After our visit to the Myin Ma Htie Village, we drove to Inle Lake. As we were getting close to the lake, I started to notice piles of rocks all along both sides of the road. Then I started to notice smoking barrels of tar cooking along the road. Eventually, we got stopped by a traffic person. We asked our guide what was going on. He said we had been stopped by a road building crew. Then he asked if we wanted to get out and see what they were doing. Of course, we did. At that point, our guide told us that they have a saying in Burma, “Everything in Burma is handmade, even the roads”. In our discussions with the road crew, we found out that they earn US $4 day for 8 hours of work. When commenting that those wages seemed very low for this work, our guide asked them some more. He said that they were only earning $2 to $3 a day doing farm work. I thought to myself that at that rate, they might run out of agricultural workers soon.

1. We saw lots of piles of rocks along the road and eventually saw this guy, who was putting the piles of rocks along the road.

2. This was one of the guys cooking tar along the road. It was raining and the bus windshield was wet in this photo. They just dug a short ditch, built a fire in it, and put the 55 gallon drums across the ditch to heat up the tar – every several hundred yards.

3. This was when we got stopped by the traffic person. This is the majority of this road crew.

4. Women carried rocks from the rock pile to the road and dumped them on the road using metal disc type plates.

5. After some Q&A and time to observe their work, our guide asked us what we thought. I told him that the crew’s limiting factor was that the two guys doing the shoveling couldn’t keep the dozen women carrying the rocks busy. He asked if I wanted to show them how. While I wasn’t out to embarrass anyone, I put the women to work with some quick shoveling. I just wanted them to understand that they needed more people shoveling or less women carrying rocks to be more efficient. I worked up quite a sweat as it was over 90 degrees.