Summer Issue, 2012

Don’t Forget Us Anushri K Alva (BSocSc 2010) Anushri K Alva, a graduate in International Politics and Sociology from India, first entered the MOEI programme in 2008, with a three-week placement at the Mae La camp for temporarily displaced people. “I find the phrase ‘temporarily displaced people’ amusing,” says Alva, “because many people in Mae La have been there for more than a decade and the situation in Myanmar has only worsened in that time.” She found that the camp, home to more than 50,000 refugees, reminded her of her hometown in India. “It had the charm of a quiet, scenic village,” she recalls. “The chickens protecting their young ones, the pigs and their nonchalant manner, the bamboo huts and the muddy road were all so familiar.” Familiar, that is, except for the armed guards, the jeeps of the various international organisations, and the unavoidable presence, in the minds of the refugees, of the troubles that drove them from their home. “I remember we would play a game where one student would stand in the middle of the circle and say, ‘Everyone who is wearing a red shirt stand up and change places’, or something similar,” Alva says. “One time, one of my students said, ‘Everyone whose mother is dead, stand up and change places.’” Stunned, Alva watched as the students laughed and scrambled to change places, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. A week before Alva was due to return home, one of her students suggested that the teachers at the camp “are like the weather: they keep changing”. “He wasn’t angry with me,” Alva explains. “He was just stating a fact. Many of [my students] had no idea where their family was anymore, and they had escaped from Myanmar years ago. Being abandoned was part and parcel of life for them.” She returned to Mae La in January 2011 and once again her students grabbed her hands. “Teacher, please don’t forget us,” the child pleaded. “Please come back.” Speaking Out for the Kachin Luxi Fang (Psychology and French,Year Two) While the world celebrates the apparent return to democracy in Myanmar and Aung Sang Suu Kyi’s landslide victory in parliamentary elections there in April, Luxi Fang, a second- year undergraduate in social sciences, is working to help some of the country’s still beleaguered ethnic minorities. “More people need to know about Myanmar in depth,” says Fang. “Not just in a superficial way from BBC or CNN news, which only talk about the changing democracy, coming peace and Aung San Suu Kyi all the time. That is not true for the whole of Myanmar. Many ethnic groups, like the Kachin, are still suffering from the civil war.” The Kachin ethnic minority has been fighting the Myanmar army intermittently for more than 60 years, and oppression is still a fact of life. Many Kachin people fled as a result to border areas controlled by the Kachin Independence Organization, or across the border into China’s Yunnan province, says Fang, a mainland Chinese. “There is not so much information about the Kachin compared with Karen refugees in Thailand. I think it’s mainly because of the Chinese government’s denial of any foreign interference.” Determined to do something for the refugees, Fang packed her bags in May to head for Kachin State, in the northernmost corner of the country. She found it was difficult to get there via Yangon, so she drove in directly from Yunnan. “I crossed the border on a motorbike, illegally,” she says. “It is easy for me since I am Chinese. Many Chinese cross the border every day to do business with Kachin people.” Fang is spending the summer visiting refugee camps and meeting community-based organisations to explore the possibility of involving HKU’s “Connecting Myanmar” programme with local social services. Her experience with the refugees was transformational, Fang says, and “I don’t want to take my easy life for granted anymore.” “After my graduation, I want to do documentaries related to Myanmar, possibly with Filmaid international,” she says. “I want to provide refugees with another way of being heard.” 6