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We're excited that Teri Turner, a hugely popular Instagram food blogger and author of the best-selling cookbook, No Crumbs Left: Recipes for Everyday Food Made Marvelous, is encouraging her Friday Favorites newsletter subscribers to donate to Shanta. And she is matching their donations, dollar for dollar! If you like to cook and could use some [...]
While our partner villages have not yet had any Covid-19 cases, the travel restrictions and drought have severely impacted their livelihoods. Villagers could not get their crops to the markets this past spring due to lockdowns, limiting the money they had to invest in their fall planting. For families living on less than $1.50 a [...]
“My three sons are students and I’m worrying how can I support them to keep study this year. And because of I lost big amount of money in last season, I need to reduce farming size.”- Maung Kham, 42 year-old farmer from Bayar Ngar Sue village. The rainy season has just started in Myanmar, and [...]
A lot has changed since my last blog post, shared as the real scale of COVID-19’s impact on our lives was just beginning to come into focus in the US and Myanmar. By mid-April our partner villages in Myanmar were still facing deep uncertainty about the risks they faced and the challenges created by how [...]
We know the world is feeling upside down right now, and everyone is facing a lot of uncertainty and fear. It is time for us all to take care of ourselves and one another. Together we are stronger and can get through this pandemic. People are paying close attention to the things and people that [...]
Bwar Kyi and her husband live in Aung Lei village. They are subsistence farmers working the small plot of land they live on to grow onions, garlic, and potatoes. The amount of money they make from farming barely feeds their family of six with little leftover for house-hold expenses. Recently, at a Village Development Team (VDT) [...]
Happy International Women's Day! Traditionally, women have been under represented in rural Myanmar. The men made the decisions for what they thought was best for the entire village. When we started the Village Development Teams we recognized the need for women to participate equally. Now our VDT's are equal part women and men, and in some villages [...]
Wai Ti, of Pin Mi Kone village, shows us her young coffee plant in her bamboo shade house. While her coffee bean harvest may be a few years away, this dedicated entrepreneur is excited to take a chance on an experimental cash crop to increase her family's annual income. Wai Ti is 32 years young. [...]
Thirteen years ago Elizabeth and I went to Myanmar and spent one day visiting remote villages that hadn’t progressed in hundreds of years. We were moved by the generosity, kindness and work ethic of the people, and the extraordinary efforts they were exerting to help themselves, despite the complete absence of any of the advantages [...]
In Naung Boat, Shanta has been challenged by a perceived lack of village interest in the partnership, specifically by women. We’ve struggled getting the minimum number of women on the Village Development Team (VDT), and struggled harder still to get them to attend meetings. Last year, Shanta held both a Village Health Educator (VHE) workshop [...]
