Summer Issue, 2013

Joanne Yan 忻璪瑩 (BBA(Law) 2010, LLB 2012) some stories... The Truth behind Happiness SERVICE 100 In June 2012, Joanne Yan and other eight HKU students devoted themselves to playground construction and health education at four Burmese schools for refugee children at Mae Sot, a border town in North-western Thailand that shares a border with Myanmar to the west. It is also a town with a large population of Burmese migrants and refugees. “We will never forget the innocent laughter of the young Burmese refugee children who saw the new, yet primitive, playgrounds, almost as happy as if they were paying a visit to Disneyland,” says Yan. “We will remember the faces of our eager-to-learn Burmese colleagues who enthusiastically talked to us to brush up their English oral skills, and the Burmese refugees’ hopeful faces because their concerns were no longer about meeting the daily needs of food and water, but an opportunity to receive an education, even if they were tied to isolated refugee camps and had no nationality or identity of their own.” “We had one of our most blissful times at Mae Sot because we appreciated the tiny bits of life that we had taken for granted, be they as simple as having access to running water. Re ecting on the Burmese refugees’ hopeful and grateful attitudes towards life, we found that we had missed out the most fundamental building block of life – happiness – while we were being swamped by our hectic lives in one of the busiest cities in the world.” 1. Students painted more than 150 tyres for a play 2 & 3. Kids enjoyed playing at their new “Disneyland” 1 2 3 38