The school bus bringing education for all

The school bus bringing education for all

By Fiona Macgregor   |   Sunday, 26 January 2014

With a rev and a jolt the small green bus – unremarkable except for the pictures of smiling children on its sides – sets off into Yangon's rush-hour traffic.

A child sits in the first myMe classroom bus on January 18. (Aung Htay Hlaing/The Myanmar Times)

The vehicle belongs to the Myanmar Mobile Education Project, or myME, and as it makes its way through the busy streets towards a large teashop in the city centre, 60 or so excited boys and young men are already gathering at the tables. They have been waiting on all day, preparing themselves for its arrival.

Among them is 13-year-old Ko Thet Myo Thet. Earlier this month he was sent by his parents from his home village in the Ayeyarwady delta to work in a Yangon teashop because they could no longer afford to send him to school.

He is a solidly built boy but his round-face, streaked with thanaka, cannot hide his nervousness at being in such new surroundings. His words are halting and even when he laughs he looks as if he could start crying at any moment.

"I'd finished fifth grade when I had to leave school to come here," he eventually says.

"I was so sad when I had to leave school. I wanted to become a nurse when I grew up."

Ko Thet Myo Thet is waiting for the bus to arrive so he can continue his interrupted education. The vehicle is a mobile classroom, part of a new initiative aimed at bringing the school to young teashop workers who miss out on education because poverty has forced them into the workforce at a young age.

"I don't know the words to describe the feeling inside me when I found out I was going to be able to start studying again," he says, explaining how his eyes filled with tears when he was asked if he wanted to continue his education with myME.

Sitting aboard the bus, at the specially constructed wooden tables and benches where the students attend classes, are project founder and director Tim Aye Hardy, its full-time teacher, Daw Margaret Kim, and a volunteer assistant teacher, Ma Win Kyu Kyu.

Mr Aye Hardy, a former 88 Generation student and human rights activist who left Myanmar in 1989, was living in New York last year when he came up with the idea of offering teashop children in his homeland the chance to study by bringing the school to them with specially converted buses. Together with a group of friends in the US, he started fundraising and returned to Myanmar in November to conduct a pilot project and get the first myME classroom bus on the road.

If the vehicle is the epitome of innovative design – the door to the driver's compartment also serves as a white-board, the tables and benches can be easily folded away for less formal sessions and cutely patterned curtains, tinted glass and an insulated roof prevent the vehicle from overheating – but the sentiment the project best embodies is hope.

myMe was officially launched in Yangon on January 18, four weeks after classes began. So many young people had already signed up for the thrice-weekly sessions in maths, Myanmar and English that the main classes are now taking place in the teashops themselves after they close at 5.30pm. The bus classroom, parked outside, is used for teaching those still learning the most basic aspects of literacy and numeracy.

"We'd aimed for a total of about 60 pupils for this pilot stage, but that's already doubled to around 120," says Mr Aye Hardy.

While most of the students are teenagers, this is not always the case. Ko Aye Ko, a 22-year-old bus driver who left school when he was 10, is enrolled in the English classes. Ko Aung Ko Oo, 24, is in the Myanmar class and appreciating the chance to make up for some of the education he missed out on having been sent to work as child. A heavy set man with large, broad features, he appears out of scale to the small desks and benches in the bus as he practises writing numbers in Myanmar. But he is grateful to be there – and glad his younger colleagues will not have to reach adulthood unable to read or write, as he did.

"I left school when I was about seven or eight years old and was 14 when I came to Yangon to work. I've run into challenges, of course, because I couldn't read and write. I worried that I wouldn't know when people were taking advantage of me. I never even dreamed that I'd be able to come back to school," he said.

Over in the teashop, Daw Margaret Kim and another volunteer teaching assistant are giving lessons in geometry and rounding up numbers. The concentration of the students is palpable. Despite there being more than 50 in the class, and two different grades taking place simultaneously, everyone pays attention to their own work or helps fellow students.

"I have been so impressed by how enthusiastic and keen to learn they all are," Margaret says.

The thousands of youngsters, mainly boys, who work from early morning to late at night in the country's popular teashops for as little as US$10 or $20 a month, which is generally sent back to their families, are perhaps the most visible illustration of Myanmar's child-labour problems. Unlike Ko Aung Ko Oo, most never get the chance to make up for what they missed out on in their childhood.

The children reach the teashops in different ways. Some are already out of school because of poverty and are keen to seek a life in the city and be able to earn money to send home to their families. Others are forced against their will by relatives, or tricked by "brokers" into working in cities far from their homes.

Once they start in the teashop business, many never find their way back home.

"A lot of the employers lock the children in at night. In other cases brokers move the young people from place to place, making a profit each time. Many of the children I spoke to had no idea how to get back to their families, even if they had the freedom to do so," says Mr Aye Hardy.

The government is slowly moving to address the issue. On December 18, it finally ratified the international Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, which commits it to preventing children being forced into slave-like conditions and dangerous or damaging work.

But with many families struggling to get by and the practice of child labour so widespread, Mr Aye Hardy believes the immediate priority should be to ensure that those who do end up working in teashops and similar environments are treated well and given the opportunity to access education.

He says he was lucky to have found for the pilot project a teashop owner who already believed it was important for his young workers to receive an education and has been striving to give them the best working conditions he can. But he knows as the initiative expands others will take more convincing.

"It is not possible to end child labour overnight. There needs to be a cultural shift and change in attitude," says Mr Aye Hardy.

"Most people think it's okay for the children to work and they are praised for what they are doing for their parents. A lot of employers do treat the children badly, beating them and shouting at them and paying them very little to work 16-hour days, but many people who use child workers think they are doing something good by providing young people from very poor backgrounds with food and shelter.

"That's why it's so important in this project that we bring the teashop owners and parents on board so they can see that it is a positive thing for the children and actually for their businesses too if the young people receive an education."

Ultimately, he hopes myME can help those who want to return to school get back into the formal system.

"If they don't want to, we will help them with life skills," he said. "This is a long-term commitment."

Source: http://www.news.myanmaronlinecentre.com/2014/02/01/the-school-bus-bringing-education-for-all/