Village Hein Ze

After two weeks of nearly no telephone or internet access, we are again back in the little city called Dawei, and we would like to share our first experiences from one of the villages:

Hein Ze is a very small village located on the road from Yangon to Dawei. The village has experienced very harsh times during the conflicts between the government and armed minorities. Nowadays, the situation is very calm again, but every villager told us stories about them being draged away in order to serve as e.g. carriers for the army or the armed "rebels". Many villagers run away during that time and did now come back to this village and again started to cultivate the land.

Our fist transect walk through plantations and smaller plots:

The land which is used by the villagers is dominated by betel nut palm trees, rubber trees, and other minor land uses such as lime trees, banana and other fruit trees. And there is also one very large plantation of palm trees (for palm oil) and rubber trees, owned by a big investor from a distant place. But the village is also located on the border to a very large protected forest called Tanintharyi Nature Reserve. The villagers cannot use the forest plants in the protected area. But in order to still enable them to still use some of the important forest products (such as e.g. bamboo), the government also defined a so called buffer zone. Within this buffer zone, the villagers will in the future be allowed to collect forest products and maintain the wild forest. This solution seems to work out quite well.

Interviews in the village:

While the betel nut plantations are generally owned by the villagers themselves, the rubber plantations often also belong to investors from more distant places within this region. Apparently, the villagers are not too happy with this situation. But what should they do about this issue…? They are not too sure yet.

Highly motivated villagers in the workshop:

In this village, we conducted several interviews with farmers to get an overview about the land uses here and what consequences they bring for the local people. We also organized a workshop together with the villagers. We invited around 9 people, but many more came. Everybody was very enthusiastic about having a research team in their village and they didn’t want to miss out on this happening. :-)
We also had the chance to explore the area. We could go to different plantations and also the wild forest, which was incredibly beautiful (and also followed by sore muscles and bruises from falling on slippery stones several times…) :-)

Going into the wild forest, passing remote plantations, towards the boundary of the protected forest: