Interview with Global Neighbours Founder David Heppner, February 2010

Tell me about Global Neighbors. What is it, how did it get going? 
Heather (Heppner's wife) and I travelled to Thailand in 2004 and we were introduced to the situation on the borderline. We actually visited a small school, Saw Thoo Lei, I don't know if you've visited that school or not. We decided we couldn't change the entire world, obviously, but we did think that we could make a difference in this one place. So Heather and I decided to help the one small school. And we came back to Prince Albert and started talking to business people in the city here and people rallied behind us and they joined in and we bought some land and built a school for Hsa Thoo Lei and then after that we bought the land where the school was built and we built a dormitory for 200 kids right next to the school. And after that we built a day-care for abut 80 kids and so it just kind of kept on going. We just finished our last dormitory, as far as the education goes we built a dorm for 200 kids. The old dormitory is going to be used for future training and offices for the Burmese migrant workers association.
So that's basically how we got going, and from that point we branched out into two agricultural projects. 
We bought 79 Rai (30 acres) in Krep Lo, which is just outside of Mae Sot. We've had it for one year, and that's the farm we bought. We have title to it. And there's another agriculture project we're working on as well which is the school of 360 kids in the area and they are and were in extreme need of funding. So instead of funding the school we set up an agricultural project there as well. We bought about 40 Rai in that area, which is probably around 20 acres or so (approximately 16 acres), and we built a hog barn for them there and set up an irrigation system. And hopefully we'll help them into self sufficiency within the next couple years.

Who introduced you here?
What happened is, the reason Heather and myself went is my daughter and our son-in-law were hired to set up a program in Thailand, an experiential program with a university. My son-in-law couldn't go so the director of the program and my daughter went and they asked us to join them. And while auditing and eating with a member of the Chiang Mai University and the International Justice Mission - the International Justice Mission works with getting kids out of the sex trade, and so at the end of the meeting, which was actually quite graphic, they said there's another issue that's more pressing and that's the migrant situation on the borderland. After hearing that said we need to basically check it out. We rented a van and we picked up a Karen translator in Mae Sariang and then we drove down to Mae Sot. He showed us Mae La refugee camp, and then we also went to Mae Sot overnight and just before we left in the morning we spent about 15 minutes at the school. And so that's basically how we got to Mae Sot.


So you were hooked on the Karen?
Yes I was. We were very much engaged. After, we wanted to help them. There were some very very good people with a very difficult past and a rather bleak future from the way it looks right now. But hopefully things will change in Burma so they can go back to their homeland.

Tell me about your plans for the farm. Henry (farm manager Henry Tha Won Phirachenchie) took us out there the other day, now I'd like to hear about it from you.
Well first of all I'd just like to say that Henry is a gem of a man. We're just so privileged to work with him. He is a positive, energetic guy, who's just very happy to be helping his people.


Did Henry give you the story of what he did before? Yes, he said he was a caretaker with his family for a bunch of orphans in Mae La, but not too too much.
Well, basically what happened is he started a school (in Mae La refugee camp) there's about 200 odd kids there and he started the school, and he funded the school entirely on his own. He worked for Princess Cruise Lines. And he has had Hep B since birth, lots of people in Mae La camp have it. They did testing after about four or so, four or five years of him being with Princess Cruise Lines, and they tested for hep B and he had Hep B and therefore he could no longer work. And so here he was left with the dormitory and the school and no funding. And this is where we kind of intersected our lives. I was very impressed with him when he was translating for us and I asked him if he would like to be the manager of our farm. And he was very very excited about that and he still is to this day. So that's kind of how we bumped into Henry.


So what we've done now is it's one year of operations, it's been a fairly intense year because it's a large farm, by Thai standards, and everything is basically done by hand. We do have a tractor there and we do have some automated equipment like the rice planter and we also plant beans with like the big rototiller, the iron ox I call it. But we've got plans to grow fish. We've got probably around 30,000 and 40,000 fish. We had bought just 10,000 catfish for the four little ponds you saw there. And the bigger pond is supposed to have 30,000 fish in it, I'm not sure how many are there actually.
We're learning as we go. There's, I think there's some serpent heads in there that et fish and so we, what we're planning on doing is just leave them as they are, pull them out and then we'll drain the pond and clean the bottom out and make sure there's no predators in there. So we can be more effective in that particular pond.

We've got a sort of makeshift irrigation system going right now. Obviously for the dry season we need to irrigate, and we'd like to set up a permanent irrigation system. Now they're just kind of hauling pipes around here and there and keeping things wet. When there's excess water they'll just flood the rice paddies and then they irrigate that way as well.

So our plans for the farm, we're building a workshop, storage area and a small office in the front of our property. They're putting footings down right now. So we're vying to do a workshop where we're hoping to train students in some vocational training like wood working and welding. Also, when we bring our teams over we'd like to do the construction of desks onsite as well. And we'll be working with an organization called Youth Connect, they're in Mae Sot. and they work with kids once they've got out of school. And some of those that don't succeed in school, like if there's a 17 or 18-year-old fellow and he's in grade 5 for example and he's not going to make it we'll try and get him trained up with welding or some of the other trades, electrical  or whatever, And so they can use our facility, and then we're going to store our equipment in the warehouse as well, and then we're hoping to, there's an organization called Compassion International, and they have excess materials in a warehouse in Victoria. Like when manufacturers have overproduction they get materials from them. So we can have the materials for free if we pay for shipping. And so we'd like to have a distribution centre there to be used for distribution out of the building as well. So those are our immediate plans. We'd like to have the farm as a profitable entity and we can use all of our profits in the borderline area.

What made you decide on starting a farm out here? Was it that you wanted to use the food, or to use the money out here and train people up?
Well Heather and myself have been on the grain farm out here for 30 some odd years, so we're familiar with farming. We also thought it would be something that would keep on giving if we, once we were gone, or not here anymore in a few years time. The farm will still be operating and still be generating income for people in need over there. It's just a sustainable kind of a thing where we can either provide food or we can provide funds for projects. And I think we're probably going to be doing both. We've planted fruit trees, and hopefully in a couple years we'll be producing a fairly large quantity of fruit that we can either sell or we can bring to the kids in the camp. There's no problem getting rid of food.

How long did it take to raise funds? This sounds like a big project for a young NGO.
We are a fairly young NGO, we registered in 2005. We've been very fortunate with some of the people who travel with us. Some of the business people really like what we're doing and they've joined in with us. So we've got large number of supporters in Saskatchewan, mostly. We've got a few in Alberta, but mostly in Saskatchewan. And some of the supporters will take on entire projects. The hog barn was built by a retired fellow from Roster, actually he lives in Hague, his business was in Roster, and he raised all of the funds to build hog barn. And so he was out there supervising the job with the local people, and he funded the netire barn. So we've had some very very good support. A lady from north of Pié, her husband farmed for most of his life, and he passed away a couple years ago and on his death bed he told his wife that she needed to share some of her funds with people that needed help. Their family donated a tractor and rototiller. It's just been that kind of thing where people have joined in and helped out.
How much does it all cost? 
The equipment, that's the tractor, it's a 70 horse power with a blade on it, we've got a rototiller, we've got a disc, and we've got something else, a corn planter, and I think that was around $37,000 for that. The land cost us around $200,000. The warehouse will probably be around $30,000, that they're building now. And Propera was around $30,000. So yeah, there's been a lot of contributions. (totals nearly $300,000)
And this is dollars, not baht?
No, we're talking dollars here... Part of the reason for our success is that all of our funds that we raise go right over to Thailand. We have less than one per cent is what I would say is going into accounting fees and stationery and that sort of stuff. Up to this point we have raised - 100 per cent of our money is going over to Thailand. I'm not certain we can continue doing that, but it will be very close to 100, it will be in the high 90s. For some organizations, and I don't criticize them because you do need to have full time staff when you hit a certain size, but we're small enough that we don't have any paid staff. Everyone pays for their own way, and all of the money that we raise goes to Thailand.

Do you or your wife have any development experience, or did you just take the plunge?
No we didn't. Actually we didn't anticipate it growing this quickly. But we've never done this kind of work before. So it's not just my wife and myself. At this point we've got a board of directors who've done a good amount of work when it comes to fundraising, so it's not just my wife and myself.

How many people do you expect to employ at the farm, and who are they going to be?
They're all going to be local workers. The amount of workers we employ varies. Like, during the harvest time everything they do is by hand, there's no swathers. So everything, all the beans are cut by hand. We have about 25 workers that work on the farm during harvest season. Then it cuts down, I think he's probably got about five or so. He's got roughly five working now, they're just putting on fertilizer and there's something they spray on the soybeans to get them to set nitrogen. They do that just by hand, by hand sprayers. So everything is done pretty much by hand.

Have you had any successes so far you'd like to tell me about?
Well, our rice harvest was quite successful. We're growing jasmine rice, that's for export. Henry is the one who decides what we're going to plant and he's very keen on trying to maximize our return. So he went for an export quality rice. We don't have it hulled yet, we're buying a rice huller within the next month or so. There's 280 bags and they weigh about 200 pounds each. They're really huge bags and they're all full of rice. We don't really know what we're going to get until it's been hulled. It's like an oat or a barley seed, it needs to be hulled before you can see the rice. So we're going to hull it and bag it and sell it. And the price has been fairly good, I think we would have had at least an average crop of rice.

The beans were, the green beans were fairly good. We had some issues with, there were some annual grasses or perrennial grasses growing in the field and they took away some of the yield. We've since found out that if you put Roundup on it it kills that quite significantly. So we've put Roundup on the piece that was grassy and it's quite nice and clean right now. So next year I think we're going to anticipate a bit better yield with the green beans, but the prices were really high this year.

Do you find that you're learning a lot about the difference in farming out here in the tropics and that in Saskatchewan?
Yeah there's a huge difference, there's no rest over there. In Saskatchewan when you finish the harvest you do your fall work, you basically put your equipment away and you wait for spring. You anticipate and you prepare for spring and do your planning. But over there you're already planning and doing your next crop before your crop is harvested, and as soon as you've got your crop off your working on getting another crop planted. So there is quite a difference there. Also with irrigation it's something that I'm not familiar with but and I'm not familiar with growing rice and some of the other crops there. But I do have some experience with some of it.

What is your background?
I'm also in real estate. We have some real estate properties that we still own. And I've done some land development. So we're self sufficient at this point, we're not needing to take income from donors for doing this kind of work, so we're self sufficient that way.

What are some of the problems with the project? Henry said when locals found out the farm was a foreigners' project they raised their prices, is that true?

Yeah the land prices all around us have quadrupled since we bought, so if you want to buy another piece of land you have to pay four times as much. And we were wanting to buy a small piece of land to put the warehouse and office on there, but we've since decided that the prices are too high now, so we're just going to put the warehouse on our own land. We do have a little bit of problems with the authorities, but not a lot. We're trying to work in conjunction with the Thai people, so we do have Thai people that work alongside us as well. It's not just foreigners and people from the migrant community. We do have people working with us and we're trying to work in conjunction with the head villager and – Apataw is his name and it's kind of like the district manager. So they're quite aware of what we're doing and we're trying to work in conjunction with them.

What did you do here during your February visit?
Well we had to make some decisions. We did the final design plans on the building at the rear of the property. Henry's going to live at the back, he's going to have residence there. We're going to have workers' accommodations, we want to be able to have four rooms for workers. We're going to have two rooms for kids from Mae La refugee camp. There's 12 kids who'd like to go to higher education next year so we're going to put them and a dining room and staff rooms there in the back.

Do you want to become firmly established as a Mae Sot NGO, or are you willing to help out in other borderline areas?
We would consider other locations. Right now we're quite fully engaged in this project. We're planning to do the sow operation at the Mae Tao farm, we'll be starting the sow barn within the next month. We'll be building the sow barn in Mae Sot and then the hog, the finishing barns in Saew Ki and Propera. Then taking the weanlings from the other barn and then we're hoping that they'll learn how to butcher hogs and then we don't have to sell them into the market, we'll actually butcher them. We'll butcher them in Mae Sot and in Propera. And just try to create as much industry as we can and employment for these people. So we want to have a value-added kind of proponent for it.

What is the big problem for the Karen?
The big problem is they need their land back. Until that happens we're really in a tough spot. These are stateless people. If they go back to Burma they're in serious trouble because of the political issues there. What needs to happen, and we've talked to the Canadian ambassador in Bangkok on a number of occassions, we're working hard to try to get some political solution to Burma. If we can do that then we could build on something that would be more predictable. Right now they do need education, but they do need their homeland is what they need. That's a tough thing, but for myself now if I were trying to farm in Sasksatchean and somebody would burn my house and chase me off the farm, and then put me in another country where I wasn't really appreciated then it would be very tough for me. The solution would be for me to get my farm back. It's the same for them.

Before the first time you came here did you know much about the Burmese situation or the Karen?
We knew absolutely nothing. That was one of the shockers for us. We thought we were fairly well acquainted with the issues in the world, but we had never heard of the 50 or 60 year civil war in Burma and the plight of the migrant people in the area. And it's more than just Karen too, there's many different ethnic tribes. There's the Shan and the Mon and there's East Indians and the Muslim community has also been removed from Burma, so they're in a plight as well.