Utahn aiding cyclone victims -- and blogging -- from Myanmar

Whitney Vander Wilt Wallace with street children in Yangon/Rangoon.

As a Utahn living in Myanmar, a country that limits media and has banned American Web sites such as CNN.com, Whitney Vander Wilt Wallace isn’t afraid to speak out.

While international reporters focused on the outcome of democracy advocate Aung San Suu Kyi’s house arrest trial this summer, the 27-year-old humanitarian worker blogged about life and the repression outside the courtroom.

There are no credit cards or ATMs, and the Internet is widely censored. Children beg in the streets. Newsweek and other foreign publications are sold secretly in the markets. Many zones are off limits to Westerners.

For this country of about 50 million, formerly known as Burma, the past is the present. Buses date back to the first half of the last century. Bicycle rickshaws abound.

Her take on the country’s rickety taxis, from her blog: “I took a taxi to the market today, and the driver literally had to use a screwdriver to let me in and out of the car.... We’ve driven in taxis where the driver’s seat is literally a thin plastic lawn chair duct-taped to the ground.”

Medical treatment is practically nonexistent; when her husband had Dengue fever, a doctor advised them to go to Thailand for care.

Wallace is in the country working for Samaritan’s Purse, a non-governmental humanitarian group. Many organizations are primarily limited to helping victims of 2008’s Cyclone Nargis; Wallace helps arrange micro-loans for women who lived in the destroyed villages. She says the Myanmar people she has met are deeply grateful.

This summer, it was widely assumed that Suu Kyi, placed under repeated house arrest by the military junta, would not earn her freedom. Humanitarian groups feared they might not be allowed to stay in the country, but her group has so far remained.

Unlike Iran, where youth and others took to the streets earlier this year to fight for freedom, many of Myanmar’s young seem more accepting of their stifled reality -- and more willing to leave the country and start over, she said. Older people, who identify with Suu Kyi, are more passionate.

In a previous job at the Utah Federation for Youth, Wallace worked with refugee children who are ethnic Karen, a group being forced to leave the country. Now, she says, she understands what they have suffered.

“I think if Utah could see where they’re coming from, they’d be a lot more compelled to give them compassion,” she said. “Coming to America isn’t this big ideal. It’s where you go when you have no where else to go.”