Thanks to the collaboration with the Don Carlo Gnocchi Foundation, we were able to start up a Community Based Inclusive Development program in Dala, Yangon outskirts. Here the story told by Teresa Sassu, their coordinator.

The collaboration with Don Carlo Gnocchi Foundation (FDCG) started after a field visit in Myanmar in 2018. After this first visit we started a partnership, thanks to this, FDCG managed in 2020 to send a new coordinator in Myanmar, Teresa Sassu. She managed to open the chance to start up new collaborations in disability field. After helping us improving our approach to disability in projects we were already implementing in Taunggyi and Yangon, they helped us to start up new Community Based Inclusive Development (CBID) programs in Kyaing Tong and in Yangon’s outskirts.

After starting up the Dayamit Community College and some food distributions in Dala, in Yangon’s outskirts, our local staff met a big need in disability’s field. The collaboration with FDCG was then really precious in order to meet this need in a very rapid way.

We report here Teresa’s words.

“United intervention NHI-FDCG in Dala started in April 2021, only 2 months after the military coup. We started with a first mapping and assessment identifying families with a member with disabilities, with the aim to start up activities who could meet theire rehabilitative, educational and social inclusion needs, as foreseen by the CBID approach indicated by WHO.

The rehabilitative project started at Dayamit Community College, in order to spread awareness among students in the school regarding people with disabilities. Many of them could in that way know different realities, thanks to the fact that they could see people with disabilities, physical or mental, and observe their rehabilitation path managed by a physiotherapist and a Meziere therapist.

First months were useful to start awareness and sensitization about some health conditions and some professional roles (such as physiotherapist), besides of an holistic and multidisciplinary approach (typical of FDCG) to a work “with” and “for” people with disabilities.

Since March 2022 there is a separate rehabilitation center in which there is a Rehabilitative Team composed by a physiotherapist, a Meziere therapist and 3 promotors. This is a team made by enthusiastic and dedicated people who are putting their selves on the first line for contributing to their own community.

Weekly, the 18 beneficiaries of the program are receiving sessions of physiotherapy and special education, often together with other children living nearby and who perfectly understood the meaning of proximity and caring of each other. It’s really precious to observe their first steps towards inclusion, and also to can rely on a community who is starting to understand which kind of intervention we are trying to develop.

Concretely we are providing therapeutic sessions and groups activities with children and families every week, we are also providing medical referral and home visits. Meanwhile, we are organizing professional and motivational training for the operators we are working with and we are starting new collaboration with other local organizations, in order to grant a clinical assessment to our beneficiaries.

There is a lot of work to be done, especially in terms of mentality and approach to disability: since taking in charge of the person, by assessing his needs, to exploring his potentialities in order to help her living a dignified and full life, as much as possible.

One thing is very interesting in Dala’s project: all promoters are boys! Usually, in Burmese society, only women are families caregivers. This could certainly be a small sign of mentality’s change, disrupting the stereotype who says that caring is a female chart.

At the moment we are facing lots of challenges, especially for the political instability who doesn’t allow us to work as we want, because of military’s controls, the high number of checkpoints and the interdiction of moto in the district. This is really limiting our work and stimulate us to find new strategies to face the transport problem.

In spite of this, thanks to our motivation, to the strong group’s spirit and the dedication of our team, we are keeping on supporting and implementing activities we thought for the next future, starting from clinical assessments and awareness meeting with parents who will take place in July. “

We can’t add anything, but saying good luck to Teresa and the whole rehabilitative Team for this new challenge, we are sure that their work will ameliorate the life of lots of people!

Last Tuesday, June the 28th, our desk officer Francesca Benigno explained the Myanmar case study during the seminar “Land owners” organized at the Council of the Italian Republic for the presentation of the V report about Land Grabbing in the world, edited by Focsiv.

After our participation in the campaign“Abbiamo riso per una cosa seria”  organized by Focsiv, thanks to which our volunteers sold rice to support our agro-forestation project in Shan State , Focsiv asked us to present our project during this seminar and asked also to explain the Myanmar’s land grabbing situation and what we are concretely doing to face this problem through our land tenure trainings.

It’s hard to evaluate the size of the land grabbing in Myanmar, as there aren’t reliable official data nor an official register of grabbed land. Nevertheless it’s sure that we are talking about millions of acres, and so about a phenomenon involving millions of people. Main estimations talk about numbers around 5 and 6 millions of grabbed acres, to which we should add all the lands left behind by the hundreds of thousands of displaced people who left their lands after the military coup and who are now occupied by the actual government.

Francesca exposed several very interesting data, without the chance to deepen them because of limited time of the intervention. Here you can find her speech reported by Mondo e Missione and at this link you can watch directly her intervention, since minute 52:00. 

At the same link you can also see all other interventions, very interesting, among them we certainly want to point out the final intervention of don Bruno Bignami, who brought a very interesting interpretation of Land Grabbing as a sum of subtractions: of work, of biodiversity, of food and of community. He presented in this way this phenomenon as a part of a global socio-environmental crisis which cannot be faced without an “integrated ecological” approach.

We really appreciated his intervention because also our rural development projects aims to face the problem with the same approach: trying to fight at the same time both climate change and poverty of the farmers in Shan State.

We therefore consider even more important our intervention in agricultural communities in Shan State, where all farmers who attend agricultural trainings also attend land tenure trainings. We started to organize this activity since 2018, because of a starting of law’s renovation. Our training usually starts then with a short introduction to the regulatory framework in Myanmar, in order to show to farmers different level of classification of the lands and laws which should protect them. After that we draw together a map of the village in order to define lands borders and to see to which classification they are included, identifying in this way their rights upon these lands. And finally we accompany them in the registration process.

The week before the seminar, our agronomist in Taunggyi visited a village tract who attended our training in 2020. It’s a community of about 203 households, almost all families incomes are from agriculture through the cultivation of corn, rice and beans. When we first met them nobody had a property document of their land, even though they all considered to be the owners only because these lands have been cultivated by their families since generations.  When they realized that without an official registration their lands were considered “unoccupied”, and so at risk of expropriation, they all wanted to start the registration process. It took a lot of time, more than a year to do all evaluations and verifications and finally complete the registration.

When our agronomist went there they told her that in previous months a company came to their village and asked to buy 80 acres of land for an intensive cultivation of corn. Community just ended registration process and, thanks to the property documents they had in their hands, they could refuse and preserve their lands.

The witnessing of these farmers community was then really appreciated during the seminar, especially the words of one of the farmers, U lone Su, who said: “We refused their proposal and didn’t sell our land. This land has been cultivated by our families since generations, it belongs to us. The land, the soil, our natural resources are the most important things we have!”.

And exactly these are the words who could synthesize the report edited by Focsiv and the whole seminar’s meaning, which concluded exactly with this motto: “The land to whomever is cultivating it!”

We would therefore thank Francesca for presenting our work in an excellent way and our local staff who is carrying on with dedication and constancy, despite the difficult times, an extremely important work both on local level and on global level.

Since February 2022 until today 211 displaced children in Taunggyi had the chance to attenda school again and to re-gain a bit of hope. Here some updates from our project coordinator of “Do Giaong – Our School”.

“Initially established as a rehabilitation center for drug addicts and alcoholics, the House of Dreams  has opened its doors to families, youth and the elderly fleeing conflict zones or different kinds of persecution and oppression, since the beginning of the political situation following the coup d’état.

The first group of people arrived the second week of February 2021, and to date The House of Dreams has given hospitality to hundreds of people. Thanks to the refugee support campaign in Myanmar, we had the chance to reach out and give logistical, food, and health support to thousands of refugees scattered over a vast territory that touches at least four dioceses- Loikaw, Phekon, Taunggyi, Taungoo.

Around the end of December 2021, talking with the families in the house, an urgent need was raising: the large educational gap that has been created over the past two years, partly because of the pandemic. There are also other refugee shelters in the city neighborhood where The House of Dreams is located, so in a meeting between the heads of these centers, we made the decision to open a new educational space for school-aged boys and girls, all of whom are war-displaced.

The school opened on February 3, 2021 with more than 180 boys and girls divided into two sections: the House of Dreams section and the Infant Jesus section (the Infant Jesus section is an orphanage and shelter for people with different types of disabilities, run by the Sisters of the Child Mary).

Since then the number of students has gone up, and as of today 211 students are attending the school.

We began this journey without knowing whether we would be able and carry it out even for a few weeks, with the uncertainty of controls by the authorities currently in power, and without being able to predict which was the psychological condition of the boys and girls who asked to go on this journey with us.

The school’s goal is educational and rehabilitative in a very broad sense, our focus is first and foremost on discovering, listening to, and, as far as possible, healing different kinds of trauma that these boys and girls have gone through: assault by the military, violent death, abuses of various kinds. In the recent history and memory of these children and young people, there is a lot of violence suffered.

The formative tool that we wanted to emphasize is the relationship with the students. Our desire is to make children and young people feel the presence of non-threatening adults, adults they can trust, to whom they can entrust their history, their path, and thus reactivate a common path of rebuilding the future, or at least a desire for the future.

Through this formative and rehabilitative relationship, our lessons intend to foster shared feelings, to stable bonds among students, to reactivate motivational processes and light up a new positive imagination about the future.

Do Giaong is a challenge for everyone: for the students who attend it, for the teachers who walk with the children and youth, for the refugees who live in The House of Dreams.”

We truly thank all those who made this dream come true giving in this way a bit of hope to those children, we’ll keep you updated!

“The future starts here!”

“The future starts here!”

Again big news from Yangon! Do you remember the new educational project in a slum of Insein? Yesterday was the first official school-day at our Golden Beehive! 

It’s a small early childhood education centre for children aged among 3 and 4 years old, in order to start a work in pre-scholar education and, at the same time, to approach families with the aim of spreading awareness about sanitation and hygiene.

In this slum there are 350 families, for a total of 1500 people, among them 89 children under 5 years old.

The school’s name is Golden Beehive. Beehive as a community in which everybody is taking care of others, in which everybody has his own role and leaders could take care of little ones. Golden because it is the sacred colour of Myanmar people.

The start up of the school and the elaboration of the program has been possible under the supervision of JosèMagro, psychologist with specialization in development and childhood psychology.

Last 23rd of April there was the first parent’s meeting and yesterday, April the 25th, 60 children were wlecomed for their first official school-day!

School’s building went very well and teachers’ training already concluded.

In the school will be developed propaedeutic subjects to school integration, but we will also focus on relational abilities and emotional development of children.

We will pay special attention on vulnerability cases, in order to start individual and family’s psychologic therapies.

We organized the day into 2 shifts, in order to welcome a greater amount of children, involving 31 children in the morning and 29 children in the afternoon. 

If you want to support this project you can see the project’s table and find supporting modalities at this page

Now we only have to wait and see the wonderful change the this new center will produce in the slum, we’ll keep you updated! 

Last saturday, April the 9th, at PIME center in Milan we lived a day dedicated to Myanmar named “Together for Myanmar“. Participation has been higher than foreseen and Myanmar community was very happy and satisfied for the attention paid.

A lot of events have been organized. The first one was a laboratory for children organized by Popoli e Culture museum, the income of which was dedicated for the emergency fund for Myanmar. The second appointment, again for the little ones, has been organized by the education to globality office of PIME foundation and involved children in a story telling on a burmese tale written by the local organization “Third Story project”.

During these first appointments many people also attended the guided visits organized by the museum about Myanmar objects and culture.

After that it was the time of a conference with the intervention of several witnesses from Myanmar, with the mediation of our Francesca Benigno: Yi Mon, who talked about her childhood and the wieght the politic had during her life; mother Regina, who told us her experience in Myanmar since 2020, and father Dominic, who talked about his run from Myanmar after the events of last february 2021. At the end of the conference we also had the chance to meet five seminarians who just came to PIME seminary to study.

During the happy hour, with burmese and italian food, Myanmar community showed few local popular dances from Myanmar, with great enthusiasm of all people, more than 100 people attended this moment.

The evening closed with a full Cremonesi’s hall for the monologue about father Cremonesi’s life, an elaboration of his writings made by F. Tampieri with the music of C. Franco which trasnported us in the Burma of last century.

An intense day, with an extraordinary participation, to which we were really grateful and happy to participate.

Thanks to PIME center and to Myanmar community in Italy for making this possible!