Guilt and Perfectionism Destroy Your Confidence

by Rick Warren

"Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God." (1 John 3:21 NIV)

You've probably noticed that your confidence ebbs and flows. It varies greatly from day to day — one day you're up, and one day you're down. What causes that?

In part, it's about what is going on inside of you. The Bible teaches, "If our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God" (1 John 3:21 NIV). When we face life's hurts, habits, and hang-ups, it's important that we walk out of self-condemnation and into the faithful confidence that God forgives us.

What causes self-condemnation?

Unresolved guilt. King David wrote, "There was a time when I wouldn't admit what a sinner I was. But my dishonesty made me miserable and filled my days with frustration" (Psalms 32:3 TLB).

This reminds me of a sign I saw the other day: "A clean engine produces more power."  That's true in humans, too. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the man who wrote "Sherlock Holmes," once pulled a prank on 12 prominent Englishmen. He sent them an anonymous note that said, "All is found out. Flee at once." Within 24 hours, eight of those men had left the country! Guilt destroys your confidence. 

Unrealistic expectations. This is also known as perfectionism — the feeling that I must be flawless, that I must be perfect, that I must please everybody, that I always have to do more, that I'm not allowed to relax. 

If you're a perfectionist, your favorite phrase is, "I should ... I must ... I ought to ... I have to …" You're always doing more.

If you're an average person, you have three things on your daily "to do" list. You get one of them done, you leave one of them unfinished, and the third one you just forget about.  You go home and put your feet up at night and feel good about yourself. 

If you're a perfectionist, you have 29 things on your daily "to do" list. You finish 28 of them and you go home and feel like a failure! The Bible says, "Even perfection has its limits, but [God's] commands have no limit" (Psalm 119:96 NLT).

Both guilt and perfectionism cause a lack of confidence in our lives. Tomorrow we'll look at how we can replace condemnation with confidence.

Talk About It

What is it that you need to confess to God and then let go of today?
If you are a perfectionist, in what ways has it affected your confidence?

Suu Kyi tells migrant workers: ‘I will never forget you’

Jubilant Burmese migrant workers greeted Aung San Suu Kyi on Wednesday morning, who told them she is working to make it possible for them to return home.

Thousands of local people and migrant workers packed a narrow street in Samut Sakhon near Bangkok to hear her speak during her first foreign trip in 24 years.

Standing on the balcony of the Library and Office of the Migrant Worker Rights Network building, she told the migrant workers that she came to Thailand to learn about their conditions first hand.

Suu Kyi invited the representatives of 30 migrant workers to a discussion on worker’s challenges in Thailand. Migrant workers discussed problems of access to accident compensation and the workmen’s compensation fund, exploitation by job brokers in the Nationality Verification (NV) process, human trafficking problems and access to education for migrant workers’s children in Thailand.

They also said many workers underwent the NV process, but they were not eligible to take part in the social security system. Migrant workers also told Suu Kyi about the plight of crime victims who endure rape and robbery.

Suu Kyi acknowledged the issues and urged migrant workers in Thailand to seek their rights and to shoulder that responsibility. She said migrants should unite and give mutual support, and that she would talk to the governments of the two countries to seek solutions to such problems.

“I will never forget you, and I will discuss your troubles with the Thai government to help improve your well-being,” the National League for Democracy Party leader said. “I ask you to be patient and please work to your full potential as assigned by your employers. I'll try to develop our country so you can come back home and apply your skills and knowledge and make our country prosper."

Suu Kyi, who will speak to the World Economic Forum on Friday in Bangkok, will meet with Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and opposition leader Abhisit Vejjajiva, the former prime minister.

She told a crowd of thousands, “Don't feel down, or weak. History is always changing.”

“Today, I will make you one promise: I will try my best for you,” she said.

After speaking to the crowd, the Nobel Peace Prize winner met with migrant workers who told her they faced mistreatment from employers but lack knowledge of their rights and have no legal means to settle disputes.

Thailand hosts around 2.5 million Burmese who have fled here to work low-skilled jobs as domestic servants or in manual labor industries like fisheries and the garment sector.

Andy Hall, a researcher at the Institute for Population and Social Research at Thailand's Mahidol University, said up to a million of them are undocumented, and they make up between 5 and 10 percent of the Thai work force, contributing as much as 7 percent of the nation's GDP.

Many are exploited and paid reduced wages, he said. Some have been trafficked; some have had their passports confiscated by employers. Hall said they were nevertheless “the lifeblood of a lot of the Myanmar economy, sending home money to support families who don't have enough money to eat.”

“They have no voice, they can never speak up or stand up,” Hall said. “So for Aung San Suu Kyi to visit is like a dream come true, someone who finally may be able to bring attention to their suffering.”

About 30 km southwest of Bangkok, Samut Sakhon is home to tens of thousands of Burmese migrants, documented and undocumented, who are the primary labor force in Thailand's fisheries industry.

Since becoming a Member of Parliament, this is Suu Kyi first trip abroad after spending 15 of the last 24 years under house arrest.

Following her trip to Bangkok, she is scheduled to visit Norway, Britain, Ireland and France, according to a NLD spokespersons. First, she will return to Burma before heading to Oslo, Norway, where she will receive her long-delayed Nobel Peace Prize. 

One-third of malaria drugs in SE Asia are fake

More than a third of malaria drugs examined by scientists in Southeast Asia were fake, and a similar proportion analysed in Africa were below standard, doctors warned last week.

“These findings are a wake-up call demanding a series of interventions to better define and eliminate both criminal production and poor manufacturing of antimalarial drugs,” Joel Breman of the Fogarty International Center at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) said on May 22.

Trawling through surveys and published literature, the researchers found that in seven Southeast Asian countries, 36 percent of 1437 samples from five categories of drugs were counterfeit.

Additionally, 30pc of the samples failed a test of their pharmaceutical ingredients.
In 21 sub-Saharan countries, 20pc of more than 2500 samples tested in six drug classes turned out to be falsified, and 35pc were below pharmaceutical norms.

Sub-standard medications are a major problem in the fight against malaria, a disease which killed 655,000 people in 2010, according to the UN’s World Health Organisation (WHO).
Many of the drugs that are being faked or poorly manufactured are artemisin derivatives, the study said.

This is especially worrying as artemisinins are the frontline treatment for malaria, replacing drugs to which the malaria parasite has become resistant.

The study says there are many causes for the problem, ranging from widespread self-prescription of drugs to shoddy controls to monitor drug quality and prosecute counterfeiters.

“Poor-quality antimalarial drugs are very likely to jeopardise the unprecedented progress and investments in control and elimination of malaria made in the past decade,” said Mr Breman.

Last month, studies published in The Lancet and Science journals reported that artemisin-resistant malaria, which was first spotted in Cambodia in 2006, has since been detected 800 kilometres (500 miles) westward on the Thailand-Myanmar border.

Burma’s business visa-on-arrival starts Friday

A limited visa-on-arrival program aimed at easing business travelers entry into Burma will kick off on Friday, said Burmese officials.

Originally, it was believed to include tourists, but Immigration Department Director-General Maung Maung Than told the Associated Press on Monday that tourists will not be included in the on-arrival program.

The visas will cost $50 and not be available for tourists. He said the visas will be available to nationals of 27 countries including the U.K. and the U.S.

Maung Maung Than said the government has also updated a "blacklist" to bar people who violated visa agreements, criminals and people banned by government ministries.

Critics of military rule often were banned from entering the country. Observers who noted the new blacklist questioned why such a list would exist now that the government has said it is moving toward a democratic system.

Myanmar introduced visas-on-arrival in 2010 but suspended the service before that year's general election.

The service will first be available at the country's main entry point, Rangoon International Airport, and later in Mandalay and the capital, Naypyitaw.

The visas will be granted to travelers from member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations plus Australia, Britain, China, Japan and the United Statesl and other countries.

Business visas will be issued for 70 days, officials said.

This week Mizzima reported that about 1,500 tourists are arriving each day in Burma’s four international airports, an increase of about one-third over the past year. Tourists mainly passed through Rangoon, Naypyitaw, Mandalay and Nyaung Oo international airports.

Burma’s tourism industry is in an emerging growth stage. According to official statistics, the number of tourist arrivals at Rangoon International Airport reached 359,359 in 2011, but is expected to reach 1.5 million in 2012.

The hotel and guesthouse industry is straining to prepare for the influx of tourists and businessmen following the opening up of the country during 2011.

Figures for the first two months of 2012 showed 98,486 people arrived from North America, West Europe, East Europe, Africa, Middle East, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, according to the Myanmar Tourism Promotion Board.

There are a total of 739 hotels in Burma including 22 foreign-invested hotels, four joint-venture hotels, six government hotels and 707 private-owned hotels.

Burma earned US$ 319 million in 2011 from the hotel and tourism sector, up 26 per cent from US$ 254 million in 2010. 

Suu Kyi to meet Burmese migrants in Thailand

During her visit to Thailand to attend the World Economic Forum starting on Wednesday, Aung San Suu Kyi will visit Burmese migrants to see working and living conditions and visit a local National Verification Center, according to migrant worker advocates.

She is scheduled to visit the National Verification Center in the Aur Arthon Housing Project in Thajin, Samut Sakhon Province, tour a shrimp market and meet Burmese migrant workers and their families at a migrant learning center.

Suu Kyi is expected to garner vast media attention at the World Economic Forum, which may have been a factor in causing Burmese President Thein Sein to cancel his attendance at the three-day event. He said he would come in Thailand soon at a later date.

The Burmese Minister of Energy U Than Htay will officially represent the government at the gathering.

An aide to Suu Kyi told The Bangkok Post that she would visit Samut Sakhon's Mahachai District, which is home to hundreds of thousands of Burmese migrant workers.

The Nobel laureate may also visit a refugee camp in Tha Song Yang District in Tak province, opposite Myawaddy, Burma, and she may visit the Mae Tao clinic, and meet a group of exiled activists based in the province, said the newspaper. That visit has been tentatively arranged for Saturday.

Suu Kyi's talks with exiled dissidents who have worked closely with democracy forces inside Burma play a large role in determining whether the country’s reconciliation efforts have the support of the exiled population.

On Tuesday, the exiled Karen Women’s Organization (KWO) released an open letter to Suu Kyi, saying the Burmese refugee community in Thailand is “currently living with a great deal of uncertainty and worry due to the changing position of international communities regarding continuing support here and possible repatriation during these fragile peace negotiations.”

Part of KWO's focus is to conduct consultation with communities on the issue of return to Burma.

“Like you, we believe women have an important role in moving these issues forward as we have always had a vital role in maintaining and sustaining our community,” said the statement.

The KWO works in all seven Karen refugee camps and in Karen State.

“We have more than 49,000 Karen women who are members of our organization,” the statement said. “We provide services to our community like special education, safe houses for women who are victims of gender based violence, nursery schools, along with leadership development and women’s direct involvement in the peace talks.” 

ထိုင္း - ျမန္မာနယ္စပ္

ထိုင္း - ျမန္မာနယ္စပ္ မဲေဆာက္ၿမိဳ႕မွ ဘန္ေကာက္သို႔ အလုပ္ရမည္ဟု ေခၚေဆာင္လာကာ ေရာင္းစား ခံခဲ့ရေသာ လူ ၁၀၀ ေက်ာ္ထဲမွ ကိုေက်ာ္ဇံႏွင့္ ကိုေဇာ္ထြန္းအား ဘတ္ေငြ ၁၁၅၀၀ စီျဖင့္ မၾကာေသးမီက ျပန္လည္ ေရြးယူခဲ့ေၾကာင္း သတင္းရရွိသည္။

ေရာင္းစားခံထားရသူမ်ား လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရးႏွင့္ လူေမွာင္ခို ကုန္ကူးသူမ်ားကို ဖမ္းဆီး ေဖာ္ထုတ္ႏိုင္ေရးအတြက္ အကူအညီေပးေနသည့္ မဲေဆာက္အေျခစိုက္ People Volunteer’s Association (PVA) အဖြဲ႕က ယင္းလူငယ္ ၂ ဦးကို ျပန္လည္ ေရြးထုတ္ႏိုင္ခဲ့ျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။

အဆိုပါ လူငယ္ ၂ ဦးသည္ ပင္လယ္ထဲတြင္ ၁၃ ရက္ခန္႔ ငါးဖမ္းေနခဲ့ရေၾကာင္း၊ ေဆြမ်ိဳးမ်ားက ပိုက္ဆံႏွင့္ ေရြးထုတ္၍ ရလွ်င္ ေရြးထုတ္ခ်င္သည္ဟု ေျပာသျဖင့္ PVA ႏွင့္ ပူးေပါင္း ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနသူ ကိုခိုင္မင္းထြန္းက သြားေရာက္ ေရြးထုတ္ ေပးခဲ့ေၾကာင္း PVA အဖြဲ ့မွ ဗဟိုေကာ္မတီ၀င္ ၁ ကိုသိန္းဆန္းက ေျပာသည္။

ကိုခိုင္မင္းထြန္းက “ဒီနယ္ေျမက လူေမွာင္ခုိမႈေတြ၊ လူေရာင္းစားမႈေတြ အရမ္း မ်ားေတာ့ အခုလို သြားေရြးရတာ သိပ္ အႏၱရာယ္ႀကီးတယ္။ အေၾကာင္းမညီညြတ္ရင္ ကိုယ္ပါ အစေပ်ာက္ သြားႏိုင္တယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ လူသားခ်င္း ေက်းကၽြန္လို ေရာင္းစားခံထားရတဲ့ သူေတြအတြက္ က်ေနာ္ အရဲစြန္႔လုပ္ေပးခဲ့တာ” ဟု ဆုိသည္။

ေရြးထုတ္ လာခဲ့သည့္ ကိုေက်ာ္ဇံမွာ အသက္ ၂၄ ႏွစ္ ရွိၿပီး ကိုေဇာ္ထြန္းမွာ အသက္ ၁၉ ႏွစ္ ျဖစ္သည္။ ႏွစ္ဦးစလံုး ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္ ေပါက္ေတာၿမိဳ႕နယ္မွ ျဖစ္ၾကသည္။

၎တို႔သည္ ေမလ ၆ ရက္ေန႔မွ စတင္ကာ ျမ၀တီ နယ္ျခားေစာင့္တပ္ အမွတ္ ၁၄ ဂိတ္မွ ထြက္လာခဲ့ၾကၿပီး မဲေဆာက္ ဘက္ျခမ္းမွတဆင့္ ေတာလမ္းခရီးကို ေလွ်ာက္ခဲ့ၾကရေၾကာင္း၊ ေမ ၁၃ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ထိုင္းႏုိင္ငံ ခၽြန္ဘူရီခရိုင္ အေခ်ာင္ၿမိဳ႕ ေ၀လာစိန္ တံတားတြင္ ရွိေသာ ငါးဖမ္းေလွဆိပ္သို႔ ေရာက္ရွိခဲ့ေၾကာင္း၊ ထိုအရပ္သို႔ေရာက္မွ ၎တို႔ ေရာင္းစားခံခဲ့ရ သည္ကို သိရေၾကာင္း ကိုေက်ာ္ဇံက ေျပာသည္။

ကိုေက်ာ္ဇံအား ပြဲစားက မဟာခ်ိဳင္အရပ္ရွိ ပုစြန္ေခါင္းခ်ိဳး စက္ရံုတြင္လုပ္ရမည္ဟု ေျပာကာ ေခၚခဲ့ျခင္း ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း၊ သို႔ရာတြင္ မဟာခ်ိဳင္ေဒသမဟုတ္ဘဲ စက္ရံုတြင္လည္း မလုပ္ရေၾကာင္း သူက ဆိုသည္။

“အနီးအနားက မြန္တေယာက္ကို ေမးၾကည့္ေတာ့မွ သူက မင္းတို႔ကို ပြဲစားက ဘတ္ ၁ ေသာင္းနဲ႔ အျပတ္ ေရာင္းထား ခဲ့ၿပီလို႔ ေျပာတယ္။ အဲဒီေတာ့မွ အေရာင္းစား ခံလိုက္ရၿပီဆိုတာကို သိလိုက္ရတယ္။ ကိုယ့္ လူမ်ိဳးအခ်င္းခ်င္း တိရစာၦန္တေကာင္ကို ေရာင္းသလို၊ ကၽြန္ကို ေရာင္းသလို ေရာင္းစား ခံလိုက္ရတာ အရမ္းခံျပင္းတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ အဲဒီအခ်ိန္မွာ ဘာမွ မတတ္ႏိုင္ေတာ့ဘူး” ဟု ၎က ဆက္ေျပာသည္။

ပြဲစားသည္ တျခားသူမ်ားအား ဘန္ေကာက္ရွိ ငါးေသတၱာစက္ရံု၊ နာနတ္သီးစက္ရံုႏွင့္ ပန္းရံလုပ္ငန္းမ်ားတြင္ အလုပ္အကိုင္ ရမည္၊ လက္ငင္းေငြေပးစရာမလုိ၊ အလုပ္သမား လက္မွတ္လည္း လုပ္ေပးမည္၊ ယာယီႏုိင္ငံကူးလက္မွတ္လည္း လုပ္ေပးမည္၊ လမ္းစရိတ္ ဘတ္ ၁၀၀၀၀ က်မည္း၊ အရစ္က် ဆပ္ရမည္၊ လစာ တလလွ်င္ ဘတ္ ၈၀၀၀ ရမည္ စသျဖင့္ မက္လံုးမ်ားေပးကာ ေခၚလာခဲ့ျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။

လူဆြယ္ေပးေသာ ပြဲစားမွာ အသက္ ၂၀ ေက်ာ္အရြယ္ရွိ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံသား မင္းမင္း ဆိုသူျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း၊ မင္းမင္းက ျမ၀တီရွိ လူပြဲစား မေမာ္ (ခ) ေဒၚစန္းစန္းေမာ္ထံသို႔ ပို႔ေပးေၾကာင္း ျပန္ေရြးထုတ္ခံခဲ့ရသူ ကိုေဇာ္ထြန္းက ေျပာျပသည္။

“က်ေနာ္တို႔ကို မဲေဆာက္ကေန ျမ၀တီမွာရွိတဲ့ မေမာ္ဆီကို မင္းမင္းက ပို႔ေပးတယ္။ သူက ပြဲခယူၿပီး က်ေနာ္တို႔ကို လႊဲေပးလိုက္တာ။ အဲဒီ မေမာ္က ျမ၀တီဘက္ကမ္းမွာရွိတဲ့ အမွတ္ ၁၄ နယ္ျခားေစာင့္တပ္ ၀န္းထဲမွာေနတာ။ က်ေနာ္တို႔ အဲဒီမွာ တညအိပ္ခဲ့ရတယ္” ဟု သူက ဆိုသည္။

မဲေဆာက္မွ ဘန္ေကာက္သို႔ လူတင္ပို႔ေသာ ကယ္ရီ (ပြဲစား) မ်ားစြာ ရွိၿပီး ျမန္မာ ေရႊ႕ေျပာင္း အလုပ္သမားမ်ားသည္ နယ္စပ္အသီးသီးမွ ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံအတြင္းပိုင္းသို႔ ကယ္ရီမ်ားျဖင့္ သြားလာၾကရေၾကာင္း၊ ထိုကယ္ရီမ်ားထဲတြင္ လူေမွာင္ခို ကုန္ကူး သူမ်ားလည္း ပါရွိေၾကာင္း PVA အဖြဲ ့မွ ကိုသိန္းဆန္းက ဆိုသည္။

“ကယ္ရီေတြကေတာ့ ဒီမွာ အမ်ားႀကီးပဲ။ ဒီလို လူေမွာင္ခို ကုန္ကူးတဲ့အဖြဲ႔ေတြက သံုး၊ ေလးဖြဲ႕ေလာက္ေတာ့ ရွိႏိုင္မယ္ ထင္တယ္။ က်ေနာ္တို႔ ေျခရာခံ မိေနတာကေတာ့ မေမာ္တို႔အဖြဲ႔ပဲ။ သူတို႔အထဲက မင္းမင္းဆိုတဲ့သူကို က်ေနာ္တို႔ ထိန္းသိမ္းထားတယ္။ မေမာ္က နယ္ျခားေစာင့္တပ္ကို အကာအကြယ္ယူၿပီး လႈပ္ရွားတယ္။ ထိုင္းဘက္ကို မကူးဘူး” ဟု ကိုသိန္းဆန္းက ဆိုသည္။

အေခ်ာင္ၿမိဳ႕ ေ၀လာစိန္ ေလွဆိပ္တြင္ ငါးဖမ္းေလွ ေထာင္ႏွင့္ခ်ီ ရွိႏိုင္ေၾကာင္းႏွင့္ ယင္းေလွမ်ားတြင္ အေရာင္းစား ခံထားရသူ မ်ားစြာရွိေၾကာင္းလည္း ကိုေက်ာ္ဇံက ေျပာသည္။

ကိုေက်ာ္ဇံတို႔ ၁၃ ရက္ၾကာ လိုက္ခဲ့ရေသာ ေလွနံပါတ္ ၁၁ တြင္ ေလွသား ၁၂ ဦး ရွိရာ ၁၀ ဦးမွာ ေရာင္းစား ခံထားရသည့္ ျမန္မာမ်ား ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း၊ က်န္ ၂ ဦးမွာ ပဲ့နင္း ထုိ္င္းလူမ်ိဳးႏွင့္ ေရသွ်ဴး (ငါးရႏုိင္မရႏုိင္ ၾကည့္ေပးရသူ ေရကၽြမ္းက်င္) မြန္တိုင္းရင္းသား တဦးျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း၊ ၎မွာ သူေဌး၏ လူယံုလည္း ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

လူပြဲစားမ်ားက လူတဦးလွ်င္ ဘတ္တေသာင္းျဖင့္ ေရာင္းစားခဲ့ၿပီး အေရာင္းစားခံရသူက ဘတ္ ၂၀၀၀၀ အထိ ျပန္ဆပ္ ႏုိင္မွ လြတ္ေျမာက္ႏုိင္မည္ ျဖစ္သည္။ အေရာင္းစား ခံရသူသည္ တလလွ်င္ ပ်မ္းမွ် ဘတ္ ၃၀၀၀ ခန္႔ ရမည္ဟု သတ္မွတ္ ထားေသာ္လည္း မည္သည့္ လစာမွ် မရဘဲ ၇ လခန္႔ အလုပ္လုပ္ေပး ၾကရသည္။

အကယ္၍ ေလွမွ ထြက္ေျပးရန္ႀကိဳးစားပါက ျပင္းထန္စြာ ရိုက္ႏွက္ခံရေၾကာင္း၊ ေလွ သူေဌးထံမွ ထြက္ေျပးစဥ္ ရဲ မိ၍ ျပန္လာအပ္ပါက မူလသတ္မွတ္ေစ်းထက္ ၂ ဆ ျပန္ဆပ္ရေၾကာင္း ကိုေဇာ္ထြန္းက ေျပာသည္။

“က်ေနာ္တို႔ ေရွ႕မွာပဲ ထြက္ေျပးတဲ့သူကို အုပ္နဲ႔ ၀ိုင္းရိုက္တာ ျမင္မေကာင္းဘူး။ ၿပီးေတာ့ က်ေနာ္တို႔ ေနခဲ့တဲ့ ေလွေပၚမွာ ေက်ာက္ျဖဴက ကိုစိုးျမင့္ထြန္းနဲ႔ ကိုထြန္းထြန္း၀င္း ဆိုတဲ့ လူ ၂ ေယာက္ကိုေတြ႔ခဲ့တယ္။ သူတို႔ ထြက္ေျပးလို႔ ရဲက ဖမ္းမိၿပီး သူေဌးကို ဘတ္ ၅၀၀၀ နဲ႔ ျပန္လာ ေရာင္းသြားတယ္။ အခု သူတို႔ လုပ္ေပးရမယ့္ လက္က်န္ ၃ လ ျပည့္သြားေပမယ့္ မလြတ္ေသးဘူး။ ေနာက္ထပ္ ၃ လ ထပ္လိုက္ ေပးရဦးမယ္လို႔ ေျပာတယ္” ဟု သူက ရွင္းျပသည္။

ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံ အတြင္းတြင္ ယခုကဲ့သို႔ ေရာင္းစား ခံထားရေသာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသား ေျမာက္မ်ားစြာရွိေနၿပီး ယခု ေမလ အတြင္းတြင္ပင္ ျမ၀တီၿမိဳ႕မွ မေမာ္တို႔အဖြဲ ့ေရာင္းစားလိုက္သူမ်ားမွာ ရာႏွင့္ ခ်ီရွိသည္ဟု PAV အဖြဲ႕က ေျပာသည္။ 

ယင္းအထဲမွ အမ်ိဳးသားမ်ားကို ငါးဖမ္းေလွသို ့ ေရာင္းစားၿပီး အမ်ိဳးသမီးမ်ားမွာမူ ယခုအခ်ိန္အထိ မည္သည့္ေနရာတြင္ ေရာက္ေနေၾကာင္း အတိအက် မသိရဟု ကုိသိန္းဆန္းက ဆိုသည္။

ယခုကဲ့သို႔ လူမ်ား အစုလိုက္ အၿပံဳလိုက္ ေရာင္းစား ခံေနရျခင္းမွာ ျမန္မာအလုပ္သမားမ်ား အေနျဖင့္ ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံအတြင္းသို႔ တရား၀င္ လာေရာက္ႏိုင္ျခင္း မရွိဘဲ ပြဲစားမ်ား၊ လူေမွာင္ခုိ ကုန္ကူးသူမ်ားႏွင့္ သြားလာေနရျခင္းေၾကာင့္ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း၊ ျမန္မာႏွင့္ ထိုင္း ႏွစ္ႏိုင္ငံအစိုးရမ်ား၏ အလုပ္သမား ေပၚလစီ အားနည္းခ်က္ေၾကာင့္ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း၊ ထို႔အျပင္ ေဒသခံ အာဏာပိုင္ မ်ားမွာလည္း အလုပ္ရွင္မ်ား၏ အက်ိဳးစီးပြားကိုသာ ၾကည့္သျဖင့္ ေျဖရွင္းရခက္ေၾကာင္း လူေမွာင္ခိုမႈ၊ လူေရာင္းစား ခံရမႈ အပါအ၀င္ ျမန္မာ ေရႊ႕ေျပာင္းအလုပ္သမားမ်ား အေရးကို ေဆာင္ရြက္ေပးေနသည့္ Thai Action Committee for Democracy in Burma (TACDB) မွ လက္ေထာက္ ဒါရိုက္တာ ဦးျမင့္ေ၀ကေျပာသည္။

၎က “ခၽြန္ဘူရီ အေခ်ာင္ဘက္မွာ အခုလို အမႈမ်ိဳး ခဏခဏ ျဖစ္ေနတယ္။ ေဒသခံ အာဏာပိုင္ေတြကလည္း လုပ္ငန္းရွင္ေတြရဲ႕ အက်ိဳးစီးပြားကိုပဲ ဦးစားေပးၾကည့္ေနေတာ့ ေျဖရွင္းရတာ မလြယ္ဘူး။ ဒီအမႈ ၁၀ မႈမွာ ၁ မႈကို ဖမ္းဆီးဖို႔က မလြယ္လွဘူး” ဟု ဆိုသည္။
ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံအတြင္းတြင္ လာေရာက္အလုပ္လုပ္ေနၾကေသာ ေရႊ႕ေျပာင္းျမန္မာ အလုပ္သမားမ်ားမွာ အနည္းဆံုး ၂ သန္းမွ ၄ သန္း ၀န္းက်င္ခန္႔ရွိေၾကာင္း အလုပ္သမားအဖြဲ ့မ်ားက ခန္႔မွန္းၾကသည္။

Peace wishing ceremony held for Kachin war refugees

Catholic Kachin youth group held an eternal peace wishing ceremony for Kachin war refugees at in Yangon on 19.

The ceremony was attended by political parties, 88 new generation students, local NGOs, youth organizations and some artistes. All those present wished for civil war refugees across the country to enjoy eternal peace.

In this ceremony, leaders of political parties and Ko Mya Aye, an 88 new generation student, spoke words of wishing.

Youths present at the ceremony sang own-composed songs in turn. They also shared sympathetic words towards Kachin civil war refugees at the ceremony.

“We, Kachin youths, can help nothing to them but we can show passion and sympathy to them as much as we can. For this purpose, we are holding the wishing ceremony for them,” said a Catholic Kachin youth in Yangon.

Karen IDPs Granted ID Cards

The Burmese government began on Monday to issue national identity cards to ethnic Karen internally displaced persons (IDPs) who until now have not had the opportunity to obtain such IDs due to displacement and decades of civil war.

The move marks the first time the Burmese government has granted ID cards to Karen war refugees who were in the past targeted by government troops and thousands subjected to violent attacks, murder, torture, rape and forced labor.

On Monday a group of more than 30 Karen IDPs in Kyaukkyi town in Pegu Division were given ID cards at a ceremony attended by Burmese officials, including Minister of Immigration Khin Yi, as well as a leading Karen National Union (KNU) leader, Saw Tu Tu Lay, and Norway’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Torgeir Larsen.

The Norwegian government is funding US $5 million toward the peace process in eastern Burma, including needs assessments aimed at resettling IDPs—part of a project conducted by its Norwegian Initiative.

Saw Htoo Klei, the secretary of the Karen Office of Relief and Development (KORD), which provides assistance to the IDPs in KNU-controlled areas, said that the move seems positive, but added that more needs to be done for the IDPs.

“Issuing ID cards to IDPs is not enough,” Htoo Klei told The Irrawaddy on Tuesday. “There must be safe living, traveling and aworking conditions for the IDPs.

“It is important to ensure the IDPs’ long-term peace and freedom,” he said.
With the cooperation of the Burmese government, the KNU and various Karen relief groups, the Norwegian government said it also plans to expand its financial and technical assistance to the peace process, including funding mine clearance projects in KNU-controlled areas.

The ceremony in Kyaukkyi was the first in a project that could encompass hundreds of thousands of IDPs in eastern Burma, and which was agreed following the ceasefire agreement which was signed between the Burmese government and the KNU on Jan. 12 this year.

Norway’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs is scheduled to meet with leaders of the KNU during his visit to Thailand this week. He will also brief humanitarian agencies, NGOs working on Burma, and CBOs about Norway’s further role in Burma in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand, on Wednesday.

The Jesus Film (English Version with Subtitles)

Reproductive Health Training

All of our staff had finished the reproductive health training on the last week in here Maesai Grace Church. Organized by Kachin Women Organization Thailand and special thanks for the KWOT and the trainers.

Mother's Day Celebration in Maesai Grace Church

Thanks Mum ( ေက်းဇူးပဲေမေမ )

G Lay - Mom

May May...............

myanmar mother song

For all the Mother!

Maesai Grace Church (2-4-2012 & 7-4-2012) Mission trips

Thai, Burmese bank open remittance service

Asian Green Development Bank and Thailand’s Kasikorn Bank signed an agreement on 8 May to create a remittance service between the two countries.

On Tuesday, AGDB’s deputy-chairman Zaw Min and the K-Bank’s Senior Executive Vice President Somkid Jiranuntarat signed an agreement in Bangkok at Kasikorn’s headquarters in front of officials from the Burmese embassy and the World Bank.

“Migrants sending their hard-earn cash from Thailand back to their homes via unofficial money transfer services often end up losing their money so based on this consideration, we sought approval from the World Bank to run an official remittance service,” said an official from K-Bank.

The exchange rate will be based on daily EU currency rates. The bank said it will offer special discount services to migrant workers and is looking to hire Burmese staff at select branches.
K-Bank said they aim to have the service up and running in June. The first bank to host the service will be in Mahachai district near Bangkok, where a large Burmese community is located.

Kasikorn is the first bank to use Burmese language interface with their ATM machines at more than 20 locations in Thailand.

Asia Green Development Bank is owned by the powerful businessman Tay Za, whom Forbes has described as Burma’s first billionaire and who has benefited from close relations with top-level government officials.

Planning a participant or staff retreat

Retreats are a way to gather your staff and/or participants in a relaxed setting to share ideas, reflect on experiences, discuss service issues, learn new skills, and work on team building. This practice provides several suggestions for implementing an effective retreat, including advice on how to organize and define the goals of a retreat. Includes sample agendas, examples of ground rules, and a retreat feedback form. Excerpted from the Corporation for National and Community Service's Handbook for Continuous Improvement.

Action

Consider the following when implementing a retreat:

• Define the desired outcome of the retreat.
• Determine who needs to attend in order to accomplish the desired outcome.
• Decide whether you will use a facilitator to help plan the agenda and manage the retreat.
• If you use a facilitator, decide whether s/he should be from outside the organization or inside the organization.
• Once you know how many people to invite and the type of space you need, identify a facility that can accommodate your requirements.
• Visit the facility if you are not familiar with it to verify the accommodations.
• Develop an agenda for the meeting and determine whether you want the attendees to do any work prior to the retreat.
• Schedule some "fun" or "down" time for attendees to reflect and just enjoy being together.
• Hold retreats that last longer than a day at the beginning of the week. Participants will be much more focused if they have had the weekend to relax.
• Reconfirm details with the facility a few days before the retreat.
• Arrive early the day of the retreat to set up the room.
• Ask everyone to complete a Retreat Feedback Form at the end of the retreat.

Staff Retreat Days

A staff retreat day scheduled into the regular work life of an organization can be a source of great unity and inspiration. As we learn to be with each other in different ways, we develop deeper understandings of who we are as individuals and as a group. Spending time with coworkers in a way that is fun, relaxed, and reflective can be nourishing as well as productive. Rarely in this culture do we take the time to simply pause from the frantic pace of our actions. A commitment to pausing on an organizational level can lead to the manifestation of an entirely different and powerful orientation toward work, vision, community, and self.

Creating a pause within a regular workday can help to create a healthy pace for our work lives. And the commitment to taking an entire day for staff contemplation and rejuvenation can make those changes more profound, especially if repeated at regular intervals throughout the year. It may require a leap of faith to take a precious eight hours out of the month [or even the year], but that kind of commitment signifies an understanding of the importance of the dynamic relationship between process and product and a willingness to invest in the long-term sustainability of your workplace.

Evaluation Meeting, Action Planning and Retreats

Staff are always busy with their responsible duty and assignment. Every year we are planning to our staff for evaluation for the last and strategics and action operational planning for the new years and events with the retreats program.

This year we are going to Doitung Village and the garden and spent the night with chiang rai international YMCA.

And have a fun and program with the staff and all the family member and children are including. We are one family and one team.

ကိုယ္ပိုင္ေက်ာင္း မွတ္ပံုတင္ ဥပေဒျပ႒ာန္းခ်က္ ေပၚထြက္လာၿပီးေနာက္ပိုင္း ပုဂၢလိကေက်ာင္းမ်ား၌ ေက်ာင္းအပ္ႏွံရန္ မိဘမ်ား စိတ္၀င္စားမႈ ပိုမိုလာ

လာမည့္ စာသင္ႏွစ္ေက်ာင္းဖြင့္ ရာသီျဖစ္သည့္ ၂၀၁၂-၁၃ပညာသင္ ႏွစ္၌ ပုဂၢလိကေက်ာင္းမ်ားတြင္ ေက်ာင္းအပ္ႏွံရန္ မိဘမ်ားစိတ္၀င္စားမႈ ပိုမိုလာသည္ဟု သိရသည္။
ပုဂၢလိကေက်ာင္းမ်ား၏သင္႐ိုး ႏွင့္ အေျခခံ သတ္မွတ္ခ်က္မ်ားမွာ အစိုးရေက်ာင္းမ်ားႏွင့္တန္းတူျဖစ္ ျခင္း၊ လူထုလူတန္းစားအသီးသီး တက္ေရာက္သင္ၾကားႏိုင္သည့္ ႏႈန္း ထားမ်ားရွိျခင္းတို႔ေၾကာင့္ ႏုိင္ငံပိုင္ သတင္းစာမ်ားတြင္ ၂၀၁၁ ခုႏွစ္ ဒီဇင္ဘာလ ၂ ရက္ေန႔ ရက္စြဲျဖင့္ ထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကညာခဲ့သည့္ ကိုယ္ပိုင္ ေက်ာင္းမွတ္ပံုတင္ဥပေဒျပ႒ာန္းခ်က္ ေပၚထြက္ၿပီးေနာက္ပိုင္းမွ စတင္၍ ပိုမိုစိတ္၀င္စားခဲ့သည္ဟု သိရသည္။

“ပုဂၢလိကေက်ာင္းေတြမွာ မူလ တန္းကေနတကၠသိုလ္၀င္တန္းအထိ သင္ခြင့္ရွိတဲ႔အတြက္ေက်ာင္းေျပာင္း ေက်ာင္းလႊဲေတြအတြက္လည္းအလုပ္ မ႐ႈပ္ေတာ့ဘူး။ ၿပီးေတာ့အစိုးရ ေက်ာင္းေတြ၊ က်ဴရွင္ေတြကိုလည္းထပ္ တက္ဖို႔မလိုဘူး။ ပုဂၢလိကေက်ာင္း က ထုတ္ေပးတဲ့ေအာင္လက္မွတ္နဲ႔ အစိုးရေက်ာင္းကထုတ္ေပးတဲ့ေအာင္ လက္မွတ္ အဆင့္အတန္းခ်င္းလည္း တူတယ္။ ၿပီးေတာ့ အလြယ္တကူ ေက်ာင္းေျပာင္းအပ္ႏိုင္တယ္ဆိုတဲ့ အခ်က္နဲ႔ေက်ာင္းစရိတ္ထက္ က်ဴရွင္စရိတ္က လက္ေတြ႕မွာ ကုန္က်စရိတ္ပိုမ်ားေနတဲ့ အေနအထားမွာ က်ဴရွင္ထပ္တက္စရာ မလိုဘူးဆိုတဲ့ အခ်က္ကို စိတ္၀င္စားမႈ အရွိဆံုးပါပဲ”ဟု ေက်ာင္းသားမိဘတစ္ဦးက ေျပာျပခဲ့ပါသည္။

“ကြၽန္မကေတာ့ ကေလးကို ပုဂၢလိကေက်ာင္းမွာ အခုလာမယ့္ စာသင္ႏွစ္ကစၿပီး ထားဖို႔စိတ္ကူးထားပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့ သင္ၾကားမႈပိုင္းဆိုင္ရာကိုလည္း စမ္းသပ္ၾကည့္ခ်င္ပါတယ္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ ေက်ာင္းမေျပာင္းခင္ ေလ့လာတဲ့အေနနဲ႔ စာသင္ႏွစ္မတုိင္မီမွာ အႀကိဳဖြင့္လွစ္တဲ့ ေႏြရာသီ သံုးလသင္တန္းကို စမ္းအပ္ထားပါတယ္”ဟု ေျမာက္ဒဂံုၿမိဳ႕နယ္ရွိ ေက်ာင္းသား မိဘတစ္ဦးက ေျပာျပခဲ့ပါသည္။

ပုဂၢလိကေက်ာင္းမ်ား၌ သင္႐ိုးႏွင့္ အေျခခံ သတ္မွတ္ခ်က္မ်ားသည္ အစိုးရ ေက်ာင္းမ်ားႏွင့္တန္းတူ ျဖစ္ေသာ္လည္း အပိုေဆာင္းၿပီး သင္ၾကားလိုသည့္ ဘာသာရပ္မ်ားရွိပါက သက္ဆိုင္ရာသို႔ တင္ျပ၍ ခြင့္ျပဳခ်က္ရယူ သင္ၾကားႏိုင္သည္ျဖစ္ရာ ပုဂၢလိကေက်ာင္း အခ်ဳိ႕တြင္ အဂၤလိပ္စာ(4-Skills)၊ ကြန္ပ်ဴတာ၊ ဂီတ၊ ပန္းခ်ီ၊ အားကစားအမ်ဳိးမ်ဳိး စသျဖင့္ သင္ၾကားမႈမ်ားရွိေၾကာင္း သိရွိရသည္။

“ကေလးေတြဟာ ဘက္စံုမွာ ထူးခြၽန္ေနေအာင္လို႔ ေက်ာင္းစာသင္႐ိုး အျပင္ အပိုေဆာင္းသင္ၾကားေပးတာ ေတြရွိပါတယ္။ အပိုေဆာင္း သင္ၾကားေပးတဲ့ ဘာသာရပ္ေတြကိုလည္း တတ္ကြၽမ္းမႈအဆင့္ သတ္မွတ္ခ်က္ အလိုက္ Certificate ထုတ္ေပးတဲ့ အစီအစဥ္ေတြရိွပါတယ္။ ပုဂၢလိကေက်ာင္း ဆိုေပမယ့္လည္း သင္ၾကား ေရးမွာ မိဘေတြစြက္ဖက္ခြင့္ လံုး၀မရွိပါဘူး။ သင္ၾကားမႈပံုစံကိုေတာ့ ေက်ာင္းသားေျခာက္ေယာက္ကို ဆရာ တစ္ေယာက္ႏႈန္း အခ်ဳိးက်ျဖစ္ေအာင္ စံခ်ိန္ကို ထိန္းထားပါတယ္” ဟု ေရႊပင္ေရႊသီး ပုဂၢလိက အထက္တန္း ေက်ာင္းမွေက်ာင္းအုပ္ဆရာႀကီး ဦးေက်ာ္စိုးက ဆိုသည္။

ေက်ာင္း၀တ္စံု သတ္မွတ္ခ်က္မ်ားႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ ျမန္မာ့ယဥ္ေက်းမႈႏွင့္ ဆန္႔က်င္သည့္ ၀တ္စားဆင္ယင္ မႈမ်ဳိးမွလြဲ၍ ေက်ာင္းအလိုက္ႏွစ္သက္ရာ အေရာင္မ်ားကို ေရြးခ်ယ္၀တ္ဆင္ခြင့္ရွိေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။
“တကၠသိုလ္၀င္စာေမးပြဲ ေျဖဆိုၿပီးတဲ့အခ်ိန္ကစၿပီး ေက်ာင္းအပ္လက္ခံခဲ့တာပါ။ အေျခခံပညာ စာေမးပြဲ ေအာင္စာရင္းေတြ ထြက္ၿပီးတဲ့အခ်ိန္ကစၿပီး လက္ခံလာခဲ့တာပါ”ဟု သခ်ၤာ ဦးသန္းစိန္ ပုဂၢလိကေက်ာင္းမွ ဦးသန္းစိန္ (သခ်ၤာ)က ေျပာျပခဲ့ပါသည္။

ပုဂၢလိကေက်ာင္းမ်ား အေနျဖင့္လည္း အစိုးရေက်ာင္းမ်ား နည္းတူ လာမည့္ စာသင္ႏွစ္အတြက္ ေက်ာင္းမ်ား ျပန္လည္ဖြင့္လွစ္သြားမည္ ျဖစ္ကာ ရန္ကုန္တိုင္းေဒသႀကီးအတြင္း၌အီးစီ ပညာရိပ္သာ၊ မဟာျမကြၽန္းသာ၊ ဇင္ေယာ္၊ ပညာနန္းေတာ္၊ Success၊ ဟယ္ပင္၊ သခ်ၤာဦးသန္းစိန္၊ N-3၊ ဂုဏ္ထူးဦးသိန္းႏုိင္ႏွင့္ ေရႊပင္ေရႊသီး စသည့္ ပုဂၢလိကေက်ာင္း ၁၀ ေက်ာင္းရွိ ၿပီး လစဥ္ေၾကးမ်ားမွာ မူလတန္းမွ တကၠသိုလ္၀င္တန္း အထိ ေငြက်ပ္ႏွစ္ေသာင္းမွ ငါးေသာင္း၀န္းက်င္ အၾကား ရွိေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

Correct Your Children Without Condemning Them

"Correct your children while there is still hope; do not let them destroy themselves." (Proverbs 19:18 NCV)

We all need correction at times, because no one is perfect. If I don't discipline my kids, it means two things:

I'm willing to participate in their destruction. Proverbs 19:18 says, "Correct your children while there is still hope; do not let them destroy themselves" (NCV). If I don't take the time to correct my kids and teach them new habits and the right way to behave and think, I'm actually setting them up to fail and be destroyed. Even worse, refusing to take the time to discipline our children is evidence of a lack of love in our heart. We don't think of it that way. Sometimes we're just too tired to fight another battle. But that reveals that we're putting our needs ahead of our child's needs. We need to take the time to discipline our kids.
How can we correct them in a way without condemning them?

Don't correct in anger. Ephesians 6:4 says, "Don't keep on scolding and nagging your children, making them angry and resentful. Rather, bring them up with loving discipline, with suggestions and godly advice" (LB). When I'm frustrated and angry with my kids, it feels good to let out that frustration; that release is an instant solution. But it does nothing for the long-term problem, and it strains the relationship between my kids and me. Instead of disciplining in anger, back away, calm down, get yourself under control, then come back and deal with the problem.

Watch your words. Ephesians 4:29 says, "Do not use harmful words, but only helpful words, the kind that built up" (GN). Harmful words create hurtful memories. Those words that are spoken in anger and belittle our weaknesses and our faults and our failings are like knives in the heart. You don't want to leave harmful words in your family's memories. Instead, choose your words carefully, and speak in love.

A Parent's Prayer

Make this your prayer today and every day: "I will try to walk a blameless path, but how I need Your help especially in my own home, where I long to act as I should" (Psalm 101:2 LB).

Photo Album from Narkaung Moo Mission Trip (1)