Mae Sot Team Backgrounder

BRACKETT REFUGEE EDUCATION FOUNDATION
MAE SOT TEAM BACKGROUNDER
Brief History of Refugees from Burma (Myanmar)
Myanmar (formerly
known as Burma),
was colonized by the
British in 1886 and
gained independence
in 1948. In 1962 a
military dictatorship
took power and there
was a large exodus of
refugees at that time.
A change of power
occurred in 1988
when SLORC (State
Law and Order
Restoration Council) took over. A pro-democracy rising followed.
Elections were held and won by Aung San Suu Kyi’s Democracy
party, but the results were ignored. Aung San Suu Kyi was put under
house arrest and fighting ensued between the government and prodemocracy supporters which included ethnic opposition groups
already fighting for long promised autonomy. Armed conflict,
persecution, and human rights abuses led to major refugee outflows
into Thailand, China, Malaysia, India and Bangladesh which continue
to this day.
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Myanmar has been populated for centuries by a number of ethnic
groups the largest of which is the Burmans who make up 50% of the
population. Other major ethnic groups include the Karen, the Shan,
the Mon, the Karenni, the Chin and the Rohingya. All but the
Rohingya have been engaged in armed conflict with the Burmese
regime for the
past 50 years as
they continue to
seek greater
autonomy in their
ethnic states.
During this
conflict farmers
and villagers have
been subject to
relocation,
arbitrary arrest,
A burned Karen village
forced labor, and
conscription at the hands of government soldiers. In worst cases,
villages and crops are burned, and men, women and children are
maimed, killed or raped.
Refugees crossing the river to Thailand
While fighting is more
sporadic now, and there
is hope for change,
abuses still persist and
the flow of refugees
continues.
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Who do we help and where do we work?
The Karen people are the largest ethnic group outside of the Burmans
and they have been fighting the longest for human rights and
autonomy in their
designated state within
Myanmar. They have their
own government, army,
education system, language
and cultural traditions.
Many practice Buddhism,
while an increasing number
are Christian due to ongoing
efforts of missionaries in the
border area. A majority of
the students we work with in
MaeSot
Mae Sot are Karen. However,
BREF’s program reaches out
to all persecuted ethnic
groups, and each has a
similarly distinct culture,
language, and refugee story.
Today BREF travels annually
to 5 distinct geographical
Where BREF Works
areas within India,
Bangladesh and Thailand to develop educational opportunities for
young people of all ethnicities affected by displacement. Our most
recent area of focus is in Bangladesh where many of the severely
oppressed Rohingya have fled.
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Refugees in Thailand
Mae La Refugee Camp
An estimated 160,000 refugees are living in 10 camps along the Thai
border alone. Many have lived in these camps for 25 years or more.
Therefore an entire generation has been born and grown up stateless
and within camp confines. Although thousands have been resettled
to other countries, refugees continue to come across. Up to 500,000
more have settled outside the camps and are scattered in small
villages tucked away in mountainous jungle areas along the border.
Mae La Camp, shown above, has a population exceeding 50,000. It is
enormous. Mae La Camp is about a 40 minute drive from Mae Sot.
Schools in the camp are fairly well established up through the 10th
grade. Children are taught in Karen and English. Those educated in
the camp system usually do not learn Thai and have limited
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educational opportunities beyond 10th grade unless they are
resettled.
Children who grow up in villages outside the camp, who learn Thai,
and can arrange transportation or a temporary living situation, are
able to attend migrant or Thai government schools. A major objective
for these students is to obtain a Thai ID so they can pursue higher
education and find subsequent employment. This is a significant
obstacle for most. Offspring of refugees who have married Thai
citizens are best positioned for the future, but we also see young
people born in Thailand of Burmese-Karen parents who apply for our
program who are considered by the government to be living in
Thailand illegally.
What is the Brackett Refugee Educational Fund? (BREF)
Liz and Tom with 2012 grads
Vilailak and Kanjana
In 1992, Tom and Liz Brackett, professors from Colgate University,
spent 6 months on sabbatical teaching English to refugees at the
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Gray Hta Refugee Camp on the Thai border not far from Mae Sot.
There they made lifelong friendships with the Karen including key
community leaders who had a vision for continuing education for
their people at a high standard. It is the Bracketts’ belief and the
belief of the groups they now serve that education is the key to
developing and maintaining strong leadership, self-sufficiency and
peace in challenged societies. Hence, the Brackett Foundation was
established to provide scholarships to promising students to pursue
university studies with the idea of maintaining a strong base of
educated leaders for struggling populations.
Another program , the Study Grant Program, was later developed to
provide stipends for living and travel expenses to high school aged
students who were qualified to attend Thai government schools. And
finally, projects encouraging basic literacy were identified and funded.
The St. John’s
Orphanage in Mae
La Camp is a BREF
funded boarding
house for children
from a Karen village
in Burma who live
away from their
parents. They stay
in the boarding
house in the camp
for their safety and
access to education.
Barbara, Alyson and Janice
Mae La Refugee Camp
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The Bracketts’ first project was a school created in 1997 for the
children of medics working at Mae Tao Clinic, a large community
border hospital for injured soldiers and refugees founded 1989 by Dr.
Cynthia Muang, a political refugee from Rangoon. This project, the
CDC, began with a
handful of young
children and has
now grown to over
1000 students with a
curriculum that
spans nursery to
high school. Other
projects in the Mae
Sot area that are
ongoing include a
K-5 Karen village
school, boarding
Closing ceremonies at the Maw Kwee School
houses for children
attending Thai schools too far from their villages and salaries for
teachers in IDP (internally displaced persons) areas inside Myanmar.
The majority of BREF donations, however, are still allocated for
university scholarships. To date, BREF has graduated almost 300
students from universities in Thailand and India. Several have
graduate degrees. One of BREF’s earliest students is on the team
that travels to Rangoon to negotiate peace settlements on behalf of
the Karen people with the Myanmar government. Another runs a
school in Mae La Camp. A recent graduate conducts malaria research
on the border. The majority of our graduates, however, are teachers
who return to their villages to teach in local schools. Some work for
NGO’s (non-governmental organizations) providing programs for
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basic needs and other services to the refugee community. More
recently we have graduated nurses and public health workers who
return to their communities to educate others and administer care.
BREF Operations in Mae Sot
In Thailand, there are three border areas -- Mae Sot, Mae Hong Song
and Kanchanaburi -- and three Trustee Representative teams who
travel annually to meet with current students, interview new
applicants to the scholarship program and visit projects. Trustee
Representatives, or T-Reps, pay for their own travel expenses
keeping overhead very low.
T-Reps are responsible for
personally managing the
distribution and oversight of
donations at a local level.
The Mae Sot area is the
largest and where BREF has
been the longest. Because
Mae Sot is the closest town
to the Mae La Refugee camp,
the small but growing town
is home base to NGO workers
Myanmar across the river via the Friendship Bridge
from various countries. The
Friendship Bridge in Mae Sot connects Myanmar and Thailand and is
the focus for future economic development and diplomacy between
the two countries. The Mae Sot team travels to Mae Sot every
February and takes up residence for a week in a local boarding house.
From here we visit with our continuing students returning home
from university as well as new applicants just graduating from high
school.
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Who are our students?
Most of our students in the Mae Sot area live outside the Camp and
have graduated from government schools up and down the border
outside of Mae Sot. They all speak the Karen language at home, but
have learned Thai in order to attend local Thai schools. Most of their
parents are farmers -- and many of them cross the river to farm land
in Myanmar. A few only know Karen and English having been
educated in the refugee camp system. Several are high school
students we supported with stipends so that they could come down
from their mountain village and live in a boarding house so that they
could attend high school. Most are born in Thailand now -- although
almost all have at least one parent who came across in the past 25
years as a refugee. All are motivated and have high need.
Ketkeaw is in her final year at Rajabhat Mae Sot majoring in Public
Administration. Her parents are from Burma and she was born in
Thailand without citizenship. Her mother
left the family when Ketkeaw was 16 and
Ketkeaw’s father demanded that she leave
school to help support the family.
Ketkeaw worked but continued to go to a
migrant school, with help from the The
Brackett Foundation, against her father’s
will. A girl with fierce determination,
Ketkeaw is completing her college degree
on the weekends while working during the week for NGO’s supporting
Karen refugees. We have loved watching Ketkeaw’s confidence and
considerable leadership skills take flight. In the time we have known
her she has mastered English and is already viewed as a community
leader.
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Hae Moo graduated in 2013 in Public Health from a university in
Chiang Mai. He grew up in a small border
village and his mother farms. He is the
youngest in his family and the first to go to
college. His father died when he was in middle
school, and his oldest brother who worked to
help support the family was killed in an
accident when Hae Moo was in high school. He
is extremely bright. When Hae Moo came for
his first interview with us, his shoes barely
held together. He completed high school with
excellent grades in science despite stopping out
regularly to work to help support the family.
Some of his friends left school to become soldiers in the Karen army,
but Hae Moo did not give up on his ambition to work in a hospital.
His first year in college was very hard as he was far from home, and
there were many challenges adapting to a new environment. Now
Hae Moo works in a hospital in Chiang Dow, north of Chiang Mai as a
public health officer. He is able to translate for Karen patients he
administers to, and can help support his mother with the salary he
earns. His goal is to return to his home province and work in a
hospital there.
Tu Doh graduates this year and will
go back to this home province to be a
math teacher. His parents settled
briefly in Thailand on the other side
of the river from Burma, but moved
back to Burma, taking shelter on the
Thai side when they need to. Tu
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Doh lived at a Buddhist monastery from age 6 and later in boarding
houses so he could complete his early education. He attended school
in the camp, a small village school and later the local Thai
government high school excelling in his studies especially math. He
was not able to go to college right away because he did not have a Thai
ID, but somehow he was able to get one and enroll at a teaching
college, Rajabhat Kampaengphet. We met Tu Doh after he had
completed his first year at university. He was at the point of dropping
out of school because of lack of funding. He is a straight “A” student
and top of his class in math. He is currently finishing his student
teaching assignment at his old high school. Tu Doh sees his family 2
times a year. Like the others he will be the first and only child in his
family to advance to this level of education.
Kaw K’Ter’s father was a Karen soldier and the family fled from
place to place along the Thai border until
settling for a time in a refugee camps
where Kaw K’Ter was able to establish
herself as a promising student in the
camp school. Later she completed her
GED at a migrant school where she
continued to teach others until applying
for our program when she was 22 years
old. Her parents have moved back to a
safe place in Burma. Kaw K’Ter has the ambition to earn a college
degree and return to Burma to develop and advance her community.
She is in her first year at Rangsit University in Bangkok majoring in
Politics, Philosophy and Economics. All of her classes are in English
which she speaks fluently as a result of her schooling in the camps
and migrant schools. She is also fluent in Karen and Burmese.
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The Mae Sot T-Rep Team
Alyson, Barbara and Janice are friends who met while living in
Bangkok in the 1990’s. Barbara and Janice are both Aussies -Janice, mother of 3 and a children’s book author, lives in Bangkok
with her Thai husband. Barbara, mother of 3 and a teacher in her
past life, lives in Queensland. Alyson lives in California and has 2
children. She heard about the Bracketts through an old college
friend and met Tom and Liz in
2005 while visiting students
and projects in Kanchanaburi
province . Not long thereafter,
Alyson recruited Barbara and
Janice to help oversee college
bound students in the Mae Sot
area. We travel every
February to Mae Sot where we
spend a week catching up with
our continuing students in
Barbara, Alyson and Janice at Mae La Camp
university and interviewing
new applicants for the program. Typically we conduct about 80
interviews in a week between new and continuing students. Among
the three of us we mentor about 60 continuing students all of whom
are in universities in Thailand. Our work includes monitoring
student progress throughout the year via email . We ask for grades
and written reports and we respond to requests for advice or
additional assistance to help get them through. A minimum GPA is
required. They are required to apply every year and meet with us in
person in order to renew their scholarship.
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Each year, the local T-Rep team is
given a regional budget which we
manage at our discretion. Last year
the college scholarship budget for Mae
Sot students was about $60,000. Our
budget is determined by donations
received the previous year to be
Barbara and Chaipat
allocated across
the regions where BREF operates. We
can receive up to 80 applications a
year for 15-18 new scholarships.
Typically we will interview 25-30 new
candidates. We look for the ability to
succeed at the university level,
Alyson with Ngai Htway and Thida in Bangkok
motivation, need, and intention to use
their education to help their own people.
Our scholarships average about $1000 USD a year which in some
cases can pay for almost all of the tuition fee for a local university.
Janice and Pimjai in Kampaengphet
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We require that they supplement the
scholarship amount from family,
government loans, working, etc., to
pay for additional expenses.
Scholarship payments are made
twice a year. The second half of the
scholarship is withheld pending a
written progress report from the
student. Funds are wired from the
U.S. to their Thai bank accounts.
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We have been traveling to Mae Sot for 8 years. In that time we have
mentored over 114 students and graduated 38 thus far.
2013
Graduates
at the
annual
Alumni
Dinner in
Mae Sot
We love coming back every year and seeing how our students have
matured and developed. The Karen are people of high integrity.
They are hardworking, determined and extremely gracious. By the
time our students graduate we feel a strong bond with each and every
one. Each year we host a party for new graduates and alumni in the
area. Always a highlight.
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Travel Information and Life as a T-Rep
There are a few ways to get to Mae Sot. From Bangkok you can take
a bus (all-nighter but very cheap) or, more recently they have had
intermittent flight service available. It’s about a 30-45 minute flight
and costs about $40 round trip. We have also flown to Chiang Mai
(hour flight) or Phitsanoluk (45 minute flight) , rented a car
(expensive and a bit frightful unless you are comfortable on mountain
curves with shared passing
lanes driving on the left side of
the road) and driven 6 hours to
Mae Sot. The advantage of
doing this is we can see some of
our students en route at
universities in Chiang Mai and
On the road in Thailand . . .
environs. Another option is to
hire a car and driver or take
songtheaws (trucks that serve as
small buses) or motorcycle taxis
to get around.
Motorcycle Taxi!
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In the past few years we have taken a day out of our schedule to walk
across the Friendship Bridge into Myanmar, visit local town schools,
or drive to some of the mountain village areas where are students
live. Always an adventure!
A day at Phuter Village School
At a temple in Myanmar
If we have time we
accompany the
Project Team on
their visits to our
local projects at
Mae La Camp and
Remote Karen village
beyond. We also
touch base with the local committee who runs the high school
scholarship program (called the Study Grant program). Tamla Moo,
a local community leader and long time friend of the Bracketts is on
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this committee and is an
invaluable contact for us in the
Mae Sot area. We look forward to
seeing her every year.
Mae Sot is a bustling border town
that has evolved over time and
you can find just about any
T-Rep Team with Naw Tamla
convenience there. We stay at a
small boarding house called Phannu House for about $20 USD a night.
The rooms are simple but have hot water and air conditioning. We
conduct our interviews there at the boarding house. Thai and
Burmese food abounds, of course, but a popular hangout is Canadian
Dave’s that caters to the expat community in Mae Sot.
Outside Canadian Dave’s
A room at Phannu House
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It has been our privilege to work with the young people in this region.
Our lives are enriched having immersed ourselves in their culture.
We come away every year with renewed appreciation for the values
and work ethic that motivate them, and we strive to set a similar
example for others when we return home. And we feel good about
aiding a deserving population in their quest for self-sufficiency and an
honorable place in our global society.
With Koonlatida, a nursing graduate 2012
If you are at all interested in becoming a T-Rep for The Brackett
Foundation or are simply curious about what we do and want to meet
up with us in Mae Sot please let us know! We can also put you in
touch with other teams who work for BREF in other regions -Kanchanaburi, Mae Hong Son, Aziwal (India) and Bangladesh. You
can find us at [email protected].
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