Two classrooms
In the bottom of a parking garage
Warning students to be quiet so local citizens don't call police on the "loud" refugees
Classroom Rule #1: Speak softly (so police aren't called)
All of these kids came down from Burma 1 to 2 years ago. One of these boys is an orphan, living with the Chin school leader, his wife, and their baby, along with some other kids they've fostered
No workbooks available. The teachers write the problems on the board.
Basket system with curricula for each age group, since some of the 13 year olds are at the grade level of an 8 year old. Most kids are 3 years behind in school. It's a challenge for the teachers to have kids at so any different grade levels and new kids coming at random times.
They have preschool math too, for the seriously delayed
Note the fans on the ceiling. UNHCR provided them. It can be very hot and stuffy in the basement parking garage without much flow of air.
English-Myanmar (Burmese) Translation Dictionary kept by the students' side. The students' English is pretty bad. The teachers' English is almost equally bad. But, in theory, they are being taught in English.
This teacher doesn't have his UNHCR Refugee ID card yet. He asked me if I knew how to speed the process along, one of many who've assumed I have influence at UNHCR. Note that the teachers and students wear shirts with UNHCR emblems on them. I see it as a measure of protection, for when the police come for their nearly daily checks/harrassments of them. Since this teacher does not have a UNHCR card, he only goes between his apartment upstairs and the school. He rarely if ever leaves the building.
Trophies from their Faisal Cup Soccer Tournament for refugees win. The tournament is a big point of pride and excitement -- the one time per year they get to play outside, on big fields. Otherwise, they are trapped in their one building, with their school and apartment in it. It's too unsafe for them to play outside.
One of these girls' father recently committed suicide, jumping off a high story of the same building the school is in, and the same building they all live in. It's a hard life as a refugee provider.
A drawing break from her repeatedly writing the letter "K" at school
This teacher was put in detention for 6 days by Malaysian police, until the head teacher had to pay a big bribe to get her out. UNHCR did not respond to his repeated calls to help her in detention. She was put in detention even after she had a UNHCR refugee ID card, that supposedly protects her from detention.
March 24, 2011
I went to visit another one of the most hidden refugee schools I’ve seen in Kuala Lumpur. It is hidden in a basement parking lot of one of many blocks of high rise, very low-income buildings in the worst section of Kuala Lumpur (KL).
It was a Chin school. The Chin are the most dominant ethnic refugee group from Burma in Malaysia. The Chin come to Malaysia but the Karen don’t come to Malaysia as much. Why? The Karen Burmese refugees mostly stay in Thailand next to the border of Burma for a couple reasons, it seems. (1) They want to be nearby Burma so they can return to the Karen state of Burma, in case any more welcoming political change ever, as unlikely as it seems, happens (2) The Karen dominate the refugee camps across the border in Thailand. The Chin I spoke with felt it was a sensitive political topic, but hesitantly told me that the Karen dominate the refugee camps, in many ways, and the Chin do not feel welcome in the camps. In theory, the refugee camps should welcome any ethnic group. The Chin also said Malaysia is becoming known as an easier place to get registered as a refugee by UNHCR, than in Thailand, and, for a while, UNHCR was resettling disproportionately more Chin, than other Burmese ethnic groups, to safer, more welcoming Western countries.
So, most of the Chin have migrated away from the border, and most have come down to Kuala Lumpur. How did they get here? I asked a Chin leader and some students in the school, who’d only left Burma a year or two ago. First, some of the kids were orphans. One orphan said a friend’s family brought him the long trip from Burma through Thailand down to Kuala Lumpur (KL). The kids who were not orphans have parents who left them back in Burma for a year or two then sent for them later.
What was their trip like from Burma to KL? Tough. Sounds similar to Mexican illegal immigrants making their way into the US. Sometimes they would pay an “agent” to take them down to KL, often starting their journey in the jungle, waiting for days without much, if any, food and water, for Thai soldiers’ movement away from them to give them an opportunity to escape south. Then, they’d walk all the way to Bangkok. It took at least a couple days, if not more. Exhausting, they said. And, then, in Bangkok, they’d be stuffed into a car or truck, often tightly piled on top of each other, sometimes banging on the inside of the trunk asking for more air. Then, somehow, greased with many bribes, they make their way all the way down through Thailand, to Kuala Lumpur.
In Kuala Lumpur, the kids rejoin their families in high-rise housing in poor parts of the city. It is far from a safer place for their families, though, compared to Burma or Thailand. They often are barely able to survive, financially, packing many families into one small apartment. But, downstairs in this one Chin community I visited, they have a school for them, run by a Chin leader who has an Australian wife who invited me to visit their school.
The Chin leader usually welcomes each new Chin refugee family who arrives in Kuala Lumpur, saying the child can come to school for free. One recent family said, No. They wanted the child to wait a year or two first. Why? The leader thinks it’s because they want the school-aged child to babysit the younger child while the parents work.
Let’s be clear, even this relatively well-run Chin refugee schools does not compare in education to the Malaysian government schools, and this is common for all the refugee schools in Malaysia. First, the schools are only a few hours per day per child. They have so many kids to educate that they can only offer either a morning or afternoon class. Second, there are not many learning resources for the kids, like there are no workbooks. However, they have been trained by Harvest Centre, my NGO partner, to use a minimal, laminated curriculum that the students can use independent of the teacher. Truth is, there often aren’t enough laminated curricula for the kids. Third, the refugee teachers are mostly untrained educators, volunteering to do their work.
And, the teachers are at risk too. One teacher is not registered as a refugee by UNHCR so he only leaves his apartment to come downstairs to teach at the school. He can barely speak English but seems to feel a sense of purpose as a teacher. He, like many of the refugees, assumed I had some influence at or work for UNHCR, and asked how he can speed along his registration process.
Another female Chin teacher I met had been taken by police into detention as recently as July 2010, and even after many calls to UNHCR, UNHCR did not go get her out, even though she was registered as a refugee by UNHCR. The Chin leader had to borrow the equivalent of $200 and pay a police “broker” a bribe to get her out after 6 days of waiting. If he hadn’t gotten her out, then she would have been sent away to detention closer to the border, making it even harder and more expensive to bribe her way out. Fourth, the classes are usually in overheated, small classrooms where the kids cannot move much or make much noise, so exercise and singing are completely out. Why? Because their neighbors are often local Malay citizens who will not hesitate to call the police on them, threatening to put their family members or teachers in detention for their unprotected status as refugees in Malaysia.
And, the police have their eye closely on this school. The police visit this school a few times a week, asking if there are any new refugee families who have come. Often, they have done raids of the building, looking for refugees to put in detention. While, it’s been reported by UNHCR that these raids have dramatically decreased since 2006, these families and children still live in fear. Anytime the police come, the children are completely panicked and scared. The teachers have to soothe them.
Once this past year, the police raided the building and the Chin leader of the school made the children hide in a corner, keep silent, turn off the lights, and lock the door. The children were incredibly scared. The Australian wife of the Chin leader went to each parent’s apartment and told them not to come get their children and that the children were safe but hiding in school. They planned to cook the children lunch and slip it into the school through the window. The police eventually left and the kids went home.
This refugee school is located in the bottom of one of many numbered blocks of buildings in the poorest part of Kuala Lumpur. It is not tenement housing but it’s close. The school is hidden in the parking garage. Yes, a school in a parking garage! I was stunned. It’s in a couple rooms that are probably usually used for storage, although each has a few windows. I think UNHCR has given them some fans to help with air circulation. The teaching is traditional, often rote lecture style, with the youngest children in preschool sitting and copying down the letter “K” over and over in their notebooks when I visited. The older children were not following the individualized curricular approach that the school had been trained in by Harvest Centre. They were instead using the individualized laminated workbooks for the teacher to copy the Math problems onto the chalkboard to be copied down and worked on by each teenager.
Even in such conditions, the kids really look forward to coming to school and they behave very well as a result. I am interested in behavior problems in these refugee schools – problems that impede learning. My ultimate goal is to do a refugee teacher training in May to help them manage the behavior problems. For the second time now, the head teacher said that there weren’t any real behavior problems. He said he didn’t think they had problems because they really valued NOT working and being in school. I’m really noticing a difference in behavior problems depending on the ethnic group of the school. The Somali and Rohingya refugee schools seem to have the worst behavior problems, the least hope, and, not coincidentally, the most use of corporal punishment, like caning.
In this school, they are mildly concerned about two behavioral issues. (1) Keeping the children quiet so the local citizens won’t call the police, and (2) Keeping them focused on the task. In the rare moments that the older students became disruptive in class, or less than focused (perhaps bored), the head teacher would threaten that they could not go to the Faisal Cup soccer tournament organized by Harvest Centre every October. The boys and girls LOVE competing in the soccer tournament. And, if you look around their school and home, you can see why. There is no place to play, much less a playground or field to run and kick a ball around. They are rarely allowed outside anyway, for safety reasons. It’s their one chance to be free, safe, out in the open, with other refugees, just plain able to be a kid. See my earlier posting on our visit to the Faisal Cup soccer tournament.
And, an unspoken concern of the head teacher was that his refugee teachers were not able to teach his older students as they grew older. His teachers were typical of refugee school teachers – untrained and often ill-educated themselves. The teachers seemed to struggle with teaching in English, and the older students were supposed to speak English by now but don’t. Most of the instruction was in Chin.
So, the head teacher was thinking of busing his older students to Harvest Centre where they have one of the only refugee schools that continues past age 12. And, Harvest has partnered with an online education service that allows for focused instruction in topics like Biology, about which their teachers don’t have much knowledge. In theory, refugee students anywhere could do coursework like this online, for free.
I did a casual, short interview of a few of the only students there who could speak minimal English. Most of the students had only been in Kuala Lumpur for a year or two. My guess is they were 14 or so years old, maybe younger. I was told beforehand that the boy who’d been orphaned back in Burma and come down to KL with a friend had gone through a very rough path to get to KL. He’d been put in detention twice, as a much younger boy. He’d been treated very poorly, probably being physically abused in detention. Still, I was told, his foster parents were amazed at how resilient he was, seemingly happy in school, at their home, and with a very close classmate. When I interviewed him, he told me it had been a rough trip to get from Burma to KL but that he was much happier here in KL. The Chin leader and his Australian wife had taken him in as a foster child, along with a few other orphaned or abandoned children. Once again, I was amazed at how every school leader, from Thailand down to Malaysia, had fostered or adopted many children. They had the children living in their homes, with their own children. I’m in awe.
These few teens were much happier being in Malaysia than in Burma, but they could not tell you why they left Burma. They knew of shooting and village burnings by Burmese government soldiers but they, themselves, either didn’t admit or didn’t experience directly being a victim of Burmese government soldiers. Interestingly, most of the Karen Burmese students in Thailand whose Karen leaders (Karen National Union) put up an armed resistance against Burmese soldiers choose to be Karen resistance fighters or soldiers when you ask them what they want to be when they grow up. The Chin students here in Malaysia said they could not go to school back in Burma and they wanted to learn English like they were learning in Malaysia.
The question is often raised over whether or not some of these Burmese refugees in Malaysia are economic or political refugees. Are they coming to escape being the target of violence by the Burmese government? Are they coming for better education and work opportunities? Or is it too simplistic to simply ask those questions? Maybe it’s a complex combination of all of the above. Or, once they escape violence in Burma, they become focused on surviving so they shift from a political refugee to an economic one? I’m grappling with these issues, although, in the end, these Burmese refugees are fleeing one of the most oppressive regimes in the world, who’ve been targeting their ethnic groups with violence, so maybe the question is moot.
In the end, I’m most focused on the mental health of these refugees and their ability to feel hope and learn in school. These Chin students, along with the Karen Burmese school I saw, seem to feel more hope than most other ethnic groups of refugees in Malaysia. Maybe they have hope because they have a relatively strong community who’ve provided a safer place to land in Malaysia. I wish I could flesh out more how their community may be a strength for them.
