Burma’s Elderly Turn to Begging for a Living

Min Lwin
The Irrawaddy News
www.irrawaddy.news
February 6, 2008

A group of senior citizens is sitting and chatting together in a circle, hoping for worshippers to appear at Mandalay’s famed Mahamyatmuni Pagoda in Mandalay so they can beg for money. They are weak, feeble, and entirely dependent on these small offerings from the pious and compassionate.

“They can be seen gathering and talking with each other, like pilgrims at famous pagodas,” said Thura, a resident of Sagaing, a major Buddhist pilgrimage center in Upper Burma. “When their children are unable to look after them, they come here to beg for their daily survival.”

Increasingly, Burma’s elderly, including retired civil servants, are turning to mendicancy to make ends meet. They can be seen near pagodas, in teashops, and on the streets, seeking to supplement their meager pensions with the spare kyat of passersby.

Residents of Rangoon and Mandalay say that senior citizens without support from their families or a place to stay in a monastery face severe hardship. Facilities for assisting those in their declining years are few, and most have already reached their full capacity.

“We can accept new residents only after someone else has died,” said an employee of the Shwe Than Lwin Home for the Aged in Rangoon. “We have only enough room for 96 people,” added the staff member, who was contacted by phone.

Kandawgalay Little Sister of the Poor, a Catholic-run organization in Rangoon’s Mingala Taungnyunt Township, currently cares for 170 elderly people, according to a senior nun who spoke to The Irrawaddy. “If we have places for them to stay, we accept,” she said, adding that all funding comes from local donors.

Rangoon’s Hninzigone Home for the Aged, a non-governmental organization founded in 1933, is funded by donations from within Burma and abroad. It is home to 220 elderly people who meet the minimum requirements of being over the age of 70 and without any other means of support.

In Burma, there are estimated to be 4 million people over the age of sixty, representing roughly 8 percent of the total population. There are just 52 homes for the aged across the nation, with a combined capacity to care for 2,196 senior citizens. All are run by charitable organizations supported by donations.

Public funding for elderly care is conspicuously absent, with the military government providing just 15 million kyat (around US $1,200) a year in cash and medicine to meet the needs of the country’s oldest citizens, according to the state-run New Light of Myanmar. This compares with the 40 percent of Burma’s national budget that the government spends on the army.

Inadequate care for the elderly has forced many to rely on others who are also struggling to provide for themselves. “Some older people, leaning on a healthier elderly person, go from car to car along U Wisaya Road, because drivers in this area can afford to give money to beggars,” according to Ma Naing, a resident of Rangoon.

Ma Naing added that insufficient pensions are one of the key reasons so many have been reduced to seeking handouts.

“The pension I receive now is 800 kyat (60 cents) a month, not even enough for a meal,” said a retired teacher in Rangoon. “We fulfilled our duty to our country, but the government has failed to take sufficient responsibility for retired civil servants.”

The former teacher added that the high cost of transportation since the regime raised fuel prices late last year has been especially hard on retired civil servants living in rural Burma, who must go into the city to collect their pensions. Now, he said, much of the money they receive is spent on traveling expenses.

“I don’t like to see old people, weak and shaky, asking for money,” said a civil servant in Rangoon, watching a frail woman in her late seventies with a plastic basket collecting money from shoppers on their way to the market. “Life for them is tough.”