The school run and survival struggle of migrant worker children on the Thai-Myanmar border: a people-run school

Located in Mae Sot on the Thai-Myanmar border, the town was once a refuge for the Karen Tribes, an ethnic minority on the Thai-Myanmar border fleeing the flames of the Myanmar civil war. In recent years, as Thailand established a special trade zone and Myanmar moved toward openness, Mae Sot, situated on the overland transport route from Bangkok to Yangon, has become an emerging hotspot for foreign investment in factories, and has attracted large numbers of Myanmar migrant workers entering Thailand illegally to work.

According to estimates by local aid organizations, nearly hundreds of thousands of Myanmar migrant workers are gathered in the Mae Sot area and neighboring districts, living in crudely built temporary housing. Arriving in Mae Sot, one can often see temporary shelters built by migrant workers from whatever materials were at hand scattered along the roadsides and across the open fields, forming a group of dark, unregistered households without education, medical care, or citizenship.

To solve the schooling problem for the children of Myanmar migrant workers, migrant schools have been run by civil society with international aid, including aid from Taiwan. Green Water School is one of five migrant schools receiving donations from Taiwanese civil society, allowing children to receive an education at low or no tuition. The road home from Green Water School is the children's happy school run, the migration route of Myanmar migrant workers, and a microcosm of the fate of most Myanmar migrant worker families.

The marginalized within the marginalized - the education of migrant worker children

Green Water School is in Phop Phra County south of Mae Sot, in the countryside about an hour's drive away. Leaving Highway 1090 and entering the winding local road, fields stretch along both sides of the hills, where group after group of people can be seen planting corn or cassava, sometimes as few as ten or twenty, sometimes as many as forty or fifty.

As large grain companies began aggressively buying up cassava, corn, and other crops converted into raw materials for bioenergy in Thailand, farmland near Mae Sot began to be heavily cultivated, and the rapidly expanding demand for labor attracted disadvantaged farmers from within Myanmar to cross the border with their families to work in Thailand.

As the local road carries you farther and farther from the highway, an isolated single-story building hides in an open grove on a hillside - this is where Green Water School is located. Although called a "school," it is basically just one extremely crude large classroom, with the dirt ground on the slope serving as the playground. The classroom is divided by partitions into spaces for upper, middle, and lower grades. Due to a shortage of teachers, migrant schools often have different grades share a teacher.

These children have circles of yellow-white Thanakha powder (thanaka tree powder) applied to their faces, a Myanmar custom for sun protection and skin whitening. On these cute, tender faces, one cannot help but think that the dense, blurry-faced groups of migrant workers seen in the fields along the way are the parents of these very children.

The unrecognized Green Water School

On the one hand, the Thai government tacitly permits large numbers of cheap laborers to enter, yet it is unwilling to provide corresponding basic education services. Civil society runs schools to provide education for migrant worker children, yet these are not recognized by the Thai government, which merely registers people-run "migrant schools" as "Learning Centers," categorized and controlled somewhat like cram schools.

Legally, migrant workers and schools for migrant worker children exist in a gray zone where they are left to fend for themselves, becoming, apart from refugee camps, another important humanitarian aid issue on the border. But while the United Nations is already overwhelmed dealing with the refugee camp issue, the migrant worker issue falls into a defense perimeter beyond the reach of other international aid organizations.

Fortunately, some international organizations are still willing to aid these migrant schools. However, remote rural schools like Green Water School serve the lowest of the low among migrant workers, making them the marginalized within the marginalized.

Fragile universal values: a migrant school run by people struggling on the survival line

Green Water School operates under the crude school buildings and conditions of a painter-turned-principal. Compared with Mae Sot, where international aid organizations are numerous, Green Water School is located in a remote area, and the reach of international aid resources is limited, so running the school is extremely difficult.

About five years ago, Green Water School faced the dire prospect of closure because it could not raise funds. The school's parents went to ask Principal Weng Wen of the neighboring "Waterfall School," who was on quite friendly terms with Green Water School's former principal. Waterfall School is about half an hour's drive from Green Water School. Because it is adjacent to a highway with convenient transportation, its scale is also much larger, yet the school's situation was also stretched thin. Principal Weng Wen approached Lai Shu-sheng (Sam), a worker with Taiwan's "Glocal Action Association," and received timely support, so Green Water School temporarily avoided the fate of closing.

"On the border, my nickname is also 'Sam Dong,' but this nickname is not an easy one." Lai Shu-sheng said with a bitter smile. It means that when everyone else cannot find resources, they place their last hope on him, a Taiwanese, and the responsibility is exceptionally heavy.

From lighting to clean water, everything here is a luxury

Green Water School is indeed a school, but because the school buildings are truly crude, the first moment you step into the classroom you are slightly shocked, and it is almost too painful to look at. Donations from Taiwanese organizations were used first to install solar panels to provide lighting and electricity, and then water purifiers to give teachers and students a clean water source.

On the afternoon of the visit, the school had already scheduled an interactive class period. Fellow partner Mama Daisy skillfully blew up the balloons prepared in advance, and it was time for the Taiwanese public welfare group to play together with the lower-grade children. The serious classroom became colorful because of balloon after balloon in every color.

Education, faint lighting, clean water - these basic services taken for granted in Taiwan can only be realized here through goodwill donated and raised from thousands of kilometers away.

The school must keep operating; once students drop out, it is very hard to bring them back!

Lai Shu-sheng, who has done overseas aid on the Thai-Myanmar border for more than 15 years, says schools in the town with convenient transportation are relatively easy to fundraise for, but Green Water School is the border of the border. Even though aid resources from Taiwan are limited each year, resources must still be squeezed out to keep Green Water School going.

"Otherwise, once students leave school, it is very difficult to find them and bring them back." Lai Shu-sheng explains that if children do not go to school, they are either at home taking care of even younger children or following their parents to work as child laborers. On the border, child laborers' wages are actually no lower than adults', and sometimes even higher. Because for managers, child laborers are more obedient and easier to manage.

"Sometimes the income of one more person is a great incentive for Myanmar migrant workers to improve their economic conditions, so changing parents' minds to support letting their children attend school is often not easy at first," Lai explains. Looking at the crude migrant villages of bamboo or sheet metal along the roadside, there are still many children who cannot attend school. Being able to come to Green Water is already a kind of good fortune.

Lai Shu-sheng: The responsibility for caring for children lies not only with the family, but with the entire community

Because migrant workers have no citizenship, they not only lack the right to education and medical security, but sometimes even the law cannot protect migrant workers; when they suffer harm, they have nowhere to turn. "I once saw a battered woman come to ask for help, and the international aid organization could only be speechless," Lai Shu-sheng painfully recounts a dark psychological trauma of international aid workers.

In his experience with international aid, Lai Shu-sheng knows that only by making children "children of the community" can they truly be protected. Therefore, with the support of Taiwan's "Glocal Action Association," Green Water School established a parents' association.