UCL STAR News is starting an article series called ‘Know Their Names’. Through this, we hope to share stories of individual refugees and their journeys. Here is the first one!
Photography: Jason Motlagh. Burma, 2012.
For years, journalists have reported on refugees, stating facts and numbers, and it sometimes feels like individuals are anonymised, drowning in a sea of big, incessant, ungraspable numbers presented by the media. Telling individual stories is a key to maintaining human connection and empathy.
Naw Paw Tai Eh Moo is a 20-year old girl from Myanmar. The country has been in a state of civil war since 1948, when it became independent from the United Kingdom. Naw Paw Tai Eh Moo was persecuted and haunted by the Myanmar military when she was 11 years old. As a child, she felt powerless at the sight of injured and sick people around her and decided to become a nurse.
Now, at the age of 20, she is a medic. She studied medicine in a refugee camp and has now returned to her community to serve as a health worker. Soldiers destroyed her childhood village, and she had to sneak through enemy-held jungle to attend a school far away from home, but she was willing to sacrifice her safety to keep learning.
Both her father and her older brother lost a leg to landmines. One morning, the family woke up to her brother being gone. They heard an explosion in the jungle and assumed that there was a military attack on the village. They frantically looked everywhere but were unable to find him. They found out that he had taken his own life in the jungle with a landmine held tightly against his chest. He left a letter to Naw Paw Tai Eh Moo that said, “there is no hope for me, but you must finish your education”. The loss was tremendously painful, but the letter made her realise that schooling the younger generation was the key to freedom and peace: “I can see that health is the greatest need in our community”, she says, “but another important thing is education”. The military of Myanmar has burned down thousands of villages, homes, and schools, preventing access to education – a vital tool to stop the ongoing war. “We no longer fight with guns, as we did before”, she argues: “today people are fighting with education. If we use words to fight, then we will win our freedom”.
Naw Paw Tai Eh Moo describes that soldiers destroyed her childhood village, so she had to sneak through enemy-held land to gain new access to education. Her heart is still wounded by the attacks, and she describes that although she does not feel joy, helping others in the community eases the pain.
The Karen people, mostly Christians, have been persecuted by the military since the second world war, when they supported the British colonisation and fought to end Japanese occupancy. The Buddhists sided with the Japanese invaders, hoping to end the British rule. In 1962, Myanmar, then called Burma, was taken over by a military coup. The attackers created a military junta that replaced the constitution, and nationalism based on Buddhist identity was heavily promoted. The Karen people, similarly, to the Rodaya people, have been singled out as threats to the Buddhist leaders of Myanmar, and are being driven out of their country through violence and rape. Many Karen people flee to neighbouring countries such as Bangladesh, Thailand and Vietnam. Currently, Myanmar lays landmines along the Bangladesh border to prevent refugees from returning to their home. In 2018, the country was accused of carrying out genocide against minority groups.
“We just want to have freedom and peace in our country, and we want to be able to study freely”, says Naw Paw Tai Eh Moo. “There is a way to achieve peace and freedom. The solution will come from the power of the younger generation. We have to learn from our educated leaders and work hard to receive better education”.
Written by Miriam Billaud Feragen
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