Myanmar Youth Sustainability Training Centre

Greetings friends and family, We trust this message finds you well. If you all follow even some of the news here in Myanmar, which can be challenging at best, you will know that the situation here continues to worsen. Here in Myanmar, we are rapidly jumping into the long, wet months of the monsoon season. As many of you are aware, we now in the middle of the 4th year of the military coup. The overall situation continues to deteriorate, with more active fighting in all regions of the country, causing the political and economic situations to continue to worsen. Not only are the are the economic and political situations in complete turmoil, the daily cost of living continues to rise. Along with this instability, the new conscription law threatens all young people, men and women between the ages of 18-30. They have already taken names in most regions of the country and started their first rounds of mandatory enlistment. We continue to experience electrical, phone and internet cuts daily, in many places only having electricity for a few hours a day. A most recent ban on almost all social media has caused yet another challenging time to simply connect with people in the country as well as the outside world. Despite all the growing challenges, we continue to push forward here at the training centre in the village for development of the centre and programs and are connecting with local partners. With the onset of the monsoon season, access once again poses a huge challenge to simply reach the centre. We continue to build up with infrastructure at the farm and will be using the next few months of heavy rains to focus on designing our programs further, focus on fundraising and expanding our design of the entire training centre. Our focus will be on the expanding design of the water and electrical systems, and design of new buildings to start at the end of the rainy season. Partnership for Teacher Trainings This past dry season, we have had the pleasure of partnering with a local school in not far from us near Inle Lake, providing unique teacher training and many opportunities for youth. If funding allows, we aim to run several programs at the farm during our peak operational months from November to May. Together we ran our first joint 2 month teacher training with them from March to May. The training was a huge success and brought over 30 participants from all over the country and 8 trainers to lead the workshops each week. Together with our partner school in Inle, we will run our second teacher training workshop, co-hosted in Inle and at our training centre. We are so excited to run the first longer training at the farm if the situation allows. Development of the Training Centre In the meantime, we have a lot of preparations to make ready for groups to arrive. A better water system is needed, road maintenance, and an expanded solar system for basic electricity. Also, we are in the process of designing a new but simple outdoor kitchen and more accommodation for participants, as well as attempting to complete the worm compost toilet. The new buildings will be extremely basic, using simple bamboo and earthen building techniques. We hope to build a large training hall in the near future, but due to budget constraints mostly in regard to high costs of building materials, we are focusing on outdoor classrooms for the coming year. The next few months will be extremely busy in the planning stages and then starting in November, with the end of the rains, we will be more actively working at the farm. Along with planning over the next few months, we will continue our yearly tree planting at the farm. This year planting roughly 500 trees at the farm. Over the last few months due to the challenges in running our programs because of the new conscription law, Jim has been working on a Masters degree. The programs he is in provide remarkable opportunities to integrate the holistic learning in a practical sense directly to the development of the programs we provide here in Myanmar as well as direct application to the design and construction of our physical training centres. It has given us yet another opportunity to network and explore our engagement with the local communities to reach even more people. Although we are facing so many challenges here in Myanmar, and a positive outcome is still not yet in sight, we do our best and continue to serve the local communities through teacher training and youth empowerment trainings. We look forward to sharing our next report with you and all the developments we are working on. For a hopeful future! The Whispering Earth Family