Back to Burma

This time, in very different circumstances.

It is July again. Time for an annual ritual, one that I look forward to — co-tutoring the Go-Far programme.

On Go-Far trips with NTU students, we head to somewhere “far away”(literally and sometimes figuratively) from Singapore to work on stories — which often finds its way into news outlets both locally and abroad.

This year’s trip, we revisit a country in extremely different circumstances.

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In 2015, the Go-Far team went to Yangon.

The country had just opened up. And our students could openly reach out to government officials, interview dissident artists who were released from jail and photograph young politicians who wanted to be part of a new democratic movement.

Our team next to the Sule Pagoda in Yangon. Many of our students continue to work in media and journalism. Amir, in white, is CNA’s Johore correspondent. Russell(bottom left) is the cinematographer for We Can Save The World, a feature film premiering in New York this week.

Poster for our Exhibition in 2015

After 2021’s military coup and the subsequent civil war in Myanmar, the optimism of our stories from 2015 has all but vanished.

This year, Go-Far will be about Myanmar.

We will work on stories from Mae Sot, a town in Thailand on the border with Myanmar. Mae Sot has the largest community of Burmese living outside of Burma. Many more have arrived after the recent coup.

We’ll be sharing stories from our reportage there on our instagram page.

Here are some pictures and videos I took on that trip to Yangon.

It was raining almost daily and sometimes flooding in Yangon when we visited.

The magnificent Shwedagon Pagoda.

Visiting a landfill in the city with Daniel Neo for his story on the city’s plans for a big clean up.