Here I am showing two women of the Kayan Tribe footage I took of them weaving || Inle Lake, Shan State.

As we are wrapping up our last few weeks in Myanmar, I have begun reflecting on the experiences I have had in this beautiful country. I knew my work as a Global Social Benefit Fellow would be challenging in many ways, however I launched myself into the experience with no expectations, just that I would be experiencing something new and unique. I have gained even more from this experience than I anticipated. I have traveled to the developing world before to complete service work, but have never worked in a professional setting abroad. Working at Koe Koe Tech has been an immersive experience in itself; most employees were born and raised in Myanmar and many speak little or no English. I have picked up small words and phrases in Burmese to interact with them and others. I have made some great friends here that I know I will have for a while.

My wonderful teammate and friend, Athena Nguyen, holding an umbrella to protect my camera from the rain. || Ayeyarwaddy Division

The Process 

My work specifically on this project at Koe Koe Tech is with videography and marketing. I have studied film in school for the past three years at Santa Clara University. SCU film classes have students work in groups of three or four. Each student has a specific role they are required to carry out over the course of the project. There is usually a producer, director, cinematographer, and editor. In the case of my work at the fellowship, I have worked every role. We have conducted six in person interviews with women who use Koe Koe Tech’s maymay application. I sat with a translator and called users to find the right women to interview, dealt with many cancellations, and many schedule changes. In this way, my work was similar to that of a producer. I then drafted interview questions based on the women we were going to interview, set up a translator to come with me from Koe Koe Tech, and went out into the field to interview the women and film with my camera equipment. At the interviews themselves, I acted as cinematographer and director- I would light the interview area, set up my camera with the appropriate settings, and film b roll footage of the family after the interview. Before each interview my teammates helped me find gifts to bring to the women and their families to thank them for their time. After the interviews, I went through the footage and logged every clip by renaming them on my hard drive and then writing notes about their content and quality on google documents organized by date. In this way, I acted in the role of editor. I also sat down with a translator for about 15 hours over the span of one week, where we went sentence by sentence through the interviews and translated them to English. At night I went back to my hotel and wrote English summaries of each interview with direct quotations, which my translator and I then sat together as she translated the summaries into the written Burmese language. I anticipate a great deal of work back in Santa Clara of actually subtitling the footage and putting all my content together into a single page of marketing materials with both English and Burmese translations for Koe Koe Tech to use.

Filming with a beautiful family in Mandalay. These adorable twins loved the camera. || Mandalay

With one of the twins in Mandalay. || Mandalay

Something I have especially enjoyed while being in Myanmar is fully immersing myself in the culture. I have loved eating the food, taking the taxis, carrying an umbrella everywhere I go; all the little things that make my daily life in Yangon different than my life at home. Every day presents a new challenge, whether it be a power outage, cockroaches in the bathroom, or haggling down the price of a taxi in Burmese. These are things many people would complain about, everything is different, but that is what makes my daily life so exciting here. The people here are so welcoming and kind. I wish to visit Myanmar again in the future. I can not imagine never coming back.

To Conclude…

The work I have done here in Myanmar has challenged me to be incredibly organized and on top of managing my own work and the people helping me with it. I am very excited about the final product I will produce for Koe Koe Tech and am beginning to see my hard work pay off. This experience has been especially great in solidifying my love of every aspect of the film process. I have been incredibly busy, working hard, and loving every second of being in this beautiful country with the most compassionate and selfless people I have ever met. I have learned so much about myself and what I believe to be important in life.

Inle Lake, Shan State