Hopeful lull on a ‘stormy’ voyage:
Halfway through their mission, Malaysia’s ‘Food Flotilla for Myanmar’ team keeps faith the aid will reach the Rohingya in the Rakhine state and the refugee camps in Bangladesh.
THE whirr of the ship’s crane engine – interspersed with loud beeps as it moved its cargo – filled the night, mashing up with the buzz of workers moving boxes down by the docks.
But one sound cut through all of that just after midnight on Friday: a man’s voice on a hailer, yelling out commands in Malay.
“I need one more! I need one more!” shouted Datuk Abdul Mutalif Abdul Rahim, 46, as he looked at the Nautical Aliya, while Myanmar port workers waited for yet another piece of cargo to be brought down from the ship.
There were already many boxes on the docks, laid out metres away from where the ship stopped about seven hours earlier.
At one end, cartons of Mamee cup noodles – each cardboard box packed with 24 cups – were stacked next to boxes of 500ml mineral water bottles. The stock list went on: bags of slippers, sacks of rice with Malaysian flag stickers on top, twin blade disposable razors, toothbrushes, halal toothpaste, nail clippers and many more.
After all the brouhaha from the Myanmar government, some 200 tonnes worth of goods made in Malaysia, or at least distributed there according to the print on the boxes, have made it safely to the Thilawa Port in Yangon, Myanmar’s commercial capital. Their final destination?
To the Rohingya in Sittwe, Rakhine State, where thousands of whom have faced alleged human rights abuses in recent years.
A few Thilawa Port staff walked around, some checking the contents of the boxes while a few Myanmar policemen watched on.
A couple of dogs roamed around, shying away when people looked at them. Parts of the stone floor were splotched in brown-red patches, products of spittoons from men who chew betel, like the Yangon’s sidewalks that are also filled with these marks.
The wind on the docks was strong and a little cold; the port far enough up river to be free from the smell of the sea, even though it is nearly 30km away from the city by road.
None of the protests that we heard or read about could be seen.
Maybe it was too far away in the port compound, or perhaps they didn’t just let anyone in.
“Count! Count! Count!” Mutalif, one of the mission’s organisers, yelled in Malay into the hailer.
If you closed your eyes, you might think you were in the middle of one of Malaysia’s many night markets, but for the spattering of Burmese.
“Mamee, five jumbo bags; slipper, one!” Mutalif yelled again in Malay.
“Hey T,” I said, calling him by the nickname that he said he gave himself during his 14 years living in Los Angeles.
“Hey brother! Got what you need?” He replied in an English toned by a slight African-American accent.
“Not yet,” I grinned.
The ship docked at about 4pm local time the day before, and they had been busy unloading the cargo since.
The aid mission’s organisers had planned for all the cargo to be lifted out in three hours, but it has been more than seven hours.
A few volunteers – most of them the mission’s organisers – went
about the docks and the ship, attaching ropes from the crane to the white jumbo bags weighing a little more than a tonne each.
A Malaysian official in Myanmar who didn’t give his name looked at the work on the docks and said, “Oh, why not finish?”
He then walked over to speak to two locals. Both middle-aged, one was in a longyi (Myanmar sarong), the other in a police uniform.
When each bag was lowered onto the docks, a forklift manned by one of the twenty-odd Myanmar workers there, drove at it, lifting its claws through the bag’s handles.
Originally the mission had intended for 10,000 “hygiene kits” –
filled with items like nail clippers, towels, toothbrushes and others – to be packed into individual boxes for the Rohingya.
But instead they were laid out on the docks next to the ship, each in their own separate boxes.
“We were told that the ship would be big enough for us to do the repackaging on the way,” he said.
But advice from the Nautical Aliya’s crew and the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency on uncertain weather conditions in the Andaman Sea halted those plans.
“I don’t like the way it is, but we have no choice. We have to minimise the risks,” he said.
When asked why the packing wasn’t done before leaving, Mutalif cited time constraints.
“When you do this kind of mission, you need at least six months. We organised the whole thing in less than a month,” he said.
But what about doing it on the docks? Mutalif said it was not allowed as there was a situation once at the port in Yangon where another ship had its passengers working on the docks.
“But one volunteer jumped out and ran and he got caught,” he said, pointing to the police presence.
It is expected that once all the items were taken off the ship, they would be sent to Sittwe by barge, packed in bags that can be given straight to the Rohingya.
To while away the time, we chatted about the United States, the land he once called home from 1994 to 2007.
He misses it, he said, especially the people, who “saw you for who you are”.
But would he go back, with Trump in charge?
“I don’t give a damn about Trump, rump, crump. People there are smart. People there can think for themselves,” he said.
And if the people want to get rid of Donald Trump, they will, he added.
Then why did he come back? “Because blood is thicker than water – family!” he said with a smile.
Before we knew it, the clock had struck two in the morning.
It was getting late but the work was still not done, and the organisers had planned to hold a press conference at 8 o’clock in the morning at the same docks, before leaving Yangon and setting sail for Chittagong in Bangladesh, which incidentally is not keen on giving the mission’s volunteers access to the Rohingya refugee camps either.
Unlike him, I could get some rest, so I shook Mutalif ’s hand and wished him goodnight.
As I walked back up the gangway to the ship, I heard him yell to the volunteers on the ship, “Tiger balm! Tiger balm! The headache oil!”