One School at a Time How to build 40 schools in Myanmar for less than a million dollars
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BY ROBERT CORNWELL
Build a School in Burma
first visited Myanmar as a tourist in 1996, a few years after the country’s name changed from Burma. Years later, I was curious to return to Myanmar because I have grown to love Asia’s art, its culture, and Buddhism. I’ve traveled in more than 100 countries and many of them were very poor, but I never had the impulse to jump in and help solve a problem until the day in 2010 I walked through the hills of Myanmar’s Southern Shan State. In the market town of Kalaw, I met people working with a local non-government organization called the Rural Development Society. Despite the political and economic challenges of the country now known as Myanmar, this rural development organization has since 1990 been building schools in several surrounding villages. Two more communities were “school ready,” meaning they had a donated school site, a commitment for government teachers, a school committee, a strong desire from parents to see their children educated, and a commitment from villagers to do the unskilled labor to build a school. They needed only funding, organization and a plan to execute the vision. We went to see one of these villages, the ethnic Danu farming community of Nan Auw which was about one and a half hours over
rutted tracks from Kalaw. The villagers had carefully carved out space for a school by redrawing their own house lot boundaries. Two days later the chief of Nan Auw came to Kalaw with a petition signed by all the villagers asking for help. Most of the signatures were ‘X’s. That night I thought long and hard about what it meant to be illiterate in the 21st century: no ability to use the internet, no access to further education, vulnerability to human trafficking and no prospects in life except to be a subsistence farmers like their parents. What could be done to keep the children of Nan Auw from a similar fate? The answer, I realized was to help the village build a school to educate them. Returning to San Francisco, I talked to my friend Andrew Lederer, another RPCV who served in farm mechanics in Pune, India from 1969 to 1971. Andrew agreed to help raise money to build the Nan Auw school and we created Build a School in Burma to do it. Andrew and I wrote the first checks and started a campaign for donations. To our surprise we quickly raised enough money to
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Residents of Pyin Ka Doe Gone in the Ayeyarwady River Delta gathered last year to celebrate their new school. Teachers are the women in dressed in white blouses and blue skirts and the two men standing on the far left and far right. Build a School in Burma country director Naing Lin Swe is in center foreground. Author Robert Cornwell and board member Frank DeRosa stand at the back.
