Went with UKTI trade mission to explore business opportunities in Myanmar organised by Philomena Chen from the UK and Khaing Tun (Khine) in Myanmar

One of our party Adrian Todd summed up the mission better than I ever could, so with full credit to Adrian, here is his experience……………….

“At the outset of this mission, I mentioned to Philomena that I was more interested in the Myanmar part of the mission, than the Malaysian part. It turned out that Malaysia was good, but the Myanmar part was by far the most outstanding event. You are inspirational !!!

The amount of hard work and effort put into planning and arranging this must have been well beyond the call of duty! Working day and night, right through the weekend, giving up your free time, to get every last drop of benefit for us out of our time in Myanmar. Demonstrating to all of us, your passion and conviction, determination, and belief in Myanmar. Importantly I could sense that you truly feel that things are changing for the better. Maybe slowly, but progress is progress, and this seemed to filter through to us right through the mission.

The mixture of business meetings, with clean and not so clean businesses and their different attitudes towards business, the immersion into the cultural and spiritual and grand pagodas balanced with the harsh reality of child labour and abstract poverty an hour away from the city, meeting ordinary people in the village who open their home to welcome strangers to use the toilet and rest their legs for a while, smiling as they did so, right through to no “Death by Powerpoint” and not being preached to by lawyers who think we are all multi-million dollar investors, and not leaving us to suffer experts with attitude.

I don’t for a second think that it was coincidence that it all happened to be so well balanced, and so well timed. It happened that way because of all of the hard work, effort, and thoughtful way that you had planned, to show us your country in a week, or at least get a good balanced view. Not to mention getting us into the meetings with the usually unobtainable people, and selecting only the most enthusiastic experts to put in front of us. It was simply perfect, genius, and an amazing event.
It would be hard to find the words to thank you for all of this, so I guess that we all have to thank you by coming back to do some business in Myanmar.

Whatever happens in the future, stay in touch and let us all know what you are doing.

Thank you Khine.
We appreciate all that you have done for us.”