Christian Learning Center – mission learning center for children of refugees
In recent years thousands of Karen people have fled from Burma into neighbouring Thailand to escape the civil war. These people leave everything behind in the hope of finding safety and a means to support their families.
They enter Thailand without passports or work permits and they immediately fall to the bottom of Thai society. The children of these migrant workers suffer particularly badly because they are not allowed to attend Thai schools, therefore they grow up in a foreign country without being able to speak the language and unable to read or write.
The guest bedroom being used as a temporary classroom.
For the last 10 years H2O-Help to Orphans ry (Finland) have been financing a learning center to help hundreds of these children. In February 2015 H2O built 2 classrooms for the mission learning center and in January 2018 we built 2 more.
The official name for the learning center is "The Light - Asean Community Myanmar School". The City Council of Um-phang have inspected our learning center and given it their full approval and the Governor of Tak Province has given us a licence to operate.
The church hall divided into two temporary classrooms.
We are the first and the only learning center for migrant children in the Um-phang District, no other NGO or Thai government department is helping these children. At the moment we have 6 teachers who teach the children and two staff members from the orphanage who are assistants.
We have made contact with a school inside Burma (the Sarthulay School) and they have provided us with a teaching curriculum that we use in our learning center. All of our children are Burmese speaking and it is our hope that one day our children and their parents will be able to return to Burma.
The new building erected in January 2018 (2 extra classrooms).
Our children are taught eight subjects: Burmese, English, Mathematics, Science, Environment, Computers, History, and Sport. Examinations are set and marked by the Sarthulay school in Burma.