A Monastic School in Mandalay: Providing Service at a time of Hardship
The following story comes to us as part of the ongoing Meditator Gratitude Campaign. A volunteer teacher spoke to one of our team members about the hardship of a monastic education post-primary school in Mandalay. On behalf of the Abbot of the monastic school, she said as below:
"Our monastic school is mainly a post-primary education school in Mandalay for the high school grades. Most of the students are the children from different ethnicities, Pa-O, Pa-laung, Shan, Kachin, Chin, Wa and Rakkhine. The rest are local Bamar children of poor people from nearby villages. In the last 2018-2019 academic year before the COVID-19 outbreak and schools closure, there were 700 children whom the monastic school provides with not only free education but also with accommodation, food, clothes and health care.
The abbot of the monastery takes the responsibility to support the stipends of the volunteer teachers as well as their food. The monastery provides all the boarding children with three meals and pays for the cost of health care and treatments; the volunteer teachers or assistant monks take a child to the nearest clinic when he or she is sick and unhealthy. Local donors usually donate stationery and learning materials for the children and sometimes it is truly a help when they donate for a meal or a day.
However, this is mostly occasional. When the COVID outbreak in country, the Ministry of Health directed all the monastic schools, Parahita (charity) orphanages and nunneries to obey the precautionary measures but it was quite a challenge and impossible to obey all of them due to insufficient facilities such as the buildings (including bathrooms and toilets) and mainly food as well.
Thus, the abbot was sadly supposed to send these boarding children back to their ethnic areas which are mostly remote and undeveloped. Currently, the monastery still provides accommodation and food for the volunteer teachers (even some of them are from ethnic areas and they were raised and educated by the abbot) and the local poor children with novices as well as some ethnic children from the unstable conflict zones due to the frequent armed clashes between the military and ethnic armed forces.
Due to the political situations, the children from remote and ethnic areas cannot come back to school to study. Also, due to the pandemic, the local donors in the country can scarcely donate food and the kind-hearted abbot is now struggling hard to take all the responsibilities to keep providing food and health care for all these remaining children. For all these reasons, I would like to present all the situations in the badly need of food and health-care aids in our monastery to you all. Please consider a contribution of any amount to support this noble need. "