Community Schools in Sagaing Region
A message from one of our team members in the field about an urgent need to re-establish education in the Sagaing region, for those donors who wish to support such an initiative!
There’s no need to expand on how Sagaing has struggled against the military regime for the freedom and democratic self-determination of the people. Sagaing has strongly demonstrated that the people there do not accept the military coup which deposed the NLD government and parliamentary members elected by the 2020 General Elections. [Redacted] township is located in the triangle area bordering the Mandalay region and Magway Region. Its local People’s Defense Forces could mostly stand up to the Myanmar military who wrongly thought that they could easily oppress them. These days, news sources on the ground are telling us that Sagaing’s defense forces have been able to establish a people’s administration in those places where the military has not been able to control the area. Our friends who are living in that area have told us that schools have been opened again by the respective people’s administration committees in some villages through the help of CDM teachers who have taken refuge in these areas under the protection of LDFs and PDFs there. Some people from our township are even saying that areas there are no longer under the control of the SAC and have become like free zones! However, there are still many challenges for them even though they have not seen any sign of the movements of the SAC’s troops and forces these days. The teachers in these areas have openly appealed to me to call for help from any willing donors as they urgently need funds for those re-opened schools so that the many children there can attend, after being deprived of an education for so long. First, these coordinators must build some temporary shelters for the children’s learning such as bamboo huts in those PDF-controlled villages, as they cannot use the government school campuses as in other villages. In some villages, they are using the existing government school campuses to teach the children as the respective LDFs and PDFs have control of that area, but in other places, this is not possible, especially after the Burmese military took over some schools as operating bases.
Second, although they have re-opened the schools after a break of two years since the COVID-19 outbreak began, most of the students have no textbooks for their present grades because the schools were closed just before the 2019-2020 school year started. At this moment, the teachers are managing this problem by sharing old textbooks from students who passed a specific grade in the 2018-2019 academic year. However, there is still a township-wide need for textbooks in the schools in most of the villages.
Please consider contributing a donation to help these children in Sagaing return to school!