Children in Burma: Money for molasses

MANDALAY, Burma | As the sun breaks over the horizon on Mandalay Bay, a little boy with bulging ribs pulls on a pair of too-large shorts and grabs a plastic bowl.

The child, who is 9 but looks younger, scampers with other boys and girls across the beach, scraping up puddles of molasses spilled onto the sand, salty wooden ramps and ship holds as cargo is loaded and unloaded at the busy Mandalay Bay Tourist Jetty.

The children will refill their bowls all day, racing back and forth between the heavy drums of sloshing molasses and their rickety homes to fill larger metal containers. When the sun is about to set and the day’s molasses has been painstakingly collected from drippings, droppings and splashes, the little boy in the billowing red shorts finally will return home, possibly to supper.

His mother will lift the larger can onto her head, and walk to a collection center where it will be processed into brown sugar to make candy. The family’s take for a day’s labor: between 1,000 and 2,000 kyat - about $1 to $2.

“It breaks my heart to see them doing this,” said a Burmese physicist walking past the jetty who spoke on condition that he not be named. “I’m sure their parents don’t want to have to ask them to do it.”

Burma - or Myanmar, as it is now known - is achingly poor.

Although rich in natural gas, oil and sapphires, the Southeast Asian nation is among the least-developed countries on the continent. The annual U.N. Human Development Index rated Burma at 132 out of 177 - behind Laos and Cambodia but ahead of East Timor.

Most of the country’s vast resources are controlled by the government, a repressive military regime that is isolated from the West and even its own people. But visitors, and there are a few, don’t need statistics to tell them what kind of country Burma has become. So many people are living a hand-to-mouth existence with barely adequate food, clothing or shelter. Most of the little education, health care and sanitation available to the ordinary Burmese people is supplied or supplemented by the few relief agencies permitted to work by the military government.

“Aid alone will not bring sustainable human development, never mind peace and democracy,” said Robert Templer, the International Crisis Group’s Asia program director. “Yet, due to the limited links between Myanmar and the outside world, aid has unusual importance as an arena of interaction among the government, society and the international community.”

One-third of Burma’s 51 million people live on less than $2 a day, most of them in the rural areas. The situation has only gotten worse since May 2, when Cyclone Nargis slammed into the Irrawaddy Delta, killing up to 140,000 and displacing or fracturing hundreds of thousands of families.

Just as painful, the storm flooded much of the country’s most arable land, destroying desperately needed rice, cereal and other food crops.

The government - a conclave of generals that recently moved the country’s capital from Yangon to inaccessible Nay Pi Taw in the country’s jungle-thick interior - has spent about 5 percent of its annual budget on health care and 15 percent on education, according to the most recent World Bank statistics available.

In a land this poor, the privileges of childhood are few: Tiny hands pull weeds in the tobacco fields. Slender arms carry firewood for cooking. Bony backs sway atop donkey carts laden with trash pickings.

One-third of the children under age 5 are underweight or stunted. Ten percent of them will never learn to read. One in five Burmese children born last year will not survive to 40 years of age.

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