In Burma, children with disabilities have few opportunities to gain an education. Public schools often prohibit children with mental disabilities, blindness or deafness from enrolling, leaving them with few if any options. While specialized schools do exist , there are only 15 in the entire country and they struggle with too few teachers and limited resources. Under these circumstances, disabled Burmese children often grow up without an education and become dependent on their families, impoverished and unemployed.
Many barriers stand in the way of disabled children accessing education in Burma. Not only are public schools unwilling or ill-equipped to handle their special needs, but their families also have trouble seeing the value of providing them with an education.
Myat Thu Winn is not only a Burmese man with cerebral palsy, but he is also president of the Shwe Minn Tha Foundation, a non-profit organization in Burma that helps disabled students gain access to an education. He explains “we have to persuade them, the disabled children, because most of us dare not go into the community, most of us dare not go to school…Families of disabled people are very poor, so most families think we have no need to go to school. We are just a burden for them…And how will they go to school regularly, every day? If their residence is far away, the road is not accessible for us. There are so many problems.”
The Ministry of Education determined that of the country’s estimated 460,000 school-aged children with physical or mental disabilities only 2,250 of those were enrolled in school. Of the few who do manage to attend and stay in school, only 2% will graduate with a high school education. These dismal statistics are the result of the highly limited options available to disabled students.
Living with a disability in Burma poses a wide array of challenges. With governmental and non-governmental resources being extremely limited, people with disabilities lack opportunities to gain valuable training for living independently or for specific vocational skills. As a result, the disabled largely remain isolated and uneducated with few opportunities for independence and employment.
According to the mother of a disabled Burmese child, “the lives of children with intellectual disability are like boats without an oar; they can propel or steer to nowhere, they can float along the stream or flow with the tide. If they are faced with large waves, they can’t help but sink. Only if they’re tied to other boats with oars can they be steered to shore.”
Creative Commons Love: Foreign and Commonwealth Office on Flickr.com
Written by Amanda Lubit