Ten years after having moved to the United States, Cal State Long Beach student and scholarship recipient Sundie Zin, originally from Myanmar, returned to her home country to help victims of Cyclone Nargis, which devastated much of the Irrawady Delta and Yangon on May 2, 2008.
Two months after Nargis hit Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, Zin visited her home country to see how she could help. Tonight, she will present an exhibit to thank those who supported or donated to help fund her trip and to inform others on the situation in Myanmar.
“I wanted to help in any way possible,” Zin said.
Hours into her arrival on July 16, Zin was on her way to visit the villages devastated by Cyclone Nargis, where an estimated 250,000 people died or disappeared.
Zin, a senior interior architectural design major, is set to start another fundraiser for another trip to Myanmar in December.
“I started fundraising on my own,” Zin said.
She gathered about $2,000 from friends and family for the first trip.
Through the Myanmar community, Zin heard of Dolly Lay who was putting up a show for fundraising purposes to help the cyclone victims.
Zin told her she wanted to be part of it, and helped Lay sell tickets for the show.
While fundraising for her trip, Zin met people from the non-profit organization, Giving Children Hope, and they supplied her with water purification tablets and Benadryl. But she couldn’t take much of it, for fear of being questioned by the authorities upon arrival.
Zin and Lay stayed in Myanmar for 12 days, but the trip wasn’t easy.
Aside from witnessing the vast devastation, Zin and Lay were interrogated and questioned by government officials at each checkpoint.
And even though they wore traditional clothing and spoke the language, their journey was a dangerous one. But Zin said she didn’t have time to get scared.
From the capital Yangon, it took Zin and Lay five hours by car and an additional hour and a half by boat to reach the delta areas hit by Cyclone Nargis.
Their first stop was the village of Bogalay.
“I wasn’t expecting to see that. It was sad and depressing. People were living in poverty,” Zin said.
Cyclone Nargis deprived the population from clean water and food, and now thanks to the rain, rainwater was being collected for drinking purposes.
Zin and Lay spoke to as many people as they could, gathering information about the population’s needs. They went to temples and gave money to orphans who are now being cared for by the temple’s monks.
“There’s so much more that needs to be done,” Zin said.
Zin and Lay then left for their second delta village, Tatar Chaung, where they had to spend the night and rent a car for the day.
They met with the town mayor of the delta village and learned that the village was in the process of getting a temple and a school built.
Zin chose six families to aid, and used the money she raised to buy them land so houses can be built for them. Each piece of land cost between $200 and $250, and even though the homes will be small and basic, Zin explained, it will provide a roof over their heads.
Zin also gave medicine and money to victims and toys to children. She brought clothes from the United States, some of which were her own and also some she had gathered from family and friends.
For her second trip to Myanmar, Zin will once more count on contributions from friends and family.
Her situation is different this time around, though. She has been named the recipient of the Richard and Johanna Baker scholarship from the college of the arts, in the amount of $3,200. Zin was given $1,600 this semester, which helped her pay for airfare. The rest will be given to her during the spring semester.
“I’m hoping my second trip will be better,” Zin said.
When she goes back, Zin wants to help them build the school and donate books to the children. Zin also hopes to buy 20 more homes.
Zin has two reasons for returning in December. She first wants to see the six homes, for which she had bought land, built. She also wants to donate more money that would mostly go toward education.
Her second reason is for her senior thesis design project, which she is doing on Myanmar.
Dorothy Ottolia, chair of the design department at CSULB, has encouraged Zin to do a gallery show. The show will exhibit photographs, the history of Myanmar, a devastation wall dedicated to the Cyclone and its victims, and a slide show about Zin and Lay’s trip to Myanmar.
The event, at which food will be offered, is from 5 to 7 p.m. in the Design Gallery on campus, room 102.
The gallery will be open to the public interested in seeing the photographs, until Thursday Oct. 9.
“I want this to be a long-term commitment,” Zin said.
Sundie Zin is an incredible woman
It’s a wonderful world for the people who love PEACE.
Way to go Sundie Zin! I told you this is just the beginning. Now we have more things to do.
Hello everyone,
I finally got a chance to view the comments that I’ve been getting from this website, and I was really surprised how much support I was getting. Thank you all for taking the time to write some comments about the article. Truly, it wasn’t just me who made all of this possible. It was everyone who was very supportive and helpful to me throughout this journey. Thank you so much for your support and for the encouragement.
Sincerely,
Zin
I wanted to build volunteer group ,
I wanted to grow trees not only in Myanmar ,around the world ,
I wanted to expose chili from Myanmar to world ,
I wanted to build many company like Insurance , Trading , and I wanted to grow farm technically if other country help,
I wanted to ask other country to help us technically in growing chili , onion , potato , rice , crop ,
………………………………………………………………
if Government allow to public
but how can I do?
Ms. Zin and Ms. Lay,
Thank you very much for your contribution towards the people who needs help. Originally, our people (Burmans) are kind hearted people and you are the one who followed the way that Lord Buddha teaches us. Please keep up your work.
U Soe Myint
I was in Myanamr for 23 days this summer. I was in Lashio, Hsi Pa, Py oolyn, Mandalay, Bagan, Kalaw, Inlay Lake and Yangon. I loved it and loved the people. Thank you for supporting a people in need. I know it will only get better in Myanmar, I feel it.
rossi92353@yahoo.com
Edward Beijing, China
May I know your email address then we can help you when u r in Myanmar. I also live in Myanmar.
Thanks for your effort-Venny
Hi Zin and Lay
Firstly, may I say thank you very much for your generous contributions to the people who have suffered more than expected and beyond the imagination . That will ease their pains to some extent and will erase eventually their poverty and substandard living condition . May I call ” Good Deep ( Therdu ) ” repeatedly for your initiatives
please contact me about your december plans. i have a contact at work in myanmar and an interested in a trip. the people are hard working good people with a giant hill to climb. i read the news about this country but i suspect much is not written about. is the exhibit available on the net? good work and i wish you continued success!
ecwolfman@yahoo.com
Zin, Lay I just want to sey thank you very much for what you did and what you are going to do. And we also need a lot of more like you..my native nation is Myanmar too. We want to try harder for our nation.
i am also burmese and i feel very bad about wha thas happen in burma. i think is great what you are doing and have a safe trip and good luck with your project
Hi Sundie, may God bless you for this initiative. We need more people like you to get involve in transforming Burma (I do not wish to call it Myanmar).
စစ္အာဏာရွင္ေတြ တည္ရွိေနသေရြ႕ ျမန္မာျပည္ ဆင္းရဲတြင္း နက္ေနမွာပါ။ ျပည္သူေတြ သူတို႔လက္ သူတို႔ေျခနဲ႔ ရက္တည္ႏိုင္ေအာင္ ေဖးမၾကပါ။ ကူညီေပးကမ္းတာက အတိုင္းအတာ တခုအထိပဲ ေကာင္းပါတယ္။ အာဏာရွင္ေတြေၾကာင့္ အခက္အခဲ ျပႆနာေတြ အမ်ားႀကီးရွိသလို တခ်ဳိ႕ေသာ ျမန္မာ ျပည္သားေတြမွာလည္း ညစ္ပတ္ယုတ္ပဲ့တဲ့ စိတ္ဓါတ္ေတြ ရွိေနပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာျပည္သား အမ်ားစုသည္ မိမိဘ၀ကို မိမိတို႔သာလွ်င္ အာမခံေနရပါသည္။ စစ္အစိုးရ မရွိလည္း အေၾကာင္း မဟုတ္ပါ။ လက္ရွိ အစိုးရသည္ ျပည္သူေတြ အတြက္ ဘာမွ ေလာက္ေလာက္လားလား အက်ဳိးမျပဳႏိုင္ပါ။ ဒါကို ကုလသမဂၢ သိပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့ ေပးႏိုင္ကမ္းႏိုင္တဲ့ အဖြဲ႕အစည္းကို ကုလ က အသိအမွတ္ ျပဳေနမွာပါ… SPDC (Self Protect Defense Committee), UN (Useless and Nothing).
I think she reverts the Myanmar proverb; “a single grain of sesame can’t make oil”. The most important thought I got from her commitment is that, she had tried and made some oil base, anyway. She is admirable person, I can feel that. Thank you, Sundie! Thank you for your love on your country, and your people, and your practical helping hands.
I wish you a safe trip.