Building your own latrine: Community-led total sanitation in southern Shan State

Written by Theingi Win*

March, 2019 - Sai Awan, 47, has done something he didn’t plan to do. He has built his family a latrine.

In Pak Kan village in Hsi Seing Township of Myanmar’s Southern Shan State, the father of two is convinced his efforts will improve the health of his family and his village.

 “When I learned that diarrhoea is related to open defecation, I realized the importance of latrines and became passionate about building them. Even though I don’t have much money, I’m doing it now, not later, “ said the father of two.

Open Defecation (ODF) Triggering session with children at Pan Kan village in Southern Shan State. 
©UNICEF Myanmar/2019/Theingi Win

Married for eleven years, Sai Awan and his family live in a bamboo house and until recently all the family members shared a latrine at a relative’s house or practiced open defecation behind the bushes in the nearby fields. 

လိုလွ်င္ႀကံဆ၊ နည္းလမ္းရ

စာေရးသူ သက္ႏုိင္

အသက္ ၁၄ ႏွစ္အရြယ္ စုစုေဌးေလး တစ္ေယာက္ မူလတန္းၿပီးေျမာက္ေၾကာင္း ဆု တက္ယူတဲ့အခါ သူ႔အေမျဖစ္သူဟာ စိတ္လႈပ္ရွားဝမ္းသာ ျဖစ္ရပါတယ္။ “ဒါက ကၽြန္မ သမီးေလး အခမ္းအနားပြဲႀကီးတစ္ခုမွာ ဆုတက္ယူတာကို ပထမဆုံးအႀကိမ္ ေတြ႔ဖူးတာပါ။ ကၽြန္မ အရမ္းဂုဏ္ယူပါတယ္” လုိ႔ ေဒၚခ်ဳိမိေလးက မ်က္ရည္ေတြ ဝိုင္းၿပီး ေျပာျပတယ္။ “ဒါက အမ်ားစုအတြက္ေတာ့ ထူးထူးျခားျခား ႀကိဳးစားအားထုတ္မႈ မဟုတ္ေပမဲ့ ကၽြန္မအတြက္ေတာ့ ကၽြန္မသမီးေလး ဒီလိုစင္ျမင့္ေပၚမွာ ဂုဏ္ယူဝင့္ၾကြားတဲ့ ပုံစံေလးနဲ႔ ရပ္ေနတာကုိ ျမင္ရတာဟာ တကယ့္ေအာင္ျမင္မႈႀကီးတစ္ခုပါပဲ။”

စုုစုေဌးႏွင့္ သူမ၏ မိခင္ ေဒၚခ်ိဳမိေလးတို႔အား မြန္ျပည္နယ္၊ သထံုျမိဳ႕ရွိ ေက်ာင္းတြင္ ေတြ႔ရစဥ္။ ©UNICEF Myanmar/2018/Thet Naing 

If there is a will, there is a way

by Thet Naing

When 14-year-old Su Su Htay won an award for completing primary school, her mother was overcome with emotion. “This is the first time I saw my daughter receive an award in a big event, and I was honoured,” said Cho Mi Lay, tears welling up in her eyes. “It’s not an outstanding effort for many, but for me it was a huge success to see my daughter standing on stage in such a proud manner.”

Su Su Htay and her mother Cho Mi Lay at their school in Thaton, Mon State.
©UNICEF Myanmar/2018/Thet Naing 

လယ္ကြင္းျပင္မ်ားဆီမွ ေက်ာင္းသို႔ ျပန္ေရာက္လာျခင္း

စာေရးသူ - တင္ထက္ပိုင္

ကယားျပည္နယ္၊ ျမန္မာ - စီဆီလီယာဟာ သူ႔အေဖက သူ စာလုပ္တာကို မုန္းေနတုန္းပဲဆုိရင္ သူ႔အေဖကို ျပန္လည္ထူေထာင္ေရးစခန္းကေန ျပန္မလာေစခ်င္ပါဘူး။ သူ႔အေဖက သူ အိမ္မွာ စာလုပ္ေနတာေတြ႔တုိင္း “စာပဲလုပ္ေန၊ ထမင္းမစားနဲ႔” လို႔ မူးၿပီးေျပာေလ့ရွိပါတယ္။ 

စီတီလီယာ၊ ၁၈ ႏွစ္၊ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ လြိဳင္ေကာ္ၿမိဳ႕၊ လိြဳင္လင္ေလး ေက်းရြာ၊ လြိဳင္လင္ေလး အထက္တန္းေက်ာင္းရွိ ေန႔လယ္ပုိင္း NFMSE သင္တန္းတြင္ အတန္းေဖာ္မ်ားႏွင့္ အဖြဲ႔လိုက္ ေလ့က်င့္ခန္း လုပ္ေနစဥ္။
 ©UNICEF Myanmar/2019/Min Zayar Oo

“ကၽြန္မက ကၽြန္မ အေဖနဲ႔မတူခ်င္ဘူး” လို႔ ၁၈ ႏွစ္အရြယ္ ကရင္နီမိန္းကေလးငယ္က ျမန္မာျပည္အေရွ႕ပိုင္း ကယားျပည္နယ္ လြိဳင္ေကာ္ၿမိဳ႕ရဲ႕ အျပင္နားမွာရွိတဲ့ ေက်ာင္းေလးတစ္ေက်ာင္းရဲ႕ စာသင္ခန္းထဲမွာ ထုိင္ေနတုန္း အားမနာစတမ္းပုံစံေလးနဲ႔ ေျပာျပခဲ့တယ္။ “ကၽြန္မက ကၽြန္မကေလးေတြကို မွန္ကန္တဲ့ လမ္းေၾကာင္းကို ျပေပးႏုိင္တဲ့ ပညာတတ္ မိဘတစ္ေယာက္ ျဖစ္ခ်င္တာ” လို႔ ဆက္ၿပီးရွင္းျပတယ္။

Off the fields and back to school

by Tin Htet Paing

KAYAH, MYANMAR - Cecilia doesn’t want her father to come back from the rehabilitation centre if he still hates her for studying. “Just study and don’t eat!” he would drunkenly tell her each time he found her studying at home. 

CECILIA, 18, WORKS ON A GROUP EXCERCISE WITH HER CLASSMATES DURING THE AFTERNOON NFMSE CLASS AT BEHS LOILIN LAY, IN LOILIN LAY, LOIKAW
 ©UNICEF Myanmar/2019/Min Zayar Oo

“I don’t want to be like my father,” said the 18-year-old Karenni girl, almost unapologetically, as she sat inside her classroom at a school just outside of Loikaw in Myanmar’s eastern state of Kayah. “I want to become an educated parent who can show her children the right way,” she explained. 

Overcoming the challenges to survive - the story of baby Chit Htun

In Myanmar, prematurity is a leading cause of death in the first year and the Ayeyarwady region records the highest levels of neonatal mortality nationally.

Maternal malnutrition, poverty, lack of health education and a lack of access to antenatal care make the early stages of life very difficult, particularly in rural areas. In many cases hypothermia, a leading cause of infant death often goes unrecognised and untreated, likewise, low blood sugar (hypoglycaemia) and a low level of oxygen (hypoxia).

©2018/Myaung Mya Paediatric Team

For those who are admitted to neonatal units malnutrition is a problem. There are often delays feeding and supportive feeding approaches such as nasogastric (NG) feeding are not routine. Units experience nursing and medical shortages and staff change department frequently which means staff often find it difficult to practice in the most effective way.

The limited number of working incubators, monitoring equipment, infusion pumps, and laboratory facilities, combined with power cuts, overcrowding of hospital wards mean babies face daily challenges. Infection control management is difficult across all areas of hospital care for babies and children.

It takes a village…

When children live in conflict affected areas or in camps for the Internally Displaced Persons (IDP), their education will be one of the first things to be compromised. But when communities and local officials realize the future of those vulnerable children can be brighter through education, then it will be possible to keep children learning even in difficult circumstances.  

Grade 4 IDP children, originally from Zup Mai Yan village of Ingyanyan Township, learning Geography at Tang Hpre IDP camp, Kachin State on 15 November 2018.
©UNICEF Myanmar/2018/ Nyan Zay Htet

By Fre Yilma

In Kachin State, following the conflict in April 2018, children from villages in Njang Yang Township, including students and teachers from Zup Mai Yang village, took shelter in Tang Hpre IDP camp. Initially, the children were not able to start the 2018-2019 academic year. However, with the collaboration of the local community, State Parliamentarians and district education authorities children like Hkun Mai are now able to learn within the camp.