A light at the end of a tunnel is usually a train
My love for trains is comparable to Dr. Sheldon Cooper’s. I absolutely adore everything about them, it’s still a mystery to me why would anyone choose another transportation option at all! In trains you have time to think through all your unfinished thoughts, you can eat great local food from small plastic bags that you have bought reaching out from the train window frame, you can hang out the train doors or windows as these are not present so you could enjoy the weather and the local life passing by. And when you are in one of the British Colonial era trains you can easily see yourself being one with the nature as there is a large gap between the wagons where there is no place for people with short legs and where you can see the rails whistling below „Have a good journey!“ to you. What’s not to love!
Traveled back to Mandalay last weekend to meet with the Board of Ayeyarwaddy International School. Of course it was by train and I could carry on with the ode to the trains for a good couple of pages but I’d probably lose at least half of my readers, so I won’t. Mandalay, after the small town of Hsipaw, after the village of Namlan, not my first choice of these options anymore. Being a cool city nevertheless it’s hard to be back among crowds, in a vocal nightlife that will force into the hotel room and tuk-tuk drivers who unfortunately know by just looking at you that you might be one of those people who has no sense of direction what-so-ever and will drive you around and round and round. Well, I got to see a lot of the city and at least couple of blocks from Mandalay can from now on be explored blindsided.
Ayeyarwaddy International School is everything that a school can be. It has a large area with all the playgrounds and sports fields one could wish for. There are 5 stories in the complex where the last floor is the hotel for long-term foreign teachers with the rooftop view over Mandalay. There are even thermal cameras in the entrance gates so that no corona could pass! It’s logical that different schools and areas have different possibilities and if you have the opportunity to build up an awesome growing environment, a full campus for approximately thousand students and faculty members then that is a big win for the whole community. I learned a lot from Dr. Gary Robson and the local founder U Aung Ko Latt who just wished a better education and a better environment for his own children eight years ago when he started the school. And now, the results are visible from every corner: his own daughter is now getting a University degree from an ivy league school in U.S. and his son is about to apply for abroad next year.
For rural areas education options can unfortunately vary quite immensely from a small private school to none at all. One village has the monastery, the next village will build a school and they would share both. But with Mandalay and Yangon being exceptions, education as practiced in Myanmar is still considered by most outsiders to be „a flagrant violation of its purpose elsewhere“ (Nov.14, 2018; Myanmar Times). And it is true that standards of achievement have dropped significantly even as the number of schools has radically expanded. Due to the circumstances, political situation over the past decades and underinvestments in the education sector Myanmar generally lags a little behind other countries in the region on education indicators.
We have been working on the status overview of the area to map education options and possibilities and that includes a lot of background numbers for my great pleasure. A number goes further than a word, especially when it’s a huge number. Myanmar had the population census in 1983 and is was 35,4 million people counted at that time. During the next decades there were only estimations made and by 2014 the sentiment was that there are more than 60 million people in the country. The actual result, much to their own surprise, was the population of 53 million. 7 million here and there, right? Being Estonians, we might not recognize the scale of this as we tend to proudly correct foreigners when they round our population to 1,3 million (it’s 1,33 million).
Children in Myanmar and especially in Shan State are often employed in a young age to work in their family businesses on the land which is why a large portion of people only have compulsory primary education completed. But not only the need for extra pair of working hands is affecting Shan State children’s access to education, income plays also a huge role in everyday life for many households. According to the Integrated Household Living Conditions Assessment (IHLCA), about 46% of the population in Shan East and 36% of Shan North were estimated to be living below the poverty line. Therefore more than every third household is struggling to ensure a child’s well-being and to enable them for having access to quality education, health care, water and sanitation.
Only a small amount of numbers still to come, I promise. According to the 2014 census, 71% of 5 to 9-year-old students attended primary school in Myanmar. 76% of 10 to 13-year-old students were attending middle school and 51% of 14 to 15 year-old students went to high school. These indicators differ quite a lot between urban and rural outcomes: of the rural population aged 25 and over, 53% have never been to school. Among those aged 25 and over, 11% have completed primary school (grade 5) and only 3% have completed university/college education.
CRED sees an opportunity and even a need here, their wish is to start changing these numbers vice versa, the aim is to offer more students the possibility for education while living in a healthy environment suitable for school attendance as they are the founders of Namlan Boarding House and will cooperate with the planned new school. They are working towards establishing a private school where teacher-student ratio would be twice as low as in a public school and where besides regular subjects that follow the government’s curriculum, English is taught as thoroughly as native language. That would widen the possibilities for the future for many children regardless which path they’d end up choosing: University education, international work market or continuing agricultural developments in their home village.
We are already in the middle of creating a strong business plan for a new private school, the next steps include financial planning and prognosis, finding funding possibilities and build up a cooperation network for teacher exchange program. Therefore I’ll travel 8 hours to a beautiful city called Pyin Oo Lwin this weekend to meet Lotus Garden International School’s Board and one of its leading teachers Elisabeth Faulkner. One can not guess wrong which transportation I would choose to do that.
Teng kau!
(Võta veel riisi!)
