Falling in love with Burma seems to be an occupational hazard with anyone who’s been exposed to the country for any length of time.  And that’s what happened with Dutch businessman Charlie Hilm who has spent 40 years in Asia but somehow it was Burma that claimed his heart.  “I know the Asian smile”, he says, “but in Burma the smile is genuine, sweet, real.”

Hilm has an old-world courtesy, and is quite a raconteur, full of stories about an Asia of times past  He's also the driving force behind Flying Teachers in Burma.  The project builds schools in the Irrawady Delta, a region devastated by the 2008 Cyclone Nargis.  He's also got further ambitions for a mobile clinic to service the remote villages of the area.

Rejects luxury retirement
Charlie Hilm lives in a luxurious canal house in Amsterdam, and he could have spent an easy retirement enjoying the fruits of an obviously successful career.  But his Burma projects have obviously hijacked any plans of relaxing in his perfectly manicured garden.

He started brokering sources for the garment industry in Asia long before it became a global norm.  When Japan, Korea and Taiwan were looking to outsource their production, Hilm went to Burma in 1992 to sniff out possibilities.   At that time, the country was still free of international, boycotts, and it was far cheaper to produce goods in Burma than in the neighbouring Asian tigers.

Code of ethics
Hilm pioneered the general application of codes of ethics to the factories he dealt with, so it’s not surprising that he now chooses to spend a good chunk of his retirement working for the people of a country he loves.  He’s gone back to his former profession of photography and fundraises for the schools in Burma by selling his photos and books, as well as working his considerable contacts.  The projects in Burma are all done in partnership with one of the most senior and revered monks in the country, Sitagu Sayadaw.  

The 400,000 monks of Burma comprise the only institution in the country that comes close to rivalling the infrastructure of the all pervasive Burmese army.  Monks are tremendously venerated in Burmese society, and almost every Burmese male spends some part of his life as a monk.
In 2008, Cyclone Nargis killed between an estimated 130,000 to 200,000 people and rendered homeless many hundreds of thousands.  While the military junta did almost nothing to come to the help of the people, monks from around the country mobilized immediately, delivering food and clothes, disposing of the thousands of corpses in the water and the fields and clearing the roads of the cities and towns.

Smuggled in saffron robes
And immediately after the disaster, Charlies Hilm then in Amsterdam, also sprang into action.  He got on the phone to his extensive contacts network in the garment business and within a couple of months, 100,000 items of clothing had been delivered to Burma.  Though hundreds of containers of aid were stalled in the ports of Rangoon, delayed by an obstreperous bureaucracy, Hilm’s containers were cleared by influential local businessmen who were devotees of Sitagu.  And Hilm himself, got a visa and was even smuggled onto the aid trucks, disguised in saffron robes and sunglasses, with his cameras in garbage bags, taking clandestine photos of the operation.

Hilm tries to stay away from politics, partly because he doesn’t want his trips back or his projects to be blocked.  But he is firm about one political opinion:  “sanctions or boycotts don’t work”.  He knows it from personal experience.  He was in the region when Dutch protestors boycotted sales of Triumph lingerie.  The factory in Rangoon shut down, and 4000 women were out of work.  “Each worker in Burma has roughly ten dependents”, says Hilm, “that means 40,000 people were in trouble because of that boycott. It convinced me that sanctions don’t affect the government, they don’t affect regime change – they just hurt the ordinary people.”