Foreign couple's novel approach to helping Burmese village

Myanmar is one of the most politically and socially isolated countries in the world, much bad press is leveled at our country for decisions made and actions taken that the people are not responsible for and while attention focuses on the political dynamic of the country, the plight of many Burmese such as poverty, lack of access to water and education, become overshadowed. One family in the United States has taken a novel approach to giving back to a country that has stolen their hearts.

Lynda Groux was born and raised in Myanmar, but moved to the United States when she was young and married there. Lynda and her husband, Maurice Groux, have travelled to Myanmar several times since they married over a decade ago and have amassed an impressive collection of Burmese artifacts and indigenous arts and crafts.

The Grouxes own a hair salon in Newbury Park, California, they are therefore financially stable but not wealthy, at least not wealthy enough to contribute single-handedly to the development of an entire village, and yet this is the mammoth task they’ve set themselves. Their goal will be achieved by auctioning and selling the collection of artifacts they’ve gathered over a lifetime.

“We could hang on to our collection forever and admire it and enjoy it, but it’s more enjoyable to watch a child drink clean water,” Maurice says of their decision to sell their art collection, adding that he and his wife wanted to “just sell what we have and give it back to them because they are the ones who made all this stuff.”

Their plan is to use the money to dig and build wells for freshwater in a village in Thanlyin, which is just to the south east of the capital, Yangon. Lynda, although no longer living in Myanmar, remains intimately connected to the country as some family members still live here and she regularly travels across the Pacific to see them, it is on these trips that she’s acquired her collection.

The collection includes some 60 rare and precious artifacts, some dating back to the beginning of the previous century, and these will be sold through a silent auction at their A 2 Z Cuts Plus salon in Newbury Park. There are a further 300 handmade items representing the care and effort of people thousands of miles away, these range from woven tapestries, oil paintings and traditional food serving dishes to statuettes and wooden carvings.

The auction has been named “The Well Water Project Auction” and the couple are hoping to raise $60,000, which will enable them to build around 60 wells. They were inspired to help the villagers in whatever way they could on a recent trip when they came across a young boy carrying two 5 gallon buckets of water barefoot back to his home.

The water was filthy and when they asked him how his family would clean the water he said they used a T-shirt as a filter. In Myanmar, such crude techniques and concessions are the order of the day for the some people 32% of people who live below the poverty line and struggle for access to clean freshwater, but for the Grouxes, it represented something that in a small way they had the power to fix, at least for some families.

There is a Buddhist monastery in Thanlyin and it is through them that the Grouxes will help the village. The couple has dealt with the monastery before and feels safe and welcomed by its members and the monastery has a more intimate knowledge of the needs of the community.

It is indeed a novel approach to an old problem, one which exemplifies the ties to ones country even after they have left and the impact that past can have on the future. An artisan creating a wooden sculpture of monks in prayer at the turn of the 19^th century would no doubt never have imagined that his work would contribute to the building of well in his country in 2010.