In January, seven students from Virginia Seminary in Alexandria, Va., left for Myanmar (Burma) for a three-and-a-half-week immersion course led by the Rev. Katharine Babson, an appointed Episcopal Church missionary to the Church of the Anglican Province of Myanmar. Babson has traveled regularly on mission to Myanmar since 1994. She designed the seminary’s Myanmar Immersion Seminar, which she has taught since 2002, to introduce students to Myanmar’s culture and church and to expand and enrich the companionship between the U.S. and Myanmar churches. Here, she shares this year’s experience.
This year, the most profound experience of the immersion is the direct experience of death within the Christian community and the awareness of how deep is the faith in the Resurrection.
My hope for this trip was that students would better recognize their particular calls to mission according to the promise they made in baptism to “seek and serve Christ in all persons” and that, upon returning, they would intentionally incorporate some aspect of overseas missionary activity into their ministries.
From the beginning, this mission had a new impetus: There was opportunity to know firsthand what the tsunami damage had been in Myanmar and perhaps to help the church aid its people.
The Virginia students had collected medications and funds to disperse to the church as it began to help people cope with their losses. But more exact information about the extent of the tsunami damage had to wait until they arrived because from outside it is hard to secure reliable information about the internal affairs of this secretive country that has lived under strict government-imposed isolation for almost 50 years.
The Anglican Church of Myanmar has learned to feed its sheep from the grassroots. With little international assistance to its charitable social work, and with the United States’ unilateral sanctions against “Burma” effective since early August 2003, the Anglican Church has had little stretch in its relationships with the church outside Myanmar.
The country sits tucked south of China, to the west of Thailand, to the east of India and Bangladesh, and bounded by the bay of Bengal and the Andaman sea to its south. One of the circuit of nations with coastland affected by the tsunami that struck death to thousands on Dec. 26, Myanmar – Burma – was the only country not listed on the first published lists of affected nations.
The tragedy of its isolation and the damage its people suffered is that the isolated church’s capacity to seek aid and relief is further hobbled by antiquated phone lines, highly irregular electrical supply, archaic banking systems and, above all, intense government surveillance that leaves people fearful.
Loss, though tragic, comparatively low
Early reports of comparatively little loss of life along Myanmar’s long southern coastline seemed incredible compared to the catastrophic losses neighbors reported. But the numbers soon proved more accurate than expected.
U.S. satellite photos indicated Myanmar had been spared the brunt of the tsunami’s force because the major thrust of the undersea quake had pushed the most forceful waves to the east and west, not to the north toward Myanmar. The largest loss of life came when the earthquake precipitating the tsunami collapsed a bridge in the southern Tennasserim Peninsula region; people and vehicles on it fell to their deaths.
The reasons for Myanmar’s comparative escape from the brunt force of the tsunami are curious. Many of the coastal fishing villages in the Awarawaddy River delta area at the southern tip of Myanmar and those in the southeast along the Tennasserim Peninsula shared with hard-hit Thailand are Christian villages. Poor compared to Thailand’s tourist “gold coast,” many of these villages sit on high ground, and many are situated on rocky islands, where sea-wise villagers built them on the sheltered, landward sides.
Most of the losses in these coastal villages were of personal effects: bamboo houses and thatch houses, cooking utensils, bedding, clothing and, of course, the necessary vehicles of their livelihood – fishing boats. Henry Waller, an official at World Vision International’s Myanmar offices, reported that World Vision was helping fishermen replace their lost boats at a cost of approximately $60 each – a substantial investment for fishermen earning about $5 a month.
How the U.S. church can help
Virginia Seminary student Robert Glover of the Diocese of Western Tennessee presented to Waller funds for tsunami relief that he had collected at his church, which likely will be spent on new boats.
I knew from 11 years as a missionary to Myanmar that its Anglican Church, together with the Myanmar Council of Churches -- itself an extraordinarily active and committed ecumenical body -- already would be helping the needy. This work, as always, would proceed quietly and unobtrusively. Information is passed mostly by word of mouth.
Bishop Daniel Hoikim of Hpa’aan Diocese in the southeastern Tennasserim area often travels by bicycle or by the patchwork local bus that takes forever to move along Myanmar’s beaten, pock-marked roads. In most affected Christian villages, almost all people would help one another in steady ways.
According to UNICEF and World Vision, the greatest effect of the tsunami tragedy for Myanmar’s people was that countless fishermen -- known to have migrated to southern Thailand to find work to support their families -- are missing and presumed dead. These men worked quietly and as unobtrusively as possible as foreign laborers on Thai fishing boats based in Thai ports.
Officially illegal aliens without identity cards, formal visa papers, dental records or means of DNA identification, these fishermen’s bodies, if found, cannot be securely identified. They will never return. The only registry of their deaths will be in the hearts and minds of their families in Myanmar.
The tsunami brought some recognition to Myanmar’s churches and their work and hope, but it is not enough. The greatest gift the Episcopal Church can give to the Myanmar church is due notice: to learn where Myanmar – Burma – is on the map of the world and of the communion and to find a way to visit and renew the fellowship of companions in communion.
Episcopalians have started to meet this often-forgotten church through immersion courses like the one offered by Virginia Seminary. We have given aid through UTO grants, occasional diocesan grants and generous personal gifts offered by those faithful who have visited. The Diocese of Utah has initiated conversations toward a future companionship relationship with one of the province’s six dioceses, Myitkyina, located at the northeastern border with China.
As ever, all such meetings must move by faith and as quietly, unobtrusively and humbly as the minority Christians in Myanmar have learned to live and do their work. But the first step is to take out maps to discover where these fellow Anglicans are and to learn that their country Myanmar is Burma -- and Burma is Myanmar.
