relief and recovery to Risk & Vulnerability management
• Introducing culture of preparedness at all levels
• Strengthen decentralized response capacity in the country
• Empowerment of vulnerable groups and ensuring livelihoods
• Learning from past disasters.

In the aftermaths of large-scale natural calamities such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the world was forced to wake up to the need for coordinated and collaborative harnessing of the power of ICT systems in managing natural disasters.

Paul Currion in humanitarian.info stated that:

“In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, there has been an astonishing amount of activity in web-based initiatives responding to the consequences of the disaster. Examining the characteristics of the response of the technology community to Hurricane Katrina tells us much about the way the web has shaped social responses to disaster, raises some interesting issues about the impact of ICT in disaster response, and points towards what might happen in future.[…]

“It was clear following the Indian Ocean tsunami that the information revolution was in the process of changing the way in which we respond to disasters. This was demonstrated by the rise of web-based fund-raising; Christian Aid raised over $700,000 online in nine days, amounting to nearly four times as much as it raised through donations over the phone. The spread of broadband, improvements in satellite telecommunications and the availability of imagery has made possible GIS and cartographic projects that would not have been possible five years ago. The rise of the open source movement has led to initiatives such as the Sahana project, an attempt to develop a suite of web-enabled applications for disaster response organisations.

Currion goes on to talk about the “first responders of the wired world”, netizens who spring to action to fill in information gaps that the governments of the respective countries and even the traditional media often struggle to fill. However, given the high influx of information post-Katrina, it was soon apparent that multiple data streams would be more effective if they were collated, consolidated and served from a more centralized platform. Thus we saw initiatives such as the Katrina PeopleFinder Project and the Katrina Help Wiki come into play.

In this context, it would not be unfair to say that the South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami (SEA-EAT) blog, set up during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, was a trendsetter of sorts–the first project of its kind that demonstrated the power of engaging ordinary people effectively to channel information in order to bridge the gap between those who needed help and those who had help to offer. According to Dina Mehta, one of the key people behind the SEA-EAT blog,

“I think what we managed to do was demonstrate perhaps the largest ‘people's' coordinated effort on the web during disasters, that it was possible and that too without any formal organizational structure. There’s also something in the ability for these efforts to bring in ordinary citizens from all walks of life - people who aren’t necessarily dedicated or working in this space - most of us have different professions and regular jobs too - but just a human need to help.”

While the SEA-EAT blog focused on “keeping the information flowing”, the Sahana FOSS Disaster Management System in Sri Lanka functioned as a more structured, holistic system that helped manage the large scale of the disaster of 2004. The project was deployed by the Sri Lankan government's Center of National Operations (CNO) which included the Center of Humanitarian Agencies (CHA). Generalized later for global use, Sahana has now grown to become a globally recognized project with deployments in many other disasters such as the South Asian earthquake in Pakistan (2005), Southern Leyte Mudslide Disaster in Phillipines (2006), the Jogjarkata Earthquake in Indonesia (2006), the Peru Earthquake (2007), the Myanmar Cyclone (2008), etc.

In 2005, Michael Gurstein of the New Jersey Institute of Technology wrote his reflections on the web-based initiatives and what he perceived as the need gaps in these situations:

“Scanning the Net for information and for stories I was struck by a couple of things concerning the role (and lack of role) of the Net in these events. The Net appeared to be playing a very significant part in responding to the needs of those at a distance–the on-lookers for information, stories, ways of contributing and so on; families and friends of those possibly impacted with attempts at creating listings of the found and the lost and for those on the ground to manage the concerns and queries of those farther away; and one expects that behind the scenes much of the co-ordination and planning that is being done by aid organizations is being done in ways that are pushing the boundaries of Computer Mediated Communication and managing at a distance.

“But I guess I'm a bit surprised that the Net wasn't able (yet?) to bridge the information divides between those who had some idea about what might be coming (the scientists and those immediately impacted) and those who might have been able to make some use of that information in the places where the impact took appreciable time to be realized.

“The problem here was not, I think a “the Digital Divide” that is, it wasn’t because of a lack of “access” to information, although apparently that too was a problem overall; rather, it seemed to me to be another example of what I've referred to elsewhere as the gap between “access” and “effective use”…From what I can gather many if not most of the communities impacted had Internet “access” in one form or another. What they (and here I would include those with the knowledge who couldn't use it as well as those without knowledge) lacked rather, was the social infrastructure which could have turned Internet access into an “effectively usable” early warning system.

“Some had the information—the scientists who detected the earthquake and could understand how that could result in a Tsunami and those who felt the early impact either of the earthquake or the Tsunami—but couldn't use it. Others needed the information—the coastal villages around the Indian Ocean—but couldn't or weren’t able to “get it” at least in a timely and usable form. The “degrees of separation” imposed by nationality, language and perhaps most important, domains of knowledge and profession (and the related lack of social linkages, network based trust relationships, communication pathways and so on) impeded the communication between the two groups and one wonders whether this was simply a matter of it still being early days in our Internetted world or something more profound and permanent. (Michael Gurstein, The Journal of Community Informatics, (2005) Vol. 1, Issue 2, pp. 14-17)”

Observing the loss of lives in typhoon Ketsana that hit Philippines, Vietnam and Cambodia in October 2009, Paul Conneally posted the following on his blog Head Down, Eyes Open:

“In many poverty stricken areas there is no access to TV or radio (or Internet for that matter) to help communicate warning messages. Aid agencies must work with communities to find out which methods of communication work for them at the time of an emergency and run simulation exercises to put this into practice. Often mobile phone text messages or even sending people out into the streets with megaphones, as was the case in these emergencies, prove to be most successful.

“[…]Early warning, early action in high disaster risk countries needs to be seen as a mindset, not a mechanism or technology, and works best when it spans timescales, anticipating disaster by days, hours, months, years and even decades. It must also be firmly linked to early action by decision-makers, and must cover ‘the last mile' -linking early warning mechanisms not just to the most ‘at risk' communities, but to the most vulnerable people within those communities.

“Strengthening community capacity to prevent and/or cope with the impact of disasters and crises is a concrete way to save lives and better protect livelihoods, and prevent such shocks from crippling development within the poorest countries. Early warning and early action is also more cost effective than traditional disaster response and saves more lives per pound spent: public money buys four times as much humanitarian ‘impact' if spent on preparation and risk reduction, rather than on relief items.”

In India, the 2004 tsunami was a clarion call for the government, NGOs and the civil society to effect a paradigm shift and realise that preparedness was the key to minimising the impact of natural disasters.

To enable better planning and preparedness, the India Disaster Resource Network [idrn.gov.in] was set up as a National initiative under the Govt. of India-UNDP DRM programme in collaboration with National Informatics Center, Government of India. The task of this Network was to create an online database for capturing the countrywide inventory of equipment and skilled human resources available for emergency response. The role of this ambitious, yet comprehensive database would be to help minimize emergency response time through effective decision-making on mobilization of human & material resources. The project was to ensure systematic data collection & collation from government line departments, public sector units, the corporate sector, etc at the district level. Other initiatives launched were:

• The Disaster Inventory Database (implemented in Orissa) that would allow vulnerability analysis through longitudinal study of geo-referenced inventories of local level data of past disasters (small, medium and large-scale).
• Community Contingency plans based on GIS technology that enable the visual presentation of critical data by location that can be used for coordination and implementation of relief efforts
• Development of communications infrastructure to ensure 100% coverage of disaster prone areas through satellite and ISDN linkages
• Community based ICT systems and
• Disaster/ incident surveillance system that will allow for quick, smooth, seamless data capturing and disseminating facilities.

Here is an example of implementation of this strategy/philosophy of preparedness by an NGO in Tamil Nadu following the Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004:

In the next post in the series, we shall explore disaster warning systems and the various ICT-based tools and applications that have been, are being, and can be put to use as an early warning system to help reduce and or mitigate the severe damage to life and property in the wake of natural disasters across the globe.