Thailand–Myanmar Border Team

Where we work: “Where is the Thailand–Myanmar border area?”

The city where we work, Mae Sot, is about eight hours by bus from Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, and borders Myanmar.

Although Mae Sot is under Thai jurisdiction, most of its population consists of migrants from neighboring Myanmar. Most of these migrants have fled political instability and conflicts involving ethnic minorities in Myanmar, and Myanmar culture is widespread in the city.

The challenge: what is the state of education for “Myanmar displaced people”?

The Myanmar border area is far from Japan. From where we are in Japan, it may be hard to imagine what kind of education the displaced children living there receive and what kind of lives they lead. We spread awareness of their situation in Japan and communicate the importance of “educational support for refugees,” while also visiting the field on our trips to carry out exchange activities.

Students displaced from Myanmar face the following:

① Unstable legal status: displaced people without IDs such as passports or visas have an unstable legal status. Not only is it hard for them to return to Myanmar, their politically unstable home country, but their opportunities to leave Mae Sot to receive education are also limited. As a result, students also suffer psychological harm, such as difficulty getting information and staying motivated to learn.

② Financial limits: many schools for displaced people receive funding from NGOs and others, but the money available for teachers’ salaries, teaching materials, and better facilities is limited.

③ Unrecognized education: the education programs at schools for displaced people include special programs for going on to universities in Thailand and abroad, but most are not accredited by the government.

Our Activities

Our activities fall into two parts:

  1. Trips to Mae Sot
  2. Outreach activities in Japan

1. Trips to Mae Sot

Purpose

To engage deeply, one-on-one, with the children of Mae Sot and create irreplaceable memories together

What we faced while providing educational support as the Thailand–Myanmar Border Team were institutional problems—fundamental issues that cannot be solved within the scope of what students can do.
As we searched for what we could do, a student we had met on one of our past trips told us this:

“The days MIS came, a few times a year, were what I looked forward to most.”

We thought we were giving her education, but what she received from MIS was joy in her daily life at the time and memories that she still holds today.

Education is about “helping people grow.” Giving knowledge is education, but is education only about giving knowledge?

The “four pillars of learning” proposed by UNESCO are as follows.

Learning to know
Learning to do
Learning to live together
Learning to be

When we think of educational support, we tend to picture “learning to know”—that is, promoting study along a comprehensive curriculum. We do not take lightly the possibility it opens up for going on to university and shaping one’s life.
However, realistically, considering that we travel only twice a year and that we are students, we came to think that this kind of educational support might not be what we can offer.

We are just students from Japan. But precisely because we are students from Japan, we think what we can do is not only “teach something,” but share with the children the very experience of “learning to live together.”

Speaking Japanese or speaking Burmese (or other languages). Knowing only peace, or knowing more than peace. Taking democracy for granted, or not. The time we spend together—people with so many differences laughing together and sometimes helping each other with gestures—is full of “learning” that is not found in textbooks.
It nurtures the ability to reflect on ourselves through our relationships with others, and to try to empathize even when we encounter values different from our own—in other words, the ability to “live together.”

For the local children, too, the fact that we are not “people who teach” but “people who spend time with them one-on-one,” and that we are close in age, allows us to build deep relationships.
They call us by name, share their lunch with us, speak to us in Japanese, teach us Burmese, and shed tears when we say goodbye. As we spend time together, we feel irreplaceable human bonds forming.

Through these experiences, we realized that educational support is not necessarily limited to “teaching,” and that “spending time together and connecting heart to heart” itself has great meaning.
For the children and for us alike, it was a process of recognizing each other and closing the distance between our hearts—truly a time of “learning to live together.”

That was a long explanation, but for these reasons, our fiscal 2025 trips aim at “learning to live together,” with creating irreplaceable memories together as their central focus.

We will post what we learned and felt during our trips on the NEWS page from September, after the trip, so please take a look.

2. Outreach activities

We carry out outreach activities, including through art, so that more people in Japanese society—especially young people—become interested in Myanmar displaced people and refugee support.

Compared with other developed countries, Japan lags behind in building systems to support refugees, and public interest in the issue is low. However, with the declining birthrate and the advance of globalization, Japan, too, is increasingly called on to look further abroad, welcome diverse people, live together with them, and provide the support they need.

We carry out outreach so that refugee support can be addressed not just by MIS as a single organization but by “Japanese society” as a whole.

Members

In fiscal 2025, 31 members are active (12th cohort: 4, 13th cohort: 9, 14th cohort: 18)!