Learning To Be Free
Coming Soon…
This episode, the first in a two-part series, brings together four distinct yet connected voices from Mae Sot, a border town filled with exiled students, teachers, and activists who continue to build fragments of their former lives amid displacement. Their testimonies trace the fine line between despair and endurance. They speak not with hope but with endurance, each voice revealing how survival, study, and persistence have become acts of quiet defiance.
Ben's story begins in a Mon village where poverty and cultural erasure defined daily life. When his father died, he nearly left school because the cost of books and uniforms was impossible. He describes showing up to class ashamed of his worn clothes and aware that other children saw Mon education as inferior. “Many people say that going to the Mon national schools is nothing," he notes, "like there's no use for it in the future.” Although these Mon National Schools were dismissed as outdated or irrelevant, to him they were a place of safety— a way to keep identity alive. He describes how Mon children studied their language alongside Burmese, learning to read their own history and culture while the national curriculum sought to erase it. And so in this way, the schools allowed him to see that education was not just about advancement but about remembering who they were. He recalls friends who dropped out, others who changed their names to sound Burmese, and some who moved away believing they had to hide their background to be accepted. For Ben, his success as a student in Thailand now carries a collective weight: he feels responsible for showing that Mon schools can produce skilled, articulate graduates who carry both pride and purpose. He continues to support Mon teachers from abroad, helping them find resources and organize classes for displaced students.
Pink’s account unfolds more haltingly, shaped by grief and fatigue. She had nearly finished her degree when the coup overturned everything. “It was like our dreams are all gone just one day," she says. Classes stopped, the campus filled with fear, and her professors were forced to choose between silence and exile. She describes the feeling of losing years of work overnight, of watching classmates accept degrees from the junta’s institutions while she refused. For her, taking a degree from them would mean complicity. She explains that she spent months caught between guilt and anger—fighting with her family, crying at night, and trying to imagine a future that no longer existed. Leaving Myanmar felt like betrayal and escape at the same time. Crossing into Thailand, she says, she could finally breathe but also felt the loneliness of starting over. In Chiang Mai, she returned to her studies, this time focusing on international relations, channeling her frustration into activism. "Education is not only about formulas and numbers; it's about values and attitudes,” she says. Pink continues to gather information about the situation back home and supports community networks that fund scholarships and aid for displaced students. Though she admits she does not feel hopeful, her determination to keep studying is unbroken. She believes education is meaningless without moral grounding and says that what drives her now is not optimism but necessity.
Before the coup, John was known for his activism at the University of Yangon, part of a generation that questioned both military power and the failures of democratic leadership. He speaks about the tension of being criticized even under the NLD government, and of organizing protests that drew hostility from peers who accused them of being too radical. "They killed every Rohingya, and Aung San Suu Kyi stands with the military. There's genocide!” he exclaims. “The people from all over the country worship the leader… [Yet] there is no supreme savior.” After the coup, however, however, those same peers sought his help, realizing the truth of what he had warned about. John's story moves quickly from protest to persecution. He describes the fear of constant surveillance, hiding in his hometown, and eventually escaping across the border. In Thailand, he has rebuilt his activism through design, creating posters and graphics for resistance campaigns and fundraising efforts. The digital space became his new street— his way of continuing protest from exile. John now spends nights editing videos and crafting symbols that circulate among those still fighting inside Myanmar. He says creativity keeps him sane, that art is both message and weapon, a way to hold people together when everything else is falling apart. Yet John also admits that everyone he knows is tired, though insists they cannot stop, because stopping would mean defeat.
Professor Wei Yan Linn was once a lecturer in philosophy at Yangon University, but after the coup, he joined the Civil Disobedience Movement as one of the first educators to refuse cooperation with the junta. He describes the quiet solidarity that spread through academic circles in the early days— teachers burning their appointment letters, students refusing to attend class. He watched colleagues disappear, some imprisoned, others fleeing to the border. His own dismissal came quickly, followed by months of hiding before escaping to Thailand. Now in exile, Wei Yan Linn teaches small groups of students in borrowed rooms, many without documents or steady income. He says the work keeps him alive— the continuation of teaching as a moral act, not a profession. When he speaks of history, he draws a line from past generations of student uprisings to the present, calling it one long resistance. He believes that even stripped of institutions, Myanmar’s intellectual spirit survives in exile. For him, education remains the most powerful form of resistance against tyranny. And despite the ordeal he has gone through, he insists that he would make the same choice again, even knowing the cost. “I will not be changing my decision, I stay strong in fighting for democracy for Myanmar,” he says.
When the voices fade, what remains is the sense of people who refuse to let silence win. Their stories are not hopeful; they are weary and exacting, marked by clarity that comes only from loss. Each of them—teacher, student, activist—continues to study, speak, and create in the shadow of collapse. In that persistence, the line between survival and resistance disappears.