WIDE HORIZONSWH Students Newsletter 2014 - 2015 Academic Year

Volume 2, February 2015

The Wenhui Award for Educational Innovation in Asia and the Pacific-Honourable Commendation Recipient

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2014-2015 GRADUATION CEREMONY INVITATION 2

INTRODUCTION 2

UNESCO AWARD 3

TIME FOR A WH PARTY! 3

BURMA EDUCATION LAW TRAINING 4

VIDEO EDITING TRAINING 4

STUDENT RECRUITMENT 5

ROOM TO GROW PROJECTS 6

LACK OF FUTURE FUNDING 7

FINANCIAL LITERACY TRAINING 7

STUDENTS WORK PLACEMENT 8

BGET TRAINING 9

FUNDRAISING EVENTS 10

CARTOON 11

INTRODUCTIONHello dear friends!!! Nice to meet you all here again!! This is the second volume of our Wide Horizons’ 2014-2015 academic years’ students’ newsletter. Firstly, let me introduce a little bit about what we are going to include in this newsletter. This newsletter will focus more on the activities that we have done during the second and third trimesters. We received several interesting and useful training and workshops on topics such as video shooting and editing from a professional journalist, controversial education laws in Burma- from Burma Partnership, financial literacy –from Khom Loy Foundation and sustainable living from Border Green Energy Team (BGET). Besides that, four of our proposals which we designed and wrote ourselves were accepted by the Room to Grow Foundation and we are now im-plementing those projects. Furthermore, we celebrated our cold season party gratefully with our CBOs friends and alumni around Mae Sot. In this newsletter we will also be looking forward to the future and two students will share about their plans after graduation from WH. Finally, this newsletter will also give details about student recruitment and information about our fundraising events coming soon. All in all, we all thank you for supporting us and for giving your times to read our newsletter. Thank you!

Written by: Ne Hser

CONTENTS 2014-2015 Graduation Ceremony Invitation Card

SAVE THE DATE FOR OUR GRADUATION CEREMONY WARMLY WELCOME FROM OUR PROGRAM

March 20, 2015 Hsa Htoo Lei Learning Center Mae Sot, Thailand

Design: Wah Ai Hpaw

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UNESCO CERTIFICATE

Wide Horizons goes to CHINA to collect our UNESCO award!! This award shows that Wide Horizons is an establishment which encourages “formal, non-for-mal and in-formal learning that enhances knowl-edge, skills and competencies for personal, social and economic development.” We are very honoured to have received this award and are hopeful that it will help us in our fundraising efforts to keep our Wide Horizons open for future students. For more details, please visit the UNESCO Bangkok website or contact us!

Written by: English teacher Ruth

Wide Horizons is very grateful and extremely proud to have received an honorable commendation

from UNESCO. Our very own Community Develop-ment teacher, Kristian, went to CHINA to accept the cer-tificate on behalf of Wide Horizons in November 2014. The UNESCO Wenhui Award for Educational In-novation 2014 was for Innovation for Lifelong Learning: Bridging to the Future. The theme of the award, accord-ing to UNESCO, “surrounds the importance of learning throughout life for human fulfillment, peace, sustainable development, economic growth, gender equality and re-sponsible global citizenship.”

In December 2014, Wide Horizons hosted our first ‘Cold Season’ community party!!

We celebrated our party with around 100 people, including community based organizations (CBOs) around Mae Sot, alumni, other friends and students from other schools. It was nice to spend time to-gether socially, and get to know each other better and share together. The WH alumni especially, love coming back to WH and catching up – we were happy to meet each other and get tips from them! At our party, we cooked mohinga (a great, yummy local soup) for everyone, played games, sang songs and had a shop where we sold our new stylish WH t-shirts and calendars. We all felt happy with our friends and we could say that’s it is one of our most memorable parties in our lives. Written by: Mg Sunn

Time for a WH party!

WH cold season party

WH teacher Kristian receiving UNESCO award!!

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Burma Partnership, an organization who is working for democracy human rights in Burma, came and give training at Wide Horizons (WH) School in December 2014. The training was about the recent National Education Law in Burma – it is very controversial and many students are currently marching in protest about it. Firstly, we learnt about the education law reform first draft in March, 2013 and second draft in June, 2014. Moreover, the final draft approved in September, 2014. Hundreds of Myanmar university students are currently illegally protesting against this law because they say it will curb academic freedom. They need academic freedom. Although the government says the new higher education law will give universities more autonomy and allow an independent body to coordinate their functions, the students say the law will actually reduce autonomy.

Furthermore, the students are protesting against the National Education Law because it does not represent the interests of the people and the stu-dents. The Law, according to them, will be an obsta-cle to academic freedom and the development of ed-ucation. Therefore, the students are against this new education law. After this training it was very useful for WH students who gained many critical thinking skills and information about current events in the country. Moreover, we WH students eagerly appreciate Bur-ma Partnership coming and sharing their knowledge with us. Thank you! Written by: Nan Min Min Soe

WH students learn how to make advocacy videos from expert journalist! Lights…Camera…ACTION!!!!

Wide Horizons students are very enthusiastic to learn about different things and take initiative to

create what they have learned. In November 2014, WH students learned video editing training and made short videos themselves to show their talent. This is very use-ful for our future jobs and we can help our home or-ganizations very much with this skill. The training was given by Sayar (teacher) Nyan Soe from the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) who is really experienced in vid-eo shooting and editing.we learned different techniques and methods of video shooting and editing using com-plicated software. To practice our new skills, our teacher gave us a topic which was the Burma peace process, we designed, shot and edited our own videos about this topic in small groups. At the end of training, Sayar Nyan Soe was amazed at WH student’s videos and he even published news about his training workshop on DVB Youthvoice. We were very proud!

Written by: San San Moe

WH students get the lowdown on the controversial National Education Law

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organizations (CBOs) around Mae Sot.• (Computer skills) students have to learn Micro-

soft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Ex-cel, InDesign, Photoshop, video shooting and ed-iting, and how to create a webpage and website.

Wide Horizons is looking for people who;

• Have worked in a community organization for at least a year

• Have intermediate English language skills • Have basic computer skills • are between the ages of 20 – 35

If you are hard-working, motivated and care about your community, you will be a great student at Wide Horizons!

To apply to the Wide Horizons program, Wide Horizons staff and alumni will travel to re-cruit different students that come from 13 different places around Thailand, including refugee camps. Furthermore, they also will recruit inside Burma as well (Mawlamyine and Hpa-An). Before they start to recruit, they will deliver presentations at the various different places. Thus, if you would like to know more information, you can feel free to visit the Wide Horizons Website or our Facebook page.

Your life will never be the same again! Written by: Khun Like Yu

Wide Horizons School will start recruit-ment soon for 2015-2016 academic year. Therefore, we would like to wel-come everyone to enjoy Wide Horizons

program for one-year, which can definitely change your life and you can develop your community situ-ation to be better as well. Furthermore, you will have a lot of fun with different people from all over Burma and all over the world – for example Denmark, USA and England!

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world” Nelson Mandela

When students join Wide Horizons, they will inevita-bly get three advanced skills;

• (English advanced) students have to study profes-sional speaking; listening, writing and they have to learn how to write professional reports, emails, es-says, CVs, cover letters and write newsletter. They also learn about politics, philosophy, law, history and public health and creative writing as well as reading novels and articles.

• (Community development) students have to learn project management, proposal writing and receive many kinds of training from many local and in-ternational organizations. Additionally, they often have chances to visit different community based

Welcome to join funny Wide Horizons!

We are happy playing games with Denmark university students

Wide Horizons and Hong Kong University students

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WH Community Projects Working with communities is very important for Wide Horizons (WH) – it is what we all came here to learn about!!

but we were sure we could try hard and give the communities the help they need. In January 2015, we started to implement our projects. Each team acted as project managers for the proposal they had written.1) At Thu Kha Hang Sar School, we planted a ginger gar-den;2) At Irrawaddy school, we provided school furniture, includ-ing tables and benches and we re-paired the roof;3) At Kwe Ka Baung School, we planted an agriculture gar-den including watermelons and morning glory, and made our own eco-friendly fertilizer; and4) At Elpis School, we built fences for their boarding house.

The main goal for all four pro-jects was to fulfill the needs of the communities. During our im-plementation we had many team members to coordinate such as parents, school teachers, school students, technicians and WH students, WH teachers, and WH coordinators - all were human re-sources for these great projects! We worked together with unity and without tiring. The beneficiar-ies in our projects are the schools,

A few months ago, we learned how to write proposals. We

then applied and tested our pro-posal writing skills by visiting communities and doing needs assessments there. Afterwards, we wrote proposals for ‘Room to Grow Foundation’ – a great and very useful organization which supports various projects along the border.

Before we wrote our propos-als, we divided ourselves into 5 groups. Each group took responsi-bility over one site and wrote their own proposal. The groups then switched proposals to peer review each other’s work and learn from each other. Thereafter, in October 2014, 5 proposals were submitted to the donor and we were very ex-cited to wait for the results. In De-cember 2014, the donor came to WH and each group had to pres-ent their proposal to her in a sales pitch format – we were very nerv-ous! Finally we found that 4 pro-posals had been accepted! After we heard the information, every students, teachers and coordina-tor had a face full of smiles and everyone kept talking about the accepted proposals, even during lunch time! We knew we would be very, very busy in trimester 3,

students, teachers, and technicians and parents - both now and in the future. Furthermore, we, the WH students are also beneficiaries be-cause we learned how to write pro-posals and do the projects for our communities in the coming future.

Since we started our implementa-tion, we did not do any harm to our communities and we helped them a lot so we are satis fied and happy with our projects. However, right now, we are really sorry and wor-ried for our WH program and fu-ture community projects, because of the lack of funding WH has for next year. If other donors continue to help our programmer, WH will be more sustainable and WH can continue to do these kind of pro-jects, and other different projects, in the future for many communi-ties.Written by: Naw Lay Lit Ray Thaw

Students don’t just learn inside the classroom...

TKHS Ginger Project

Irrawaddy Roof + Furniture Project

KKB Gardening Project

Elips Fence Project

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Wide Horizons needs your help!

Dear reader! I am Chan Lawi a current Wide Ho-rizons students. I want to

share what I have learnt from WH such as community development skills, proposal writing, report writing, advanced English skills and advanced computer skills, as well as critical thinking and oth-er transferable skills. Now, I re-ally want to express our current situation and experience at Wide Horizons. WH program is focused on “community based organiza-tion (CBO) on Thai- Burma bor-der, as well as all” around Burma because those communities really need this program to get the skills.

Therefore, it is helpful for the communities. Before I came here, I just heard about WH school but I didn’t know these kinds of instru-ments and how they were useful for the communities. Now, I’m sure about how useful WH is it. Thus, I know that I also can devel-op my community after I graduate from this school because it has given me a lot of knowledge, expe-riences and skills that I can use for my future. Unfortunately, one thing that makes me feel sad is the situa-tion of our WH program because, the budget will run out this year.

I worry for new generations be-cause they will not have an oppor-tunity to study at WH like their brothers and sisters. When I think about them I’m so sympathetic. So, I would like them to get the same opportunity like us because this program can effectively devel-op our communities in the future. Please help us! We will do fund-raising soon, online and through a fundraising party in March 2015, so please give what you can. Thank you for reading and please contact WH for more information.

Written by: Mi Chan Lawi

We learned about these topics;• Market session (This was an activity where the participants had to work to earn money and buy rice to eat. The activity taught the participants that they have to work every day to get enough money to reach their goals and achieve what they want).• Goals and money beliefs (identifying, ana-lyzing and challenging current beliefs)• What are savings? Making saving plans • Making household budgets• Time management

We received training on these topics in English and a week later, delivered it to a migrant community near to WH school, in Burmese. Before we would go to deliver training, we had already learnt how to be effective trainers from KLF because the training was designed in this for-mat. This training enabled us to become financial lit-eracy trainers in the community in the future and we are very thankful to KLF for teaching us.

Written by: Tai Leng

30 students received financial literacy training in the form of ‘Training of Trainers’ (TOT). They then deliv-ered the same training workshop to over 50 women in a local community.

In January 2015, 23 WH students and 7 Border Green Energy Team (BGET) students received TOT financial literacy training from Khom Loy Foundation (KLF).

Money, Money, Money!!

WH & BGET students are giving financial literacy training.

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The future is nearly here… What’s next for our WH students?

The Wide Horizons Community Development Program (WH) has been famous along the Thai-Burma border and inside Burma for a number of years. Everyone knows that if you studied at WH, you have many skills and can work very hard! WH provides lifelong learning education to ethnic young people

and each year, hundreds of them sit entrance exams and are eager to come and study at WH. Currently, over 200 of young adults have been trained by WH and they are now working in many different community devel-opment sectors, using the skills that WH provided to them effectively. Pwint Moe Thu, a WH alumni who is currently interning at Khom Loy Development Foundation said “If you are trained by Wide Horizons, you will be a good organizer and a practical leader in the future.”

After living and studying at WH campus in Mae Sot for 10 months, the students have to return to their host organizations to complete their work placement. This is the opportunity for the students to practice their new skills that they have learnt at WH such as practical experience, knowledge and skills about community development. Furthermore, the students are able to contribute to the capacity development of community based organizations (CBOs) along the Thai-Burma border by sharing their newly gained skills.

In this academic year, there are 23 students at WH who came and studied on behalf of many different organizations along the border-line and inside Burma. We are all excited for our work placements to begin! Tai Leng, a current WH student from Kaung Jor Shan refugee camp said “Wide Horizons pro-gram is a place that produces community changers”. In addition, he said “I have plans to start a new program in my camp, similar to WH and using what I learned from my teachers and my expe-riences at WH.

I do believe myself that I am able to set up a new program because I have gained so many valuable skills in WH during this year.” Moreover, Hser Khu Paw, anoth-er current WH student from Back Pack Health Worker Team (BPHWT) added, “I believe WH has provided enough skills for my work placement. The skills that I gained from WH include proposal writing, report writing and project management – which are all so necessary in our organiza-tion. After this graduation I want to share my English and computer skills to other youth as well.” During the work placement, the students are required to submit quarterly reports to WH, describing our duties and responsibilities, our progress, and any challenges we might be facing during our work placement. This means we will be continually supported by WH, and can ask them to support our future projects also. We know we will be part of the WH family forever.

Written by: Si Thu Aung

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Can you make natural fertilizer or houses out of mud? We can! BGET Sustainable Living training in Nu Boh

In October 2014, the Wide Horizons students together with some American ‘Where were the dragon’ students went to the Border Green Ener-

gy Team (BGET) training centre in Nu Boh. There we learned many things such as; adobe building, compost making, bio char, natural soil fertilizer, water filters, solar power energy and methods of raising pets. We learned theory in class and then we practiced our new skills in BGET’s sustainable training areas. We had a great time!

My favorite lesson was about adobe building making. We dug mud from the ground, stepped on it and mixed it with rice husk. We stepped on it to mix it together and until it was sticky enough to use for building. Similarly, some students carried and moved the mud bricks and started to build a wall. Everyone was working very hard and this job was very fun and interesting. Whilst at BGET, Khom Loy Foundation also gave us training about how to make compost, which was very useful for us. The structure of compost is to firstly put green grass down, and we can use any grass for it. After this, we have to put rice husk-this should be spread on the grass to cover the grass. Next, we have to put cow manure, and the last step is we put coconut husk or sawdust over it. Finally, you can put water onto it. This can be used as natu-ral fertilizer, useful for raising pigs and chickens. In the same way, to make Bio Char, we were working very hard.

We had to chop dried wood into small pieces and put it in a metal barrel until it was full and we burned it. When half was burned, we moved the barrel and put it in to the mud, and we covered it for safety - we closed it with the mud without hole and air to enter put it in the mud until the fire wood became ash.

During the training, WH students and the Amer-ican ‘Dragon’ students were living, eating, sleeping, working, playing and singing together, as like as a family. In the evening we went swimming in the river. Furthermore, on the last night of our training, all stu-dents celebrated a farewell party where we shared our cultures, sang, danced and had a talent show - we all were very happy that night. Moreover, on the last day, we all hiked to the top of the mountain and visited the pagoda. There is very beautiful place and you can see very far because that mountain is very high. Everything we learned during out BGET train-ing was certainly useful for us, especially people who live in villages because all of these courses are sus-tainable for humans and for all the living things in the world. If we can build Adobe houses in our villages, we can save money!. Moreover, you do not need to worry about deforestation and global warming. For the compost, it makes you healthier if you plant vege-table with compost, every vegetable is very fresh and really pursues you to eat. We are very thankful for this training! Written by: Khun Michael

WH and Dragon students are digging and stepping

We receive certificate from BGET

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It could be YOU!!!

Wide Horizons will be fundraising in March 2015!!! We have a party on 20 March and we will have fantastic student performances, delicious Burmese food and juice and a raffle draw…! The prizes will be:

First prize: New Honda Wave 1

1. 42,000 Thai Baht

Second prize: New Refrigerator

1. 6,499 Thai Baht

Third prize: Samsung Phone

1. 3,000 Thai Baht

ONLINE FUNDRAISING!!!!Wide Horizons will be crowd funding onlineIf you donate online, you will get a set of WH postcards, a T-Shirt or a personal video message from our WH students!!**pending amount givenPlease visit this website link for our crowd funding: http://igg.me/at/GR8JnpJ2Xng/x/9976412 Written & Design by: Moe Moe Myint

Note: You do not need to attend the party to win prize. The raffle draw will take place at 8 pm. We will announce the winner on our Facebook page after the drawing.

Other prizes also include: - 2 bicycles, a rice cooker, an iron!

Extra Information for RaffleTime: 8 - 10pmDate: 20 March 2015, Sunday Phone: 0856066973 Place: Wide Horizons, Mae Sot, Tak Contact: widehorizonsmaesot@gmail.com

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Layout Team Aung Than Naw Min Min Soe Mi Chanlawi Htoo Lar PawBurmese Translation Team Khun Michel Khun Like Yu San San Moe Lahtaw Roi Nan Khaing Zaw Win Ah KinKaren Translation Team Htoo Htoo Hser Khu PawPROOF READING TEAM Saw Than Than Lay Saw Blet Moe Moe Myint Wa Ai HpawCOORDINATING TEAM Ne Hser Wah Ler SheeENGLISH WRITING TEAM Si Thu Aung Thai Lend Naw Min Min Soe Lay Lit Ray Thaw San San Moe Mi Chanlawi Moe Moe Myint Ne Hser Maung SunnCartoon Gay Nay Dee

WIDE HORIZONS STUDENTS 14 - 2015

Cartoon: Gay Nay Dee

Frame Designer: AUNG THAN

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Address: Wide Horizons School, P.O. Box 27, Mae Sot, Tak, 63110, Thailand.

Coordinator: Maung Myo HtunPhone: 08856066973Email: widehorizonsmaesot@gmail.comBlog: www.widehorizonsprogram.blogspot.com/p/ home.htmlFacebook: www.facebook.com/Wide Horizons, Com munity Development Program

WIDE HORIZONS CONTACT ADDRESS

WH Family

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