By Jesse Gordon
Naw Paw Ray, a Burmese refugee, has been living illegally in Thailand for 18 years. This year she will finally secure her Thai citizenship and can travel freely on a temporary passport. On her first trip, this November, she came to Topanga.
PHOTO BY JESSE GORDON  Naw Paw Ray (center in beanie) with 1st and 2nd Graders at MUSE Elementary. Kids left to right: Sam Harcourt-Roland, Samuel Gordon, Josie Jennings, Sofia DeLory, Cassidy DuToit, Lauren Dawson, Luna Harcourt-Roland, Ryan McGurk, Ely Carroll. In back row teachers Erin Terzieff and Elena Perez. |
The path that led her here is as complicated as it is moving and involves three stories: one of a country crushed by a brutal dictatorship; another of a self-made educator who, against all odds, has touched the lives of thousands; and a third, about the global stewardship of a tiny private school nestled in the mountains of Los Angeles.
Paw Ray spent several days of her trip at MUSE Elementary. She met with parents, teachers and administrators, but seemed most at home in the classrooms where she sang songs with the children, told stories and listened. Her relaxed manner, both firm and fun-loving, totally captivated the young Californians. A tiny woman with a wide smile, Paw Ray may be a natural "kid person," but she also has a lot of practice visiting schools; when in Thailand, she visits four or five a month. The organization she founded and directs, BMWEC (Burmese Mirgrant Workers Education Committee), runs 55 schools, employs 547 teachers and has a student body of approximately 10,000 children.
At the age of 13, Paw Ray watched her village burn down. It was in the Karen province in Eastern Burma, the home of an ethnic minority frequently targeted by the military junta that rules that country (which they renamed Myanmar). When Paw Ray tells the story of her village, she focuses on one image in particular–that of her schoolhouse in flames. She and her family–like so many other "Internally Displaced" Burmese–escaped to the jungle. When she finally made it to Thailand, she was in her mid-twenties and had three children of her own. As illegal "migrants," her children could not enroll in Thai schools. Nor could the hundreds of other kids Paw Ray saw around her neighborhood, often living on the streets. "When I saw these children, they reminded me of myself at an earlier age," she says. "I was sad that they did not have any way to study. I wanted to give them an opportunity that I didn't have."
Paw Ray's first school, which she opened in 1999, was housed in a small bamboo hut and had 25 students between the ages of 3 and 12. "The school was a home and the home was a kitchen and the kitchen was a classroom," is how she describes it. She and the students rose at 5 a.m., cooked food for the day, then cleared the space and set out tables for study. At the end of the school day, they cleared the tables and put down mats to sleep on. Indeed, from the beginning, Paw Ray's schools have been about more than just education. "I saw the kids needed a busy educational life to protect themselves from drugs and human trafficking," she said. "They needed to learn and to be safe when their parents went away to work." In addition to academics, her 55 schools provide health care, security, food, and, in many cases, housing for their students.
These needs become clearer in the context of the refugee culture that exists along the Thai-Burmese border, and particularly in the city of Mae Sot, where Paw Ray lives. Under the current Burmese regime, which has one of the worst human rights records on the planet, more than two million Burmese have been, like Paw Ray's family, "internally displaced." Since 2004, more than 3,000 villages in the Karen province alone, have been razed to the ground. If refugees are lucky enough not to be either murdered or enslaved by the military, they may be able to escape Burma's borders. In Thailand their choices are only slightly better. They may enter one of several refugee camps which, though sanctioned by the Thai government, are themselves internationally recognized as human disaster zones. Or they may fend for themselves as illegal migrants along the border. If parents are lucky enough to find employment on farms or in factories, the hours are usually brutally long; the word, "slavery," also comes up to describe these work conditions. Their children, meanwhile, are often left uncared for and vulnerable to a variety of diseases and human predators. Stories involving working in the sex industry, forced begging, drugs, abduction and kids-for-sale, are rampant.
"It's a survival situation," says Erin Terzieff, a teacher at MUSE, who has also taught in schools in both Burma and along the Thai border. "Kids are at about 60 percent normal body-weight in Mae Sot, but in the classroom you see that their minds are working exactly the same as our kids at MUSE. They are really creative, artistic, funny; they love to act and read and laugh. But outside of school you realize that life is a very precious commodity on this border. Every time I come back, kids are missing. You have to wonder where they've gone."
Terzieff, along with the MUSE's founder Suzy Amis Cameron, started the MUSE Global Program in 2007. The idea, she says, was to "Teach through a global lens and create cultural exchange on an educational level." Working as a kind of educational ambassador, she arranges interchange between the Good Morning School, one of Paw Ray's institutions in Mae Sot; Mana Tamariki, a Maori immersion school in New Zealand; and MUSE here in Topanga. As an example of the program's effects, in the wake of Paw Ray's visit, energized first- and second-graders at MUSE wrote letters to Auung San Suu Ky, the democracy leader long held under house arrest in Burma, as well as President Obama, thanking him for supporting her release (see note below). Through donations, MUSE has additionally provided the yearly operating costs of the Good Morning School for the past two years.
"This is a great thing and very lucky for the Good Morning School," Paw Ray says. Though she acknowledges the value of "learning about American culture and American discipline," and that MUSE has inspired her to "set up new programs and use new strategies," she consistently returns to the bottom line: "Without MUSE's support, maybe these children would not be in school." Speaking with her, it becomes clear that Paw Ray's stakes in her work are existentially high, both in terms of saving young lives and in terms of her homeland. "When we get freedom in Burma, we have to go back to our own land," she says. "For the next generation, the most important [thing] is to teach them Burmese language and culture. If we lose our language and our culture, we lose our nation."
Though Paw Ray's voice is soft and her English careful, one can hear her strength and deep conviction come through in her words. Indeed, as the enormous growth of her BMWEC organization proves, her brand of educational activism has come a long way in a relatively short time. It is easy to forget that, despite her warmth and humility, Paw Ray is the CEO of a very large organization and engaged in many levels of outreach and fundraising. In 2007, she was elected to the prestigious Ashoka Fellowship. In 2008, she was visited by Laura Bush, as well as a delegation of Nobel Peace Prize winners. "Many of us believe that she will win a Nobel Prize herself; or at least she deserves to," says Terzieff. Her mission is simple and clear: the more support she can attract, the more schools she can open; the more schools she can open, the more kids she can educate and protect. "It's hard to keep track of everything I'm doing now, but I know exactly that I am working for the kids, for the next generation," she affirms. "Education is the key to everything. A country, a community, grows up with the children it has educated. Without good education our countries and our communities might fail."
In her area of the world, wherever Paw Ray sees need, she opens a school. "She goes where no-one else will, often at great personal danger," asserts Terzieff. "There are no real rules. She makes things happen first, then deals with the policies and the fiscal realities later."
Meanwhile, Paw Ray still lives in the boarding house on the campus of the first school she founded (which has now been expanded to include an orphanage). "I have no home. Perhaps my home is in Heaven only," she says cheerfully. "I live with 200 kids. This is my house and my family's house. My children sleep with the boarding house children. We are all the same–the same family." According to Terzieff, in the city of Mae Sot, any child you speak with knows Paw Ray. "They call her �Mother,'" she says.
Even though the kids in Topanga probably don't call her "Mother," now they know her too.
On November 17, 2009, President Obama became the first US President to meet with the 10 leaders of ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations). During the meeting he urged Myanmar/Burma's prime minister, Thein Sein, to release Aung San Suu Kyi, as well as other political prisoners in his country. This is a very important step in the path to freedom for Myanmar/Burma. For more information on this, or to write a letter of support, visit amnestyUSE.org. For more information on MUSE Global, visit museelementary.org. For more information on Naw Paw Ray and her work, visit ashoka.org or bmwec.org.
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