school

Small girls and boys in a variety of traditional Karen costumes – girls wear striped, white, blue and yellow dresses, while boys wear red. It is Saturday morning and the children gather in front of their wooden school, a basic structure that lacks walled classrooms. The children are primarily students. On normal schooldays the students wear a uniform of white…

Parents of high school graduates in Three Pagoda Pass Town in Kyain Seikgyi Township, Karen State allege the headmistress of the school is demanding excessive fees for the university entrance exam application form. A parent of a high school graduate, said the going rate in Kyain Seikgyi Township is 2,500kyat a student, Daw Khin Hla Wai, the headmistress of Three…

Its early morning and grey mist and smoke from cooking fires covers the makeshift crowded bamboo huts that is Tham Thin refugee camp. Small girls and boys dressed in a combination of white collared shirts and blue short or skirts tag along side their as they turn up for the first day of the new school year. Tham Hin is…

One woman pro-democracy activist who took the Burma government’s invitation to return home seriously is Daw San Dar Win, a teacher, who works at Burma Migrant Education Department in the Thai border town of Mae Sot. Daw San Dar Win said that she returned to Burma for family reasons and not because of political motivation. “I contacted the Burma Embassy…

Banners with “Teachers for Gender Equality” written on them were hanging on both walls and on the stage at the Children Development Center, a migrant school in Mae Sot, a Thai town on the border between Thailand and Burma. The Children Development Center was hosting the 2011 World Teachers’ Day celebrations. Since 1994, World Teachers’ Day is held each year…

The heavy monsoon rains hammered the north of Thailand in early and middle August, breaking the banks of the Mae Sariang River in Mae Hong Song province and flooding two refugee camps and nearby villages. The floodwaters destroyed 400 houses in the camps, made 2,000 people homeless, destroyed 2,000 sacks of rice and hundreds of bags of other essential foodstuffs.…

Budget cuts affecting an educational INGO that operates in seven refugee camps along the Thai-Burmese border have put additional burdens on refugee families struggling to provide for their children’s schooling. An official at ZOA Refugee Care Thailand, a Netherlands-based NGO, said the organization faces severe funding cuts from major European donors that will affect the group’s support for teacher salaries…