Paya Ngoto School in Burma reopens

Children of Paya Ngoto School in Burma

Back in May 2008 Audley held a staff fundraising event to raise money to rebuild a primary school in Paya Ngoto, Burma, after its destruction by Cyclone Nargis. By the end of the year we had raised a total of £11,000.

Now, nearly a year later I’ve just received (via one of our Burma specialists) an Audley client’s first-hand account of the finished project after a recent visit.

“We have just returned from our holiday in Myanmar and, on Feb 16th, our visit to Paya Ngoto Primary School. We had a wonderful holiday, as always, in this fantastic destination, but this year the world wide recession seems to have significantly reduced the number of tourists visiting the country (we noticed the same in Thailand). We had a memorable morning at the school accompanied by Cho Cho Yin and her husband. I hope you find the following report useful. There is much that can still be done for the lovely children and the teachers in this rural community.

The School and Community
Reached along a bumpy dirt road about 30 mins drive from Twante and 1 hour from Yangon. The small village is a little tree-filled oasis with lotus ponds in the flat rice lands of the delta, next to a 2 monk monastery and small pagoda. The rebuilding was completed and the school re-opened in Oct 2008. According to the head teacher, the only remaining building works to be finished are completion of the fence at the back of the school and raising the level of the earth at the front of the school (up to concrete entrance path level) as the ground gets very soggy in the rainy season. We were the first westerners to visit the school.

It is a very poor community.

The Children
There are 55, 27 boys and 28 girls, ages 5-10 and grades 1-5. The 5th grade has only 3 children, all girls. Nearly all were in their school uniform (not all families can afford a uniform) especially for our visit. Needless to say, they looked utterly charming, most sporting thanake (a paste used for skin protection) on their faces, although a little bewildered at times in front of westerners (probably due to my white hair and beard!). Sue, being a retired primary school teacher and brilliant with kids, soon broke the ice and we spent time with all the grades looking at their work etc.

The Three Lady Teachers
Also were wearing their uniform and looked very smart. They showed us pictures of the previously devastated school building. Their names are Daw Htar Htar Lwin (head), Daw Than Chit and Daw San San Moe. They were all most helpful and grateful for what had been achieved and already supplied.

We Supplied
Lots of exercise books (wide and narrow-lined for writing practice), pencils, rubbers, crayons, pencil sharpeners, colouring books, notebooks and biros for the teachers, to the value of around 100 dollars.

Further Needs
As defined by the head and not in any order of importance:
1. Wooden cupboards for storage
2. Slippers for kids and any convenient clothing, not just school uniforms. It really is a very poor area.
3. A wall clock
4. A rotating globe of the world – their present globe was badly damaged in the cyclone.
5. Text books – they were OK for the rest of this term (now finishing) but needed new text books at the beginning of the next term (early June).
6. A white board with marker pens. They have blackboards.
7. A Radio Cassette player for teaching English. A tape player, not CD. Their present cassette player is broken. They would also need batteries and spares as there is no village electricity. They prefer to operate using 6v or 12v car batteries. Not sure how they do this?
8. Rulers – not too many as they share

The Monastery
As one would expect, it plays a key part within the community and was the only largely undamaged building after the winds of the cyclone. It operated as the school building for some months. After an hour and a half at the school, we spent an entertaining half an hour with the monks over coffee and fresh yummy papaya. Our colleagues had brought for the monks a large sack of rice and other food goodies. They had done a ‘reccy’ on the village and school before taking us along and were fully into the spirit of things. They enjoyed the visit as much as we did.

It is worth mentioning also, that on the route from Yangon to Twante, there is now a hypermarket (yes, a hypermarket!) called Diamond City. It has a quite excellent, very clean and cheap Chinese restaurant. Perfect for lunch after a school visit!

On reflexion, we enjoyed a simply wonderful morning. It is both touching and immensely rewarding to see first hand that one’s own charitable contribution can make such a huge difference to a small community and mean such a lot to the children and teachers. We are absolutely certain that Audley’s clients will experience similar emotions to ourselves on their visits to Paya Ngoto. You are all to be congratulated on this initiative.

Above is a selection of photos we took.

We hope our enthusiasm has crept through in this note!”

Nigel and Sue Wright