Teaching Refugees in Maela Refugee Camp

Quality Education to Displaced Children

 

Quality education will bring positive change to the future of a child and eventually a nation. The United Nations identifies education as the best single answer to the future elimination of global poverty. Effective Aid International is delivering quality education and thus impacting the communities of refugees and displaced people living in the regions along the Thai-Burma border and rural Northern Thailand.

 

Human rights abuse, poverty and civil war have caused millions of people to be displaced from their homes and villages since Burma’s independence from Britain in 1948. Almost all of these are from various ethnic minority groups, with the greatest percentage being from the Karen Ethnic Group.

 

Today, more than 150,000 people live in nine refugee camps in the mountainous regions of north-west Thailand close to the Burmese border. Many more live as illegal migrants in Thailand. Each family has their own horror story of the struggle to escape and survive.

 

Thirty percent of the refugee population are school age. This means in the camps alone there are approximately 45,000 children in need of education. Effective Aid International provides full time quality education to more than 1100 of these children, employing and training almost 100 teachers, all of whom are refugees themselves.

 

Effective Aid International’s education program began in June 2002 when our first school was opened at the Mae Khong Kha Refugee Camp, with an initial enrolment of 160 students from kindergarten to grade 4.

 

Today, Effective Aid International facilitates three primary and high schools, two inside refugee camps and one catering to the illegal migrant children of families living in rural Thailand. We provide education at all grade levels from Grade 1 through to Grade 12. Inside Eastern Burma, we have also commenced an education program with primary schools in two villages where schooling was not available. This region will be a focus for expansion in the future.

2012 will see our education program begin to expand in areas of Eastern Burma, as that country slowly progresses towards democracy and opens up to desperately needed international aid. These are SE Asia's poorest people and already Effective Aid International has been allocated land for schools. Please partner with us in bringing fresh hope to the communities in this area.

 

In addition we have the Blue Skies School at Baan Fah Sighy Children’s Home. Registered with the Thai Education Department to deliver Kindergarten 1 – 3 as well as Primary Grades 1 – 6, this school continues to grow and gain recognition as the best in the region.

Dormitories at each of Effective Aid International’s refugee schools provide housing for both orphans and the children of families still living in Eastern Burma in villages where schooling is unavailable. These students are cared for by “house parents” and provided with all the necessities of life. There are currently more than 100 students living in these homes.

 

 

It is stories like this and the gratitude shown by the students and their families that make this “labour of love” worthwhile.

 

Lives and futures are being changed through the refugee education programs being provided by Effective Aid International.

While a program of formal education provides the basic development of knowledge and skills for any child, the true creation of opportunity comes through participation in some form of vocational training or tertiary study program.

 

Maela Senior School, in Maela Refugee Camp has been providing further studies to the refugee community since 2004. Courses to date have been mainly in the areas of English, Computers and Leadership.

 

We are currently in the planning process for the development of a formal Teacher Training Program that will commence in June 2012. This will be the first two-year Diploma Course in this field of study in the refugee community.

 

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