moon to come is it middle? 
(or "la la la la")

When life doesn’t go quite as expected because of the unique circumstances of Myanmar, we like to use the phrase “You’ve been Burma-ed.”  Some proper usage scenarios of this phrase include:
        - Finding out that a cell phone provider has randomly changed all their phone numbers to need a “07” at the beginning of the number, after spending a few days trying to contact friends unsuccessfully.
       - Taking a shower and wondering “what is that terrible smell?” only to find out that a squirrel has died in your water tank.
       - Struggling for 30 minutes to make a transaction with barely functional internet and then seeing this:

Last month, we were Burma-ed.  

Our church community took a weekend retreat to Chaungtha beach, the same beach from our company retreat in the last post.  To jog your memory, Chaungtha is a 160 mile, 7 hour bus ride from Yangon.  That’s averaging about 21 miles/hr, to give you a feel for the conditions of the road.  

After a lovely beach weekend, we hit the road at 11:30am, expecting to arrive in Yangon around 7pm.  There were about 25 people on our bus of expats, including 7 small children and an infant.  The first 1.5 hours of the trip from Chaung Tha to Pathein (our lunch stop) is easily the most nauseating; switchbacks over rolling hills combined with gaping potholes fresh out of monsoon season will do some damage on a weak stomach.  An hour into our trip, our bus driver pulled off to the side of the road (to the relief of some passengers) to investigate a loud clunking noise.  Our exhaust pipe had fallen down and took the oil filter with it.  The exhaust pipe was an easy fix – a couple pieces of wire quickly had the pipe back in place.  The oil filter, however, required a spare part.  

Let’s pause the story here for:

Cultural Note #1:  Most cars in Myanmar have the steering wheel on the right side of the car, and yet people also drive on the right hand side of the road.  So if you’re passing a car on the left, the driver can’t actually see if there is oncoming traffic.  Thus the role of the “spare.”  On every Myanmar bus there is a driver and another person called a spare, who sits where the steering wheel should be and tells the driver if he can pass other cars or not.    

Cultural Note #2: There is a deep sense of not wanting to impose on other people (or give others bad news) in Myanmar culture.  In fact, their language has a word for this mentality, and it’s used often.  So if your bus breaks down with a bunch of foreigners onboard, you’re not going to give them any bad news, even if it means lying when the truth will be inevitably revealed at some point.

So the spare jumped on a motorcycle and headed to town to look for a new oil filter while the driver stayed behind.  The driver told us the repair would take 30 minutes, although we realized later that the drive to the closest town was at least 30 minutes one-way.  Each time we checked back with the driver, he reported that he’d had talked to the spare, and he would be back in 30 minutes (we’re pretty sure he didn’t have a cell phone).  5 hours later, the spare returned, replaced the oil filter for one that was too small but would probably work, and we were off again.  

The 5-hour stop was miraculously pleasant.  Great scenery, cool weather, impromptu music, and even a woman that made motorcycle trips between our bus and her village to sell us snacks.

We returned to our bus seats for the 30 minute drive to Pathein.  We were so engaged with talking that over an hour and half passed before I realized I was nauseous.  Why were we still on this terrible winding road?  When asked, the driver said no, we were not lost, but this was just an alternative route.  He estimated 20 minutes to Pathein.

Immediately after he said this we turned onto a populated street, and I noticed a bunch of foreigners sitting at a touristy restaurant.  This was not Pathein; this was a beach town.  We were back out on the coast, about 10 miles south of Chaung Tha, in a beach village called Nwe Saung.  Unbelievable.  It was now the time we expected to be back in Yangon, preparing for work the next morning, and instead we were practically right where we started.

We had dinner in Nwe Saung (and of course got some t-shirts) and started the winding trip again at 8:30pm. Before leaving we asked the driver if he had enough gas given our little detour.  He assured us that although his gas gauge was broken, we certainly had enough.  

The entire ride back was incredibly slow; I think we averaged about 10 miles/hour.  We don’t know if our pace was an attempt to keep the oil filter in place or mitigate the danger of a sleepy driver.  After 3 hours the bus came to a halt again in the middle of nowhere, this time because we were out of gas.  (I think there was also some issue with the oil being low, but anything that happened after 1am is pretty fuzzy right now).  In typical Myanmar style, we eventually siphoned enough gas from a passing vehicle to make it to the next gas station.  Around 3am we made another 30 minute stop to let the driver take a much needed nap.  And at 6:30am, the bus pulled up to a stop near our apartment, giving Todd and I time for a 2 hour nap before running off to work.

                                                      Myanmar -1.   Murphys - 0.

Here’s a recap of what we’ve been up to in 2011:

SINGAPORE (late December)

Over the past few years, we’ve noticed more and more of our friends migrating to Southeast Asia from our Stanford Graduate Christian Fellowship group.  So at the start of Christmas break, 10 of us reunited in Singapore for a long weekend.  It was a great time of catching up and seeing the city.

PENNSYLVANIA, PA (Christmas)

This year we made our way to Allentown to celebrate Christmas with the Burkholders. 

SAN DIEGO, CA (New Year’s)

Instead of meeting up with Todd’s family in Colorado, we all met in San Diego, the home of Todd’s sister, Heather, her husband, Mike, and their adorable children, Kasey and Holden.  Heather was 8 months pregnant at the time with Judah (now 5 months old), which made our choice of location an easy decision.

PHNOM PENH & KIP, CAMBODIA & BANGKOK, THAILAND (early January)

We found out that our entry visas into Myanmar were going to be delayed, so we planned a trip to visit a sister organization in Cambodia for a few days before stopping over in Bangkok to pick up our visas.  Visas became so delayed that we ended up spending a week in Cambodia and 10 days in Bangkok.

YANGON, MYANMAR (late February)

Back in Yangon, we actually did some work before my mom and sister came to visit!  Bryn spent a long weekend in Yangon after a 3 week trip to Madurai India to do cataract surgery.

NGAPALI BEACH & INLE LAKE, MYANMAR (early March)

After Bryn left, my mom and I traveled to a beautiful beach on the western coast of Myanmar and then met Todd at Inle Lake, the Venice of Myanmar.  Inle Lake is an incredibly unique culture of people living in raised bamboo huts over the water, making a living through fishing, farming on floating gardens, and selling handicrafts to my mom.  :-)

AYEYARWADDY DELTA, MYANMAR (late March)

I’m currently working on our next new product, which will launch in September 2012.  IDEO, a well-known product design firm from the states, is working with us in the early stages of the project.  3 members of the IDEO team visited in late March and early April for some intensive need-finding and prototyping, which included field trips all over Myanmar to visit rural farmers.  (See last blog post for some pics!)

KRABI, THAILAND (mid April)

During the Myanmar New Year holiday, 4 great friends from the states (and an 18 month old!) traveled to Southeast Asia to vacation and visit us.  We spent a week with the Browns and Brackens exploring the Adaman islands before heading back to Myanmar with them.

BAGAN & PYIN OO LWIN, MYANMAR (late April)

Bagan and Pyin Oo Lwin were the next stops for the Brackens, Browns, and Murphys.  From 1200-1400 BC in Bagan, over 5000 temples and pagodas were built in a 16 square mile piece of land.  Visitors can climb up the outside of the temples for a stunning view of thousands of pagoda peaks.  Pyin Oo Lwin is a cool mountain town where the British would travel to escape the summer heat when they ruled in the early 1900s.  

CHAUN THA, MYANMAR (mid-May)

At the end of every farming season, our 250 field staff located all over Myanmar join our 50 Yangon staff to review and celebrate the past season.  The week of presentations in Yangon concluded with a whirlwind trip to the beach.  We left at 6am Saturday morning, bused 7 hours to the beach, stayed 24 hours, and bused 7 hours back to Yangon.  If the road to Chaun Tha were developed to the equivalent of a US freeway, the trip would take about 2.5 hours.  Good times.  

CHIANG MAI, THAILAND (mid-July)

We are now on our way back to Yangon from Chiang Mai, Thailand.  Two Myanmar holidays fell on Friday of last week and Tuesday of this week, so we took off work on Monday and used the long weekend to celebrate our 5-year anniversary coming up in September.  In September we’ll be in the middle our season launch- the busiest time of the year for us.  Chiang Mai is a truly delightful tourist town in Northern Thailand with the good food, beautiful scenery, and charm of a mountain town in the states.  In town we ate well and shopped; out of town we hiked and rode motos.  Delightful.

It feels like we spent a majority of our time eating delicious things we can’t find in Yangon – salads, sandwiches, burgers, Mexican food, pizza, pasta, pancakes, bagels, French toast, cheesecake - and no Thai food.  

From the desk of Alissa:

I wrote a post a month or two ago trying to justify our disappearance from the blog scene in the past 6 months – namely traveling through 5 countries during 8 separate trips (which sounds good but isn't really an excuse) -  but that kind of post requires lots of pictures, and the Myanmar internet just hasn’t been up to the challenge.  Slowly but surely I’m uploading pictures, and hopefully you’ll see that post in the near future!

In the meantime, I’ll skip the travel details and give an update on our work.  In January our organization finally received our Memorandum of Understanding (the completion of a 2+ year process), which allows us to operate officially before the Myanmar government.  As a result, our organization was able to publicly launch our new name – Proximity Designs – as an organization running independent of IDE International.  Brand new shiny website coming soon!

This year the design team separated into two teams running projects in parallel.  I’ve been managing a project for a top secret product that will be launching in September 2012.  Proximity has received a grant from the Weekley Foundation to work with IDEO, one of the most well-known design firms in the world (http://www.ideo.com).  IDEO has a long history of working on social-impact projects for discounted rates, and in partnership with the Weekley Foundation, a small team of their designers is working with us on the design of our next product.  Three of their team members visited Myanmar in early April, and with our in-country design team, we traveled throughout Myanmar to talk to rural farmers as part of the need-finding process.  

Since then, both the Proximity and IDEO teams have synthesized our findings from the field, and IDEO has spent the last two months developing an initial prototype. I picked up the prototype in Bangkok last weekend (they can’t ship directly into Myanmar because of sanctions).  This past week our in-country team took the prototype into the field to get user feedback, which will influence IDEO’s next stage of prototyping.  The project with IDEO will finish in early August, and at that point we hope to have a robust and user-friendly design that the Proximity team can take into development.

While we wait for IDEO to prototype from the states, the in-country team has been assisting the second Proximity design team with tasks for the 2011 product launch in September.  We will be releasing a new and improved water storage bag as well as an updated version of last year’s S’in Pauk pump.  Additionally, we’re implementing TreadleBot 2.0 – a pneumatic system to test our treadle pumps.  Below is a video of TreadleBot 1.0 which we used last year for life testing.  Hopefully you’ll see a 2.0 video in the upcoming months.

Todd has a lot on his plate right now.  Because of some staff changes in the last month, Todd has found himself as the primary manager and leader of our workshop.  Depending on the time of year, this involves overseeing 30 to 100 people and responsibility for manufacturing our 9 different product models -- expecting over 30,000 total products this year.  The process of hiring new factory management has started off slowly, and we’re praying that the right people fall into our laps quickly!  Todd came expecting to be a technical advisor and has found himself in an unexpected position: doing very little engineering and instead trying to implement large scale culture change that can empower people to be contributors at any level of the organization- something very radical to Burmese hierarchical companies.  We desire for coworkers in every position of the workshop, from managers to welders, to care deeply about quality and feel like they have ownership of their work.  Sometimes it feels like an uphill battle.  Keep us in your prayers as we find ourselves in roles we never imagined!

From the desk of Alissa:

"I’m stressed out about buying Christmas presents.” 

Those very words came out of my mouth during a training seminar in our office a few weeks ago, where we were sharing causes of stress that currently cloud our minds. 

No surprise to most of you - I hate shopping.  And if I hate shopping in America (a place where I can drive to store, easily navigate it, ask someone a question in English, and pay with a credit card), I was dreading my upcoming shopping ventures in a culture where internet is ever-flaky, I have to barter for everything I want in another language, and I have to pay for everything in the equivalent of $1 bills. 

-------------------------------------------------------------

Flashback to October…

IDE held training in Yangon for many of our village staff- the people on the front lines selling products and organizing infrastructure projects who actually live in rural areas.  For some, it was their first trip to “the big city.”  During a session on “How to Give Presentations” in front of a few hundred people, our country director, Jim, asked for two volunteers.  Both men were handed nicely wrapped presents.  The first unwrapped a personal LED lighting unit, a great gift.  The second unwrapped a roll of toilet paper.  Now Jim’s intent was to show that even though your presentation can look nice, your audience is going to be disappointed if you don’t deliver good content.  So when he asked the two men how they felt about their presents, he expected the responses to go something like this:

LED guy: “I feel really excited and special.”
Toilet Paper guy: “I feel pretty disappointed.”

Here’s how it actually went:

LED guy: “I feel really excited and special.”
Toilet Paper guy: “I’m just so thankful… I never received a gift before.”
Jim: “Well, um, do you feel a little disappointed that you didn’t get something like the LED light?”
Toilet Paper guy: “No, really.  This is so special. It’s my first present.”

-------------------------------------------------------------

And so a few weeks ago during our office training session, I was quickly and bashfully aware that my cause of stress (Christmas shopping) was actually an incredible blessing.  How fortunate I am to give and receive gifts on an extravagent level every single year. 

I hope that today you can put your stresses and concerns aside to enjoy the people around you and the abundance we enjoy this time of year.  However big or small, remember to appreciate the gifts that exchange hands today in celebration of the best gift this world has ever received. 

Merry Christmas!

from Todd's desk...

We've recently kicked off an initiative to implement lean manufacturing principles and operation into our production activities here in Yangon.  In preparing the first training on this topic for our staff I had conversations with half a dozen people over the course of a week trying to find a good Burmese term for lean that cast this way or working in a positive light.  I started by explaining the English word lean and how it's used to indicate a lack of fat on people or cuts of meat -- and how that's positive because fat in American culture is synonomous for "extra" or "unneeded." I didn't have a lot of luck with this approach because:

#1) It's well acknowledged that being a bit pudgy is valued in this culture.  It wouldn't be out of the question to greet a friend you hadn't seen in awhile with a complimentary "you look like you've put on weight!"  It follows that the Burmese words for a non-fat person mostly carry the connotation of something like "scrawny" in English.

#2) Also, a good piece of meat in Myanmar comes with a lot of fat.  In fact, at one of the restaurants we frequent for lunch, if I order the pork curry I believe I am often given the fattiest pieces of meat they can find as a sign of good service for me.

In later conversations I tried starting with different words that emphasize the idea of 'only what's needed.'  We finally landed on our term of choice after starting a discussion with the English word concise...but the Burmese term is several syllables long, so at the time of the training I saw another common part of modern Burmese culture in action -- that is the tendency to adopt convenient English words for things that are new -- and I'm pretty sure that everyone at the workshop will ultimately call lean manufacturing "lean manufacturing."

I'm confident that lean manufacturing principles can be applied anywhere, with any technology, in any culture, and I proclaimed as much to the staff last week.  For that to happen, however, I've started to see the need for another type of translation on top of the language.  Here are two excerpts from the book "Lean for Dummies" that I'll use to illustrate:

#1) "Can you imagine living without your mobile phone, the internet, or e-mail?...they've become a necessity.  All you have to do is take a trip on an airplane and listen for the chorus of phones being turned on the instant the plane touches the ground and you'll know how true this is."

#2)"When you turn on your tap, you expect to have a clean, consistent flow of water.  As the customer, you're assuming that the water is disease-free, safe to drink, and fully available when you want it, at a reasonable price."

The writing in "Lean for Dummies" is great, but it's written for an audience with a vastly different culture and circumstances than the people in Myanmar.  The UN estimates that approximately 0.2% of the people in Myanmar are internet users.  I'd confidently wager that less than 1% of the 50+ million people in Myanmar have ever done even one of the following: used a mobile phone, accessed the internet, or flown on a plane.  Similarly, when you turn on the faucet in Yangon you do not necessarily expect clean, consistent, disease-free water.  Or any water at all, sometimes for more than a day.  So I imagine these analogies would only make it more difficult for a Burmese person to understand the topic.

On the other hand, I was born and educated in a world with limitless communication and countless resources on every imaginable topic.  Lean manufacturing is such old news in the United States that some of the experts took the time to write a book on it specifically for stupid people.  None of my Burmese co-workers had ever heard of it.  So this is my role here: exploit as much of my background as possible to learn about and then "translate" the language and thinking and practices of first-world manufacturing to this place.  I don't know if I can do it, but this kind of scrawny, tasteless manufacturing has the potential to  revolutionize how we work each day in our factory and  significantly reduce our manufacturing costs.  Those kinds of things mean a lot even to rich companies making products for rich people; can you imagine how much more it matters for us as we try to make high quality, low cost products for desperately poor farmers in Myanmar?  And so we will try...

 I always start off with “from the desk of Alissa,” but let’s be honest-

From the plastic-stool-strategically-located-by-the-slightly-open-door-in-hopes-of-receiving-a-flicking-internet-signal-while-keeping-out-mosquitos of Alissa:

 In September I launched my first nation-wide product!  (I use “I” since product launches are old news for Mr. Intuitive Surgical.)  The S’in Pauq Treadle Pump, meaning “little elephant,” is one of the world’s cheapest plastic treadle pumps, and the only one able to pump water into an elevated water storage container while treadling from the ground.  

 The S’in Pauq is available to small plot farmers for $15.00, which covers the cost of product materials, manufacturing, distribution, logistics, and dealer mark-up.  IDE raises grant money to cover costs such as R&D, prototyping, and other overhead expenses.  This pump is the seventh in our product line of pumps, but the first designed exclusively in Myanmar, and the first made out of plastic.  The design team ventured into plastic manufacturing to lower the pump cost to half of the previously cheapest pump.  Injection molding in Myanmar comes with quite a few challenges such as managing plastic material quality (and even knowing what plastic is being used), plastic availability in a “dynamic” economy, and mold machining quality.

Why would you want to pump water into an elevated water basket at all?  By elevating the water, you pressurize it.   A farmer can run a hose from a water basket to a sprinkler or a drip irrigation system, which they couldn’t do if their water source were on the ground.  If the water source is on the ground (like in the picture with the little boy), farmers have to haul sprinkler cans on their backs to water crops, a slow and grueling process.  (Ide Myanmar also sells a pressure pump that pressurizes water from ground-level, but it’s much more expensive and has more reliability issues.)


We predicted that we would sell 2,000 S’in Pauq pumps this year (and 20,000 total products).  We are one month into the 6 month season, and we already have orders for 1,800 S’in Pauq pumps and 8,500 total products.  A great problem to have, unless you’re the manufacturing team…  or unless you're married to a member of the manufacturing team.