UK-based human rights organization Article 19 will publish original photographs, essays, and poems submitted by EarthRights Burma School students in an anthology of contemporary Burmese writings due out this May. Each month, we will add a new piece of our students' work here in this on-going online series.

Three Seasons
By Naw Naw Soe

I am inspired sometimes by other cultures, and I love the internet for connecting me with them. The Yiaaku people of Kenya have a beautiful blessing or prayer that is full of environmental symbolism:

May the land of your father and mother embrace you.
May you grow as huge as a loimugo tree.
May you smell as sweet as the Songoyo tree.
Be as straight as the Itarokwa tree.
Be as studious as Ol Dony Keri mountain.
And as cool as the forests of Muk Godo.

This inspired me to write my own poem, which is also a blessing to you, based on the three seasons of Burma:

Renewing Roots
By Khon Nasa

I am a Mon man, and I was born in a beautiful Mon Village in Karen State. It should have been a peaceful place, but it would get caught in the middle of fighting between the KNU and the SPDC.

One day that happened when I was at school, when I was maybe eight years old. We had seen this situation many times already, although we were only young children. So we hid under the school building as usual. Bullets were flying. When it was safe to move we ran to the monastery next door, and it’s lucky we did that, because the SPDC burned our school to the ground. The next day, we couldn’t go to school, of course. My family moved to a different village.

At that time, the local environment was really beautiful. There were huge old trees, there was clean water, clean air, good natural agriculture with no pesticides or manmade fertilizers.

Eventually I had to move to the city to attend school. So my life changed a lot. People in the city had a lot of contempt for countryside people like me. They looked down on me. The village education I had received was inferior to what my new classmates had. It was really difficult to catch up.

Finally I did pass high school, and I wanted to go to university. But higher education in Burma is very corrupt. If you want to study the best subjects, the ones that lead to a good job, you must bribe the staff and the people at the education ministry handsomely. I wanted to study engineering. But couldn’t afford to pay my way into university, so I had to study it at a lower level, in an institute.

After that I returned to the village of my childhood. The environment had been destroyed, by the government system, and by the powerlessness and the lack of education of the villagers. The noble trees had been replaced by rubber plantations. We lost the traditional medicines we’d been able to get from the forest. The groundwater was gone, the topsoil eroded. In the rainy season, the village would flood and homes be destroyed. It broke my heart. It made me an environmentalist.

I already had an awareness of human rights due to my childhood experiences of soldiers taking men and boys to porter for them. They took my father and brother, and we had to pay bribes to get them back.

My family’s main income is from a rubber plantation. Nowadays, when they’re sick, they must travel a long way to the hospital, because local help has been lost, the medicines of the forest have gone into air. We have a ceasefire with the SPDC, but still we must pay them bribes to be allowed to run our plantations in peace. My family knows that the future has changed, that the past is gone, but they don’t really understand how.

My father said that when he was young, there were many animals in the forest, like large birds, tigers, and even white elephants. Nowadays we never see them.

Now that I have had the chance to study human rights, environment, democracy, international law, and things like that, and I wish that all young Mon people, all young people of Burma, could have this chance. I want to go back and show people how to restore and protect our environment, how to live sustainably. We can never get those big, elderly trees back, but we can stop cutting down the ones still alive, and plant new ones. I can help them see that we must rely on the environment for our future livelihood. All of these issues I’ve learned about at the EarthRights School are connected to our daily lives, our health, our livelihoods.

I know all the people there; I can easily do research there, and awareness raising. Though I am scared that no one will understand me or be interested in what I have learned. I know that a lot of people have moved to Thailand in search of a better living. Many people have lost all of their money from gambling, especially a game called “Che”. But people still grow their own vegetables all year round. And I have hope that if I work with the younger people, I can grow knowledge and respect for the environment and human rights in their minds.

  Front Gate, ERI Photo Submission

In The Rice Grass

by Tyar Du

Before I write about my village, I would like to introduce who I am. I am a woman of Karenni ethnicity, from Burma. Now I would like to share with the world about the situation for my village.

Let’s start with the time when I was born, 1986. I was born in a small village in the jungle with about fifty households. All of the villagers were very poor. Most of them didn’t have enough food, no health care and no education. To provide for their livelihoods and survival, all belonged to the peasantry. Most children were not healthy, because of no nutritional food, no medicine and not enough clothes.

Also, often the SPDC would enter the village and arrest villagers to be their porters. When they arrived, some soldiers would take the property of villagers by force, or would kill their pigs and chickens and take their rice and vegetables without asking or paying anything. The villagers couldn’t do anything to stop them, didn’t dare. On the other hand, when sometimes the Karenni Revolutionary Group would enter the village and face the SPDC. They would fight each other, and innocent villagers would get injured, and property destroyed. Therefore, villagers were always suffering from many fears in their minds.

The SPDC would capture and torture anyone they suspected of being in the KRG. Sometimes they’d arrest every man in the village and put them in prison. They did this to my brother when he was nineteen years old. Some they released after a month, but some they would keep for so long, and torture them so much for information, that they would die in prison. I know of two men who died in that way. Torture methods included electrocution of the area between the legs. Families could bring the prisoners food, but the soldiers would take the best, of course. The best meat, best rice, anything good wouldn’t reach the family members.

In 1993, my father was the village chief; he was honest and respectable. But even so, he was tortured, hit with gun barrels. What happened is this: my father asked a woodcutter to come from another village to repair some things. On his way to our village, the woodcutter was caught in the middle of an SPDC/KRG battle. He dropped his possessions and ran away. The SPDC found them, and blamed my father. They thought these things belonged to revolutionaries, and that my father was connected to them. They tied his wrists, and dragged him to another village.

In this other place, they threatened my father, tortured him, and told him that they would kill him at midnight if he didn’t give them information about the KRG. The woodcutter tried to help my father. He was afraid to confront the SPDC with the truth directly, but he wrote them a letter. The SPDC didn’t believe him, though.

Midnight came and went and my mother was crying in her bed. She thought that my father was dead by then. But suddenly he returned to the house! He had escaped somehow before midnight. He had to hide for a while; he hid near his parent’s village. It was December, when the rice has been harvested and the rice grass has been piled up into big mounds shaped like attractive huts. He hid in the rice grass for a number of days. One night he heard noises and ran away from the rice grass – he thought that the SPDC were looking for him. But it was only the pigs rooting around! After a few days the SPDC left the area, and my father returned home. They never did really look for him.

Sometimes the SPDC create forced relocation to concentrate villagers and to stop revolutionaries from communing in one place. They did this to my village in 1996. The soldiers gave everyone in the village three days to move. I was then about eleven years old, and attending middle school. We were forced to move to another existing village, and other villages were sent there too. So we started with about fifty households but finally there were hundreds all together in one place.

The new community was a farming village, so all of the land was already owned. During the first month, the SPDC gave us food and water, though not everybody received it. After that month it stopped altogether. We were crammed together in bamboo huts. Many people had no food at all. One man hung himself because his family had nothing and he couldn’t provide for them. Some people developed mental health problems.

In 1997 we were allowed to go back to our villages. However, many of the houses on the east side of the village had been burned, and it was believed that the whole village was now bad luck, cursed, so many people including my parents did not return there. Some fled to refugee camps; others had by then settled into the new place and didn’t want to uproot again.

This sort of thing happened in many parts of Karenni State around that time.

I was never hungry when I was young, myself. It was only after relocation that I knew hunger, especially during 1997-1999, when there was a drought.

Eventually my family moved to my Grandparents’ village. They had a farm, so life was better. Strangely, it was a safe place because of the SPDC. It’s near a military base, so the revolutionary groups didn’t go near there. It was kind of peaceful, actually. We were always afraid before. Of course we didn’t want the SPDC there, so nearby, but it kept us safe, too.

My parents couldn’t support me after I left school, so in 2001 I went to a refugee camp in Thailand.

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