“Our future starts here!”
Great news from Yangon! We’re starting up a new education project in a slum of Insein. We are building a small early childhood education centre for children aged 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.
After the Nargis storm in 2008 a group of families come to a corner in Insein, building shacks on a junkyard. Nowadays in this slum there are 350 families, for a total of 1500 people, among them 89 children under 5 years old.
Shacks are illegal and families never got registered after their arrival in the city. Children born after their arrival never got registered, so officially they don’t exist and so they have no right to access education nor health system.
Hygienic conditions of the slum are precarious, with a consequent spread of infectious diseases. Families work on daily labour, often learning less than 5.000 MMK per day (around 2,50 €), without any perspective for the future.
Scholastic cycle in Myanmar start at the age of 5 years old. Working with children aged 4 years old will allow us to start an education formation before the official cycle and, at the same time, to start working with families in order to organize meetings regarding hygiene and sanitation.
If political conditions will be better we would start also a work of support to families for registration, in order to make children able to access educational and health system.
The school’s name is Golden Beehive. Beehive as a community in which everybody is taking care of othersm 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 will be under the supervision of Josè Magro, psychologist with specialization in development and childhood psychology.
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 will organize the day into 2 shifts, in order to welcome a greater amount of children, involving 30 children in the morning and 30 children in the afternoon.
In this way we would grant an high standard of education and we will reach up to 60 families.
In order to start the school we foresee following actions:
- Building
We already bought a small piece of land inside the slum and we started building the centre. I twill be a simple building: a hall with a kitchen and 2 toilets.
2. Teachers formation
We already selected 2 teachers who will follow classes. Together with teachers we are selecting 4 assistants, who will be trained by teachers themselves by the end of April.
3. Purchase of the material
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We want to keep the centre as simple as possible, in order to have a versatile space. We will buy also educational games and didactical material.
- Functioning for one year
We foresee to start classes by the beginning of the summer. Due to the hard poverty of families and malnutrition incidence we foresee also providing food to 60 children who will attend the school. Our project’s staff will be 4 teachers, 1 cook and the project coordinator. Children attending the school and their families will have also granted access to health care. We will organize also periodic meetings with parents about parenting education, hygiene and sanitation.
If you want to support this project you can see the project’s table and find supporting modalities at this page
We’re looking forward to see how it will be and to meet all children who are going to attend the new school, we will keep you updated!
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