Myan­mar is hav­ing a grow­ing prob­lem with ille­gal gam­bling in the coun­try. Peo­ple who are earn­ing only 1 to 3 US dol­lars a day are spend­ing large por­tions of their money on the ille­gal num­bers games. Many of the poor are lured into the gam­bling with dreams of big win­nings and a way out of their lives in poverty.

Pros­e­cu­tion of the gam­bling is dif­fi­cult because most police in Myan­mar can be bought off with a bribe, some receive a cut of the money if the win­ner is from their patrol.

From IRIN, we learn more about the gam­bling from NGO’s who are wit­ness­ing the problem.

On the streets of Yan­gon, the for­mer cap­i­tal, the so-called “two dig­its” ille­gal lot­tery is so pop­u­lar that devel­op­ment work­ers call it one of the most seri­ous prob­lems fac­ing the chil­dren of poor fam­i­lies. It is espe­cially pop­u­lar among the poor­est, who can least afford to lose their daily wages of US$1-$3.

Agents will­ing to take bets are every­where — in cities, mar­ket towns and rural areas across South­east Asia’s second-largest nation of 58 mil­lion. But there is no social safety net, noth­ing to stop a fam­ily from going under when the bet­ting losses add up.

“They bet because they think they’ll get a big win, and then their trou­bles will be over,” said a Burmese com­mu­nity worker, who runs self-help groups for poor women liv­ing in tem­po­rary shel­ters around Yangon.

”When they’ve lost every­thing they must give up their house, take their chil­dren out of school and send them to work. Often they will end up begging.”

Myanmar’s cit­i­zens are no bet­ter off now than 20 years ago, and most sub­sist on an aver­age annual income of less than $200 per capita, the US State Depart­ment reports.

Accord­ing to a 2005 UN Devel­op­ment Pro­gramme (UNDP) house­hold sur­vey, one-third of Myanmar’s pop­u­la­tion lives below the poverty line.

Infla­tion is adding to the eco­nomic bur­den, with the price of rice, for exam­ple, up by 30 per­cent over the past year alone.

In an exten­sive sur­vey by an inter­na­tional NGO, Myan­mar chil­dren cited gam­bling as one of their biggest problems.

This story hits home for me, because we just decided to stop play­ing the legal lot­tery here in our home state of Michi­gan. Even those of us who are not poor will dream of hav­ing more. But those “dreams” seem pretty self­ish in com­par­i­son to those who only earn a dol­lar a day.

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