Coffee Consulting During a Pandemic
I’d be lying if I said we weren’t a little jealous that the rest of our team is working on the coffee mountain right now. They have happily been reporting how beautiful the vista is as they enjoy the cool breeze in the hot season and sort green beans for export!
Meanwhile, back in Yangon, the Lighthouse team has a group of eight people “quarantining”, living in a small house. Some are managers, some are consultants, some are our interns in training. In light of the world-wide pandemic, we have all been told by the government, “You can’t go up the mountain. Stay home”.
We all sincerely want to do our part to “lower the curve” although with limited testing happening here in Myanmar and a very porous border with China, we’ve all been wondering, what that means for us in this place.
So here we are, obeying quarantine on schedule with the western world. Now, like all our friends and family in Canada, we are adjusting to “a new normal.” The other day, as I was scrubbing my walls for the second time and the effects of being “busy-busy” had left my body like a bad drug, my friend said to me, “Louise, do you want to know the secret to surviving quarantine?”- “Tell me!” I begged. He said, “I heard a marine talking the other day. He said quarantine is like living on a submarine under the ocean for months. The men go absolutely crazy unless they have a...STRICT SCHEDULE.” That was my “ah-ha” moment.
I was reflecting on that idea as I watched the young people in our house fall into the black hole of smart phoning. I knew I was frustrated with their glazed eyes and laziness. I knew that I was ready to “sink the submarine” all by myself, haha if we didn’t get into some kind of routine.
Thank goodness we are praying people. All our great ideas come from God. One day, after a prayer time, Judy came to me and said, “Hey, Louise, I have this sewing pattern for making masks. Maybe we could make our own? Then we thought about the urgent need for all the elderly people in our neighbourhood to have masks to protect themselves from the virus. Coincidentally, we already had a huge bundle of cloth in our storage room. Then 3 of our teammates confessed that they already knew how to sew. All we needed to do was buy a small sewing machine. Within a day, our on-line shopping search had found a beautiful second hand machine!
When we had made about 20 masks, collected bags of rice and a bar of soap for each senior, one of our coffee managers walked to the local mayor’s office to ask if we could help the community in this way. They were overjoyed with our offer and promised us they would gather a list of people in the neighbourhood over 70 years of age that we could give our masks to. Then they would personally escort us to each of their homes. We really didn’t want to visit the homes since we thought we could potentially expose the seniors to the virus. But they wouldn’t hear of it. They insisted we all go together.
That’s when we realized that “Social Distancing” is a privilege of the western world. The truth is, all of our neighbours live packed in like sardines. This may be hazardous to our health during the flu season but one thing we learned as we went from house to house and blessed our elderly neighbours during this “Thingyan” season, (The Myanmar new year), is that Asia knows how to care for the grandmas and grandpas in their families and communities.
The love, honour and care we saw each elderly person receiving, completely touched our hearts. The virus is a crisis in our life that we pray will end quickly but the opportunity we’ve had to meet our neighbours, make new friends and care for the seniors in our neighbourhood has helped me to be more grounded in what really matters and thankful that as a company we can give back to society just a small portion of all the blessings God has given to us.
