A chorus of children’s voices echo from a bamboo hut on the edge of Oo Kray Kee village in Myanmar’s Karen state. Nea Po Chee wants to be a teacher when she grows up. “I want to continue to study in grade V — if we have grade V here,” says the 14-year-old, whose education continues to be interrupted by government forces in eastern Myanmar. “I need to learn more to be a teacher because I’d like my nation to become better educated.”
But as Nea Po Chee and 40 classmates finish their half-day of learning in the one-room school, ethnic Karen soldiers load their weapons in a nearby field preparing for another attack by Myanmarese troops. Sixteen months ago, the village was bombed and burnt down by government soldiers, leaving the villagers with nothing more than a few personal belongings as they fled their homes.
Constant displacement due to attacks by Myanmarese troops has left generations of children without a proper formal education — let alone a normal childhood, say aid workers. “Thousands of children are completely missing out on an education. In cases where they are on the run, the children often resort to learning in a jungle school which might simply be a blackboard set up under a tree, taught by older students,” explains Sally Thompson, deputy executive director of the Thai Burma Border Consortium (TBBC).
In 2009, more than 110,000 villagers in eastern Myanmar were displaced by military action, according to TBBC. In the same area, between 2002 and the end of last year, more than 580,000 civilians, most of them children, were forced from their homes. “I’d say there were as many as 30,000 persons displaced after the elections and many of them came across the border to the Thai side. In some parts of eastern Myanmar the education system has collapsed,” adds Thompson.
Government spending on education and health is the lowest in the region at just 1.6 percent of Myanmar’s gross domestic product, says a 2009 TBBC report, Protracted Displacement and Militarization in Eastern Burma. Much of the area remains without basic infrastructure such as roads and electricity following fighting between the ethnic Karen National Union, which has been seeking independence for decades, and the military government. In eastern Myanmar, fewer than half the children aged five to 13 attend school regularly, according to a 2010 report by the Karen Human Rights Group.
Meanwhile, there are no signs of the difficulties letting up, following the November 7 elections, described by many as a sham. Fighting is expected to increase as many ethnic groups have refused to lay down arms and join the government’s border guard forces. Still, for Eh Thwa, there remains a glimmer of hope. “If the situation is good and we have peace and democracy, I think it will develop.”
But just a day later her one-room school was closed down and most of the village’s 300 residents were again on the run, living beneath plastic sheets in the jungle.
(Excerpted and adapted from www.irinnews.org)