As the new year begins, the team at AMS are getting out and into the field to visit some of our supported development projects throughout Asia and the Pacific.
My past four days in Thailand I have seen the challenges that Burmese face in Thailand as they seek a better life for themselves and their families. I have heard stories of horror and great tragedy so it was with some trepidation that I ventured across the border from Ranong into Kawthaung – located on the southernmost tip of Myanmar. As a frontier town, Kawthaung is a hotbed of human trafficking and houses a desperate population who often move between the two border towns in search of new opportunities to stave off destitution.
Fr Kevin and I boarded the rickety boat and off we took for the 45-minute crossing. Water sloshed at our feet while I spotted old bicycle tyres that were tied onto the boat to be used as a lifebuoy in case of emergency. Great I thought. Three Thai immigration checkpoints later we pulled up to the shores of Myanmar and were handed our lifejackets with a cheeky toothless grin by our ‘captain’.
Once on land we jumped on a motorbike and headed off to meet Sr Josephine RNDM and her community of five Burmese Sisters that Lenity Australia support. In that short trip around town I noticed that this corner of Myanmar is home to a great array of ethnicities, religions and cultures. I was told that Burmese people do not say they are Burmese, they say they are Shan, or Karen, or Rohingya, indicating the ethnic group they belong to within Myanmar. This was evident in Kawthaung were tens of thousands of internal migrants and refugees call home.
The Sisters are on the frontline and have seen it all. Husbands who return from months on a fishing boat and engage with sex workers at the ports and then come home and pass on HIV to their wife; families moving five or six times across the border seeking work and a better life; children in the villages being targeted by traffickers and smuggled onto boats bound for Thailand. To combat this they operate two centres: one a free health clinic where anyone can receive free medication and where HIV positive patients can receive individual and group support, the other an education centre for children and young women.
There is a great stigma associated with HIV AIDS that people are shunned by their families and marginalized by the community. Many feel great shame even coming to seek help. Sr Rosa is a nurse who runs this program and facilitates weekly meetings to provide a social support service to these people. In addition to this HIV service, Rosa travels out to palm and rubber plantations and offers free treatment to the workers and families. Men, women and children work in these plantations ten hours a day and live in tiny shacks without any sanitation facilities, running water or electricity. The little money they earn goes direct to feeding the family and as a result they can’t afford medical treatment, even for serious illness. The service that Rosa provides gives these banished people a lifeline.
Kevin and I then walked down the street with Josephine to the building where the Sisters operate their education programs. Due to the sparsity of schools in Kawthaung, schools are broken into two sessions, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, with children attending one of these sessions. What this means is that great numbers of children are at home or on the streets during the day while they are not in class and their parents are working. The Sisters provide tuition and classes for children from preschool to primary to keep them safe during the day and to improve upon the poor level of education that is received in the government schools.
In the same building Josephine introduced me to the sewing students. Looking around the room I saw 12 girls and young women, some as young as 16, working intently on their sewing machines. This program is so simple yet helps these young women in a variety of ways. They receive three to six months of training and are then offered work in the centre for anywhere up to three years. They gain real skills that they can turn into employment and an income, and crucially, they are kept safe. Josephine took me aside and gently told me some of these girls stories. It was heartbreaking but one story really stuck with me. One young lady had lived in Ranong with her family until her father died one day. Her Mum and siblings tried to pack up and move back across the border as her father had unpaid debts. Over a year later they finally made it to Kawthaung after being forced to work in Ranong in order to pay off their fathers debts. Once back in Kawthaung the Sisters took this young lady in and trained her in sewing and now she works at the centre making pillowcases, uniforms and clothing. Most of the money she earns she sends to her Mum who is living in a village outside of Kawthaung. The Sisters plan to give her one of the sewing machines in the future so she is able to start her own tailoring business.
I stewed over this story on the boat ride back to Ranong. I couldn’t even imagine the torment this young lady has gone through in her short life so far. How can you have hope in such a dire predicament? Surely the world would appear to be against you. But then I think what a ray of hope the Sisters in Kawthaung, the Fathers in Ranong, and all the other NGO’s out there must be to people like this young lady. All we see on the news is hate and sad stories, but if we dig deeper there are people out there changing lives and changing this world for the better. I think we need to hear these stories more.
As I finish up this days blog I am looking through my notes and realise I made an error while typing this. The young lady whose story I just recalled, well, she is a young lady but to my mind that indicates someone in their early 20’s.But what my notes tell me that she was not early 20’s, but only sixteen. 16.
Written by: Ashley Bulgarelli, AMS Projects Coordinator
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