A Survival Story from the Thai-Burmese Border: The Struggle for Education in the Burmese Community in Thailand

Abstract

The Burmese refugee/migrant community on the Thai-
Burmese border figures prominently among “refugee diasporas”
in the world today. This article describes efforts of
Burmese people within this community to provide basic
education to their youth in extra-legal migrant schools in
the midst of the unwelcoming environment created by the
Thai government’s refugee policy. It argues that this community
needs greater support than it is currently receiving
in order to achieve recognition and security given the impossibility
of safe and voluntary repatriation to Myanmar
in the foreseeable future. The article closes with a number
of specific proposals for facilitating the delivery of education
to Burmese “migrant” youth in the Burmese community
in Thailand through intervention by both state and
nonstate actors.

As missionary movement turns 200, questions for the future

SALEM, Mass. (RNS)—When America's first ordained missionaries sailed to India 200 years ago, they kicked off a movement to spread the faith and created America's most potent export—Christianity.

Adoniram Judson and four other missionaries are ordained as America's first missionaries.

That's the message that will reverberate across nine "Judson 200" commemorative events, running Feb. 5-20 in and around Salem. Speakers—evangelicals, mainline Protestants and scholars—will recall how the course of history changed with Adoniram Judson and four other missionaries.

Religious liberals and conservatives, who both lay claim to Judson's legacy, will hold separate events. One includes unveiling a new name to reflect the recent merger of two evangelical mission societies, CrossGlobal Link and The Mission Exchange, representing 35,000 missionaries.

But participants will embrace a shared heritage as exporters of American ideas and weigh its modern-day implications.

"The essential idea (in foreign missions) is that a person born in Pakistan is every bit as human and to be valued as much as a person born in North America or England," said Rodney Petersen, executive director of the Boston Theological Institute, a consortium of nine theological schools. "That was the message carried around the world."

Judson's 1812 departure with his wife, Ann Hasseltine, marked the start of a new era of American and Christian influence.

To support them, the first of many missionary-sending agencies was born—the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Similar organizations soon took root, sending thousands of missionaries to all corners of the globe. By the mid-20th century, America was sending more missionaries than any other country.

America still sends the most: 127,000 of the 400,000 foreign missionaries sent in 2010 came from America, according to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, based outside of Boston.

The Judsons left a giant mark. Denied admission to British India, they continued on to Burma (modern-day Myanmar), where they created a grammar system, translated the Bible into Burmese and won converts to the faith. Christian communities survive to this day in Myanmar; Judson Sunday is commemorated by Burmese churches every July.

Yet it was local Burmese, not missionaries, who most effectively spread Christianity among the villages, according to Todd Johnson, who directs the center at Gordon-Conwell. That history resonates today, he said, as mission agencies debate whether Western missionaries still are needed in developing nations.

"Some mission groups are saying there's no reason missionaries should ever go" abroad from America anymore, Johnson said. "They say you can support hundreds of indigenous missionaries for the same price as a single Western missionary. That argument has gained a lot of traction among donors and other people."

Events kick off at Tabernacle Congregational Church, a United Church of Christ congregation that was the site of the original commissioning. On hand will be officials representing the UCC's Wider Church Ministries division, which traces its roots to the 1812 mission board.

The schedule reflects just how many strains of Protestantism claim the Judson heritage. The Judsons started out as Congregationalists, but they became Baptists en route to Asia. Heads of the National Association of Evangelicals and the World Evangelical Alliance will be at Tabernacle. American Baptists, including Burmese pastors, will lead other services.

Organizers plan to emphasize virtues associated with the early missionaries, such as courage and self-sacrifice for a higher purpose. Participants can expect to hear challenges to follow in the Judsons' footsteps, if not literally, then at least spiritually.

Churches can begin by welcoming refugees and immigrant congregations, according to Maung Maung Htwe, pastor of Overseas Burmese Christian Fellowship, an American Baptist congregation in Allston, Mass.

"We're still reluctant to receive those people as our brothers and sisters," said Htwe, who will co-lead a worship service in Judson's hometown of Malden, Mass. But "Judson gave us the example that without a sacrificial spirit, the gospel that we talk is nothing."

Scholars, meanwhile, are recalling missionaries' impact on American culture and foreign policy. Missionaries who went abroad to start schools and establish hospitals laid the groundwork for a modern America that sends billions abroad each year in U.S. foreign aid, Petersen said.

"It's part of the American character to go out and help people," said Clifford Putney, assistant professor of American religious history at Bentley University. "We go (out) saying we have all these great ideas and (people abroad) would be better off following them."

Judson 200 ends with a Feb. 20 re-enactment of the Judsons' launch from the port of Salem. Events marking the Judsons' 1813 arrival in Burma will be scheduled next year.

Burmese ‘Slaves’ Rescued from Thai Fishing Boat

Twenty Burmese migrants were rescued when the fishing boat they were forced to work on was raided by the Thai authorities and human rights activists in Chonburi Province, south of Bangkok.

Kyaw Thaung, an spokesperson for the Burmese Association in Thailand (BAT) who was involved in the raid, said that the group was rescued at 3 am on Friday following a tip from one of the victims.

Some of those rescued had been forced to work as “slaves” on the fishing boat for over one year without being paid, he told The Irrawaddy on Monday.

Four people were arrested on the boat during the raid and another two Burmese men were detained later in Bangkok after the authorities followed up on information provided by the victims. Two ethnic Mon women from Burma were among the traffickers arrested on the boat, it has been claimed.

The victims apparently crossed over the Thai-Burmese border near Mae Sot with the assistance of brokers and were then handed to employment brokers in Thailand who arranged for them to join the fishing boat.

Among the 20 were three victims aged just 16 years old and another of around 40 years of age. Many were ethnic Burmese from Pegu Division, while others were ethnic Karen.
“They had to stay like animals, wearing dirty clothes and some people only had one set of clothes. They were locked up the whole time and watched by two guards,” said Kyaw Thaung.

Six of the victims have been detained in Nonthaburi Province with the rest staying at an anti-human trafficking office in Bangkok. Each may have to wait for around three to four months for the Thai courts to investigate and prosecute the perpetrators, and they will then be deported back to Burma.

Human trafficking is very prevalent in southern Thailand where there is a large fishing industry. Many Burmese migrants seek work in the area and end up being trafficked to fishing boats and forced to work for many months at sea for little or no pay.

According to a US report, the Thai government “reported 18 convictions in trafficking-related cases in 2010—an increase from eight known convictions during the previous year. As of May 2011, only five of the 18 convictions reported by the government could be confirmed as trafficking offenses.”

Our Mission Trip to Tarlay, Yanaung Lahu Village

Our second trip had in Tarlay, Yanaung Lahu village for one week, we are focus to children and young ministry in there. More than 80 children are participate on this week.

Burma May Send 200,000 Workers to Thailand

More than 200,000 workers from Burma could be flown into Bangkok to be employed in Thai factories under a direct state-to-state agreement, according to a Thai Labor Ministry spokesman.

The plan is designed to address a labor shortage in Thailand and would involved available workers being flown directly to the capital. Burma has an estimated three million unemployed and many millions more on extremely low incomes.

The announcement was made at a joint Bangkok press conference on Thursday featuring representatives of both the Thai and Burmese labor ministries. The move would have to be ratified at a bilateral meeting in Burma next month.

Proposals to safeguard workers rights include having contracts that could be revoked or ended after six months on mutual consent if Thai bosses abuse their Burmese workers physically, the employer dies or the business finishes, or the employer violates the Thai Lab our Law.

Meanwhile, five new centers enabling Burmese migrant workers to better-formalize their status in Thailand open on Friday.

Brandishing a new sample purple-covered machine-readable passport, which he says will be issued at the five additional nationality verification centers, Burmese Deputy Minister for Labor Myint Thein told assembled media that the Thai government finally agreed to allow the centers to open after a four-month delay.

The five new centers―in Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Samut Sakhon, Samut Parakarn and Surat Thani―were originally due to begin operations on Jan. 1 and will bring the number of locations up to nine in total.

“We hope that all undocumented workers from Myanmar in Thailand can become documented, so they can escape exploitation,” Myint Thein said during a rare foreign press conference given by a Burmese official.

It remains unclear why Thailand so quickly changed tack during Myint Thein’s visit, facilitating the opening of the verification centers within 24 hours after a four-month delay.
The deputy minister added that the Thai authorities would reduce the visa fee for Burmese migrants from 2,000 to 500 baht, and said that the Thais agreed to allow children and dependents of migrants to be issued with a new certificate of identity.

The deputy minister’s visit comes as Burmese and Cambodian migrant workers protest exploitation and discrimination at two factories in Thailand, one of which is a supplier to Walmart, thought to be the world’s biggest retailer. Walmart’s 2011 net sales of US $419 billion are slightly above the total GDP of oil-rich Norway, ranked 23rd in the world at $414 billion.

Some of the workers at the Phattana seafood plant in Songkla and Vita food factory in Kanchanaburi are undocumented, leaving them vulnerable to abuses by the factory management. For those with papers, it was alleged that Phatthana illegally confiscated the passports of as many as 2,000 migrant workers, leaving them in a state of debt bondage, unable to leave the country and barely able to survive. Confiscation of documents is a violation of Thai law and is a breach of Walmart’s own internal supplier standards, say activists.

The protests started when factory owners withheld food allowances and changed payment terms, apparently a reaction to a new minimum wage policy enacted by the Thai Government.

Some of the workers were trafficked into Thailand from Cambodia and Burma. Typically, undocumented Burmese come to Thailand via a network of Burmese brokers and Thai employers and police.

According to activists working on the Vita and Phattana cases, “all of them are in debt because they had to pay for transportation to come to Thailand that cost 15,000 – 20,000 baht [$500-670] per person”.

Vita Food Factory in Kanchanaburi employs 7,000 people, mostly foreign migrants. Of those, undocumented workers mostly came from Burma through the brokers. Those that have acquired work permits have had to pay brokers 5,500 baht, well above the official 3,800 baht fee.

A letter sent to Walmart by activists and seen by The Irrawaddy told the retail multinational that, “workers at both factories appear to be facing serious violations of international human rights standards, local laws and Walmart’s Standards for Suppliers,” and called on the company to help “end to this treatment of workers and do more to ensure that this treatment is not occurring in other supplier factories.”

The missive appeared to have an impact, as by Thursday afternoon Phattana had returned all confiscated passports to the migrants.

Responding to a question from The Irrawaddy, Myint Thein said that the Burmese government had not yet raised the issue with Walmart, but said that they could do so if other avenues do not resolve the stand-off, after the deputy minister met today with whom he termed “the chair” of the seafood factory in Songkla.

Migrant worker activist Andy Hall said that “it is noticeable that for the first time in two decades, the Myanmar authorities have reacted quickly to a migrant worker problem in Thailand.”

Saying that this will put pressure on the Thai government to address long-standing abuses of migrant workers in Thailand, he cautioned that “at the same time you cannot pass the buck to Thailand. The brokers who brought the workers to Phattana in Songkla operate from Myanmar.”

မိမိေငြေၾကးသံုးစြဲမွဳမွာ ဘုရားက ထိပ္ဆံုးလား၊ ေနာက္ဆံုးလား

သင္တုိ႔၏ ဘုရားသခင္ ထာဝရဘုရားသည္ နာမေတာ္ကို တည္ေစဘုိ႔ရာ ေရြးေကာက္ေတာ္မူေသာ အရပ္၌ စပါး၊ စပ်စ္ရည္၊ ဆီမွစ၍၊ သိုး၊ ႏြားတြင္ အဦးဘြားေသာ သားငယ္ဆယ္ဘုိ႔တဘုိ႔ကို ေရွ႔ေတာ္မွစားရၾကမည္။ ထုိသို႔ျပဳလွ်င္၊ သင္တုိ႔၏ ဘုရားသခင္ထာဝရဘုရားကိုအစဥ္ ေၾကာက္ရြံ႔ရမည္အေၾကာင္း၊ သင္ရၾကလိမ့္မည္။ (တရားေဟာရာက်မ္း ၁၄း၂၃)

ဆယ္ဘုိ႔တဘုိ႔ထားတယ္ဆိုတာ ကြ်န္ေတာ္ရတဲ့ ၀င္ေငြရဲ့ ပထမဆံုး ၁၀ရာခိုင္ႏူန္းကို ဘုရားသခင္ကို ျပန္ေပးတတ္တဲ့ ၀ိညာဥ္ေရးရာ အက်င့္တခုပဲ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ကြ်န္ေတာ္ ၁၀၀ ရရင္ ၁၀ ဘုရားကို ျပန္ေပးတယ္။ ကြ်န္ေတာ္ ၁၀၀၀ ရရင္ ၁၀၀ ဘုရားကို  ျပန္ေပးတယ္။ ကြ်န္ေတာ္ ၉၀ရာခိုင္ႏူန္းကိုပဲ ယူျပီး ၁၀ ရာခိုင္ႏူန္းကို ဘုရားကို ေပးတယ္။

ဒီလိုဘာေၾကာင့္ လုပ္ရပါသလဲ။ ဘုရားကေျပာလို႔ပါပဲ။ ဒီအခ်က္နဲ႔တင္ လံုေလာက္ပါတယ္။ ကိုယ္က မလုပ္ရင္၊ ဘုရားစကားကို နားမေထာင္တာပဲ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ေနာက္အခ်က္တခ်က္ ရွိပါေသးတယ္။ ခရစ္ေတာ္က ေျပာပါတယ္။

အေၾကာင္းမူကား၊ အၾကင္အရပ္၌ သင္တို႔၏ဘ႑ာရွိ၏၊ ထိုအရပ္သို႔သင္တို႔၏ စိတ္ႏွလံုးေရာက္တတ္၏။ (မႆဲ ၆း၂၁)

ကြ်န္ေတာ္ ဆယ္ဖို႔တဖို႔ထားရျခင္းက ဘုရားနဲ႔ ပိုျပီး နီးခ်င္လို႔ပဲ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ကိုယ့္ရဲ့ ဘ႑ာရွိရာအရပ္မွာ ကိုယ့္ရဲ့ စိတ္ႏွလံုးေရာက္တတ္တယ္လို႔ က်မ္းစာကေျပာပါတယ္။ ကြ်န္ေတာ့္ရဲ့ ေငြေတြကို ေမာ္ေတာ္ဘုတ္ထဲမွာ ျမဳပ္ထားရင္ အဲဒီေမာ္ေတာ္ဘုတ္ကိုပဲ ကြ်န္ေတာ္စြဲလမ္းေနမွာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ကြ်န္ေတာ္ ပိုက္ဆံထားတဲ့ ေနရာမွန္သမွ်ဟာ ကြ်န္ေတာ့္အတြက္ အေရးၾကီးတဲ့ ေနရာမ်ား ျဖစ္လာၾကပါတယ္။ ပိုက္ဆံနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္လာရင္ ဘုရားကို အဦးဆံုးေနရာမွာ ထားျခင္းဟာ " ဘုရားသခင္၊ ကိုယ္ေတာ္ဟာ ကြ်န္ေတာ့္ရဲ့ ပထမေနရာမွာ ရွိပါတယ္လို႔ " ေျပာျခင္းပဲ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

မိတ္ေဆြရဲ့ ေငြေၾကးကို ဘယ္လိုသံုးတယ္။ မိတ္ေဆြရဲ့ အခ်ိန္ကို ဘယ္လိုသံုးတယ္ ဆိုတာကို ကြ်န္ေတာ့္ကို ေျပာျပမယ္ဆိုရင္၊ မိတ္ေဆြရဲ့ ဘ၀မွာ ဘယ္အရာက အေရးၾကီးဆံုးလဲ ဆိုတာ ကြ်န္ေတာ္ ေသခ်ာေပါက္ ေျပာႏိုင္ပါတယ္။ မိတ္ေဆြရဲ့ အစီအစဥ္ ဇယား နဲ႔ ခ်က္လက္မွတ္ စာအုပ္ ျဖတ္ပိုင္းေတြကိုသာ ျပပါ။ " ကြ်န္ေတာ့္အတြက္ ဘယ္အရာက အေရးၾကီးပါတယ္" လို႔ မိတ္ေဆြ ဘယ္လိုပဲေျပာေျပာ၊ မိတ္ေဆြအတြက္ ဘယ္အရာက " အမွန္တကယ္ " အေရးၾကီးတယ္ဆိုတာကို ကြ်န္ေတာ္ေျပာပါ့မယ္။

ဒီကေန႔ က်မ္းခ်က္က " ဆယ္ဖို႔တဖို႔ ထားရျခင္းဟာ ဘုရားကို အဦးဆံုးေနရာမွာ ထားျခင္းျဖစ္တယ္ " ဆိုတဲ့အခ်က္ကို သြန္သင္ပါတယ္။ " ဘုရားသခင္၊ ကိုယ္ေတာ္ဟာ ကြ်န္ေတာ့္ဘ၀အတြက္ နံပါတ္တစ္ေနရာမွာ ရွိပါတယ္" လို႔ ကြ်န္ေတာ္က ေျပာျပီး၊ ေငြသံုးစြဲတဲ့ေနရာမွာ ဘုရားကို ေနာက္ဆံုးထားခဲ့ရင္ ေရွ႕ေနာက္ကိုက္ညီမွဳ မရွိပဲ ျဖစ္ပါလိမ့္မယ္။

ဒီေန႔ ေဆြးေႏြးတဲ့ အေၾကာင္းအရာက ကိုယ့္ရဲ့ အစီအစဥ္ စာရင္းထဲမွာ ဘုရားက ဘယ္အစီအစဥ္ ေနရာမွာ ပါပါသလဲဆိုတာပါပဲ။ ကိုယ့္ရဲ့ ဘ႑ာေငြသံုးစြဲမူဟာ ကိုယ့္ရဲ့ အေရးေပးမွဳေတြကို ရုိးရိုးေလး ေဖာ္ျပေနပါတယ္။ ကိုယ့္ရဲ့ ဘ႑ာေငြသံုးစြဲမွဳဟာ မိတ္ေဆြရဲ့ ဘ၀မွာ ဘုရားကို ဘယ္အဆင့္မွာ ထားထားတယ္လို႔ ေဖာ္ျပေနပါသလဲ။

Maesai Grace Church 2012 First Mission Trip to Mae Ning in Shan State

Picture from Day Three

Summer Bible Camp for Day Three( The Life of Praise)

We are continue our summer bible camp for the day three and we focus on the life of praise to God.

Praising God - The First Thing!
Do you know that praising God is the best thing to do first before anything else? Have you ever been in a situation that you feel all alone? Or have you encountered a difficult situation in your life and you don't know what to do, like losing your job or suffering the loss of someone very close to your heart? Consider the good times such as when you receive a raise from your boss or earn high marks at school? What do you usually do during these moments? Praising God makes every circumstance of our lives complete, essential, and eminently worthwhile.

Webster defines the word praise as to say good things about and it is synonymous to words such as admire, commend, extol, honor, and worship. A definition of Christian praise is the joyful thanking and adoring of God, the celebration of His goodness and grace.¹ This simply implies that the act of praising is rightfully due to God alone.

Praising God - Why?
Why is praising God important? The reasons are countless. First, God deserves to be praised and He is worthy to receive our praise:

• "For great is the LORD and most worthy of praise; he is to be feared above all gods" (Psalm 96:4).
• "Great is the LORD and most worthy of praise; his greatness no one can fathom" (Psalm 145:3).
• "I call to the LORD, who is worthy of praise, and I am saved from my enemies" (2 Samuel 22:4).
• "You are worthy, our LORD and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being" (Revelation 4:11).

Second, praising God is useful and favorable for us. By praising God, we are reminded of the greatness of God! His power and presence in our lives is reinforced in our understanding. "Praise the Lord, for the Lord is good; sing praise to his name, for that is pleasant" (Psalm 135:3).

Third, praise discharges strength in faith, which causes God to move on our behalf. "From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise because of your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger" (Psalm 8:2). Praising God also transforms the spiritual environment that we have. 2 Chronicles 5:13-14 clearly illustrates the alteration that happened when the Levites gave praise and thanks to the Lord and the temple was filled with a cloud signifying the glory of God. "The trumpeters and singers joined in unison, as with one voice, to give praise and thanks to the LORD. Accompanied by trumpets, cymbals and other instruments, they raised their voices in praise to the LORD and sang: 'He is good; his love endures forever.' Then the temple of the LORD was filled with a cloud, and the priests could not perform their service because of the cloud, for the glory of the LORD filled the temple of God."

Fourth, God inhabits the atmosphere of praise. Psalm 22:3 says, "But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel" (KJV). If we want to see a clear manifestation of God's blessings and grace, all we need to do is to praise Him with all our heart, our mind, and our soul.
 
Praising God - Who and When?
Who is to praise God? "Let everything that has breath praise the LORD. Praise the LORD," states Psalm 150:6.

• "I will extol the LORD at all times; his praise will always be on my lips (Psalm 34:1)."
• "Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you. I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will lift up my hands" (Psalm 63:3-4).
• "Praise the LORD, all you servants of the LORD who minister by night in the house of the LORD. Lift up your hands in the sanctuary and praise the LORD" (Psalm 134:1-2).

We cannot embark on the true joy and benefits of praising God unless we have received Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. As children of God, He dwells in our bodies through the Holy Spirit. This means that wherever we go, God is to be praised. 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 states that "Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body."
 
Praising God - How to Praise and Worship God
How is praising God possible? Singing songs and hymns, clapping our hands, even jumping for joy…the list is endless. We can give glory and praise to our God with the use of our physical bodies, with our hearts and minds, and with our deeds. There are many ways to praise God! No matter how you praise and worship God, it should result in an awe of God's power, love, and grace for all of us!

Continue the Camp for Day Two( The life of Prayer)

Maesai Grace Church {Summer Bible Camp (12.4.2012 -- 15.4.2012)} Part-1

Summer Camp (Day One, The Life of Testimonies)

In our camp we focused for day one in the life of testimonies. Every evening we have a special program and they are giving and sharing for their testimonies in their life.