After poll win, Suu Kyi gets to work cleaning up Myanmar
Leader tells lawmakers to start by giving their own constituencies a facelift
Following her party’s landmark election win, Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi vowed to give her desperately poor country a much-needed facelift.
Wearing plastic gloves, the septuagenarian got to it early yesterday, walking along the edge of an old, pot-holed road in her constituency, Kawhmu, picking up discarded water bottles, plastic bags and instant coffee wrappers.
Clutching a large white garbage bag and wearing protective gloves, Suu Kyi rummaged through the dirt to pick up tangles of old plastic bags and other debris.
She did not speak to reporters, except to tell them to stop taking photographs and start picking up litter. Villagers rushed to help, filling up their own big sacks with garbage.
Myanmar emerged from a half-century of brutal military rule in 2011, but years of mismanagement, combined with international sanctions and isolation, had turned it into one of the world’s poorest and most neglected nations. The infrastructure is in shambles and public services, including trash collection and recycling, is virtually nonexistent.
After the National League for Democracy Party’s Nov. 8 election victory, Suu Kyi, 70, told winning lawmakers to start by cleaning up their own constituencies. The party’s garbage collection campaign, she said, was aimed at improving public health, respecting the environment and attracting tourists.
Garbage is a huge problem in Myanmar, which lacks regular trash collection and proper landfill sites. Suu Kyi has seized on the issue as a way to hammer home the NLD’s drive to serve the people.
Garbage collection is “the first thing we can do to serve the people,” Thet Thet Khine, a newly elected MP from Yangon said.