Yangon, Once Frozen in Time, Inches Forward

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/world/asia/videos-from-yangon-myanmar.html

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Yangon’s skyline, punctuated by golden pagodas and the steel skeletons of new development, is a scene of picturesque disrepair and halting progress as Myanmar emerges from decades of military rule that seemed to freeze the country in time. Colonial facades crumble next to new buildings painstakingly constructed mostly by men, not machines. Recently imported cars idle on congested, often flooded, streets. And the Internet — largely unrestricted since 2011 — remains hobbled by frequent and unpredictable outages.

</param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="seamlessTabbing" value="false"></param><param name="swliveconnect" value="true"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><param name="quality" value="high"></param><param name="bgcolor" value="#000000"></param></object><h6 class="credit">By Chelsi Moy</h6><p itemprop="articleBody" class="caption">Enrollment is rising at the Aung Thawada Nunnery School on the northern border of Yangon. The nuns, whose ages range from 9 to 94, join for a variety of reasons, including to escape poverty or abuse.

The city’s squat skyline mirrors the country’s transition: It swells with new opportunity, but remains arrested by poor infrastructure, sectarian tensions, outmoded gender roles and the debilitating effects of a long-broken education system. Myanmar’s political transition may signal progress, but whether it brings the societal transformation that many hope for remains to be seen.

<em>These videos were produced in collaboration with The Center for Digital TV and the World, a project of The Tides Center and UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.</em>