From Mao Tao Clinic Website Sunday, April 05, 2009

Education

· Access to education if compromised by lack of accessible schools, poverty, war, displacement, low wages for teachers and the UNHCR.

· Officially education in Burma is compulsory until the end of primary School, with the completion of 4th Standard. Unicef reports that less than 50% of children achieve this.

· Education is supposed to be provided free of charge, but teachers wages are so low that they are forced to charge fees or seek other work elsewhere.

· Only SPDC schools continue to the 10th Grade, but these schools are not found in rural areas.

· University professors are restricted in freedom of speech, political activity and publications.

Health.

Across Eastern Burma:

· Infant mortality rate is 91/1000 compared 76 for the rest of Burma. (compare 18/1000 for neighboring Thailand.)

· One in 5 children dies before the age of 5.

· One in 12 women dies in childbirth – 4 times higher than the rest of in Burma.

· Malnutrition levels in children is 15%

· Malaria infectivity at any one time is 12%

· HIV/AIDS are considered epidemic.

General sanitation and understanding of hygiene is low. Access to clean water is poor. Incidence of GI diseases, such as cholera, typhoid, and shigella is therefore high. Many of these diseases are avoidable.

My brother is coming to visit us here as he finishes his job prospecting for copper in Botswana. He and his wife are traveling this long journey because they want to see what is going on here.

It will be wonderful to see them. We want to show them what we have been ‘up to’ the last 7 years.

We plan to take them on the same tour through Mae Tao Clinic as the CIDA people, the United Nations representatives and Save The Children get and Laura Bush had. We will look at Trauma where David works, and see the people with amputations and abscesses, acid burns just to begin the alphabet. Next we will go to the In Patient Department where malaria is a constant visitor, where AIDS/HIV is cared for but not treated, oddly unless you have TB at the same time, and where just recently MSF withdrew their previous management of TB because of worry that the patients lack of treatment compliance was leading to too many resistant forms of the disease.



We will see the new Pediatric In-Patients and admire the children, and probably see the process of rescue from mal-nutrition and vitamin deficiency. We will probably run into Dr. Terry Smith, in OBGYN, who has recently been helping run a course for about 54 Medics who after 9 months of training are going back to their communities in Karen State to improve critical care midwifery throughout the state. Last time in Reproductive Health, he showed me two tiny babies who had been dropped off at the front gate. This is a regular occurrence. My brother and his wife are concerned people and have done what they could as they worked in various parts of the world, helping people in similar situations to ours, but I know we will upset them, as each time I take these tours with people, I get upset myself. The Clinic runs an active birth control program, but not everyone has had the education. For migrant women (many thousands working in Thailand in the sweatshops, trying to help their family,) life is not easy. Most women need a protector of some sort. With a baby, it is impossible to continue working. Dr. Cynthia and the Karen Women’s Organization run several orphanages. The Karen has enormous charity for each other. I have not a met a more caring people. Generally, the husbands are with their wives as they have their babies and giving birth is a thing of great joy but often on the other side of the building there are women very sick as the result of botched back street abortions.

We have had many visitors this year, but this is the first time ever anyone in our immediate family has been to visit and so we are very excited. We are looking forward to drinking coffee in the morning, likely in our bedroom in our Mae Sot house, with them, where we are lucky to have air-conditioning. This time of year it is very hot. They have seen most of the rest of the family recently and we can catch up on the news. My brother and I enjoy argument and discussion. I want to know if he has changed his views; what he thinks of the financial crisis; what his Africa tour has left in his head. How it has changed him? Before we were always talking about growth and how much we needed to retire, but living here, we are now questioning if we need so much, and wonder if the gap between rich and poor threatens everyone’s security far more and that living in balance with each other should be our main concern. Maybe we have it all wrong, that progress is often not progress at all and that we must shift our attention to the real problems; the excessive energy consumption, the huge population increase, climate change and our failure to see that nobody is allowed to be desperately poor or desperately rich and that the first world is responsible for many of the problems of the third, and it is time to pay the bill.

We will take them to the 23 year old Refugee Camp to meet our student charges there. This year they are having to stay in the heat of the camp unhappily as it is too dangerous for them to go back to their home villages, or to Kaw Tha Blay, their previous College Campus in Karen State (this is difficult to translate but trust me). This year, we are low on cash, so we cannot provide the $7.00 each, as we did before, so that they could buy their way out of trouble if needed if they ran into the SPDC. There are 57 children left in the hostel as of yesterday. I know because I checked before buying hand and laundry soap, toothpaste, sanitary needs and toothbrushes. 25 did go home, quite how I do not know, but I think they went with Pah Yim, the Hostel grandfather, and walked. It would take 4 days in the heat. I will take my brother up the side of the mountain, through the camp, that houses more than 50,000 people and we will take watermelons or oranges, treats they do not get too often.

We are down to the deadline with the Library donated by the Retired Teachers of Ontario. We built it but the woven bamboo is just been painted. We were also in competition with the completion of the Cafeteria in the College, and it was exam time too. We finally smuggled boards for shelves into the camp under roof leaves last week but the builders can’t put them together yet. It is the biggest holiday in SEA, the water festival from now until next week. I badly want to impress my brother who set up a Mining Library in Timmins and Sudbury. It runs in the family my mother was a Librarian too. Thanks to The RTO and Heather Gauldie and the amazing Cathy and Eric Sayles, it will happen soon and I cannot wait to see the children with these beautiful books.

So, we will climb up the mountain together and I am sure the kids will meet us just inside the gate and they will pull us over the difficult bits making light of the heat and water. They are incredibly fit, rarely get sick now, which was not how it used to be. I am sure they will give us a demonstration of Chillo or kick ball – a good choice of a game, because it does not take much space. Over the past few months , the children have repaired the dormitories, the eating and study halls and the toilets and showers, totally rebuilding some of the bamboo structures. I have told Kshakalu that we cannot take any new students this year because we just don’t have the funding and the one plus from that is that we now have enough room for a volley ball court so the girls will have some exercise. So, those in Burma will have to wait for the recovery that is promised.

I am so looking forward to my brother coming. I am so proud of our brave children and I am going to be so happy to introduce him to them.

Ten of the students from our hostel will go to the college next year, a smaller number than usual but we have big second year class of 31 and we will take in another 15 from ‘inside’ and other camps.

We have spent money on turning the safe house in Thailand into the home base for the college. The Burmese Military is determined to destroy or take over any pockets of Karen resistance this year. So the decision had to be made to cross the river. And in a short time, we have been accepted or almost accepted into Doh Tah, theThai Karen Village.

This has been an amazing process and I want my brother to see it. Our students are, as I write teaching Thai/Karen village children how to read and write their mother tongue. Our teachers are teaching the children of the 7 villages in our area how to touch type in Karen and English and Thai, on the computers PUB donors and Orillia and Area Rotary Clubs have bought and our medic teacher is teaching English to them during this school break. It is a lot of organizing that Kshakalu does and my brother who has set up in many third world countries will appreciate how difficult this is.



That will be the next place I will take my family. We have cows now and chickens and further north on both sides of the river many goats and ducks and more land, lots of land given to us to use by Karen gone to America or Thai who need the land worked to keep it. We need an agriculture teacher although we have farmers sent from ‘inside’ to help us in this slow move towards independence. Our computer teacher is ready to help with the accounting for both Hostel and college. Our Thai teacher will, hopefully, interpret and ease the way to our acquiring a telephone landline so my dream of giving them Internet Access will finally come true. These things take a long time to build in this third world working with people here who have no country to call their own.

Our kids are poor, displaced and illegal with no civic rights. The college is so significant. The students have had less (only two outfits, one pair of slippers), so we could have all the buildings we need at the college (dormitories, schoolroom, a library underway, the cafeteria/kitchen/classroom, the road and toilets) and are gaining security so the education can continue - broaden and deepen. Will my brother and my wonderful sister- in- law understand why we do this?

My brother has always stepped lightly on the earth even in his search for metals. It is a lesson it has taken me a long time to learn. The Karen, have no rights. Literally they walk on landmines. Their attitude to life has had a huge impact on mine.

I can’t wait to see at least part my own family and show them our big family here.

Then home to see more family and all the wonderful aware people who have helped and who, hopefully, will continue to help as we prepare for another year.

Love to all,

Cathy