At the Insein district dump on the outskirts of Yangon, the garbage is growing week after week, but so are the people seeking shelter. Like the adolescents to whom the Nghet Aw San Boys School tries to offer an alternative to the street thanks to the NGO New Humanity, which has multiplied its initiatives in two extremely difficult years, marked by covid and war.
Milan () – In a country like Myanmar where religious and ethnic identity has always been of paramount importance, the number of undocumented children without identity continues to grow in the context of the civil war that broke out after the coup in February 2021.
In this bleak situation, the experiences of the NGO New Humanity International are a ray of hope. While the United Nations has been forced to withdraw from some areas of the country and is having increasing difficulties in distributing humanitarian aid, small local realities have managed to support the population. New Humanity, which had 25 employees, now has 70 and had the ability to grow in two very difficult years, marked by the covid and the war, and to launch new projects.
As in the Insein district dump (see video), on the outskirts of Rangoon, where mountains of garbage grow week after week but also people who flee the situation in their place of origin and take refuge there. The first inhabitants of the slum settled there in 2008 after Cyclone Nargis, which killed more than 138,000 people, devastated large areas of the country and caused $4 billion worth of damage.
But afterwards the government never decided to take control of the situation in the dump and consequently the families that live in the dump are clandestine for all intents and purposes. They do not have documents certifying ownership of the land (so the de facto authorities could evict everyone at any time) and newborns are not registered in the Civil Registry either. On the one hand, because the administrative system seems to have completely collapsed with the conflict, and on the other, because the population does not trust the authorities and prefers to live clandestinely in the marginal neighborhoods. The operators of New Humanity have created a children’s day care center on the site and have begun to establish a good partnership with the community and local authorities, but there is no shortage of uncertainties about the future. The civil conflict shows no signs of abating and no one knows when it will be possible to give the children an identity.
A similar, extremely difficult situation occurs at the Nghet Aw San Boys School in the Kaw Hmu district. More than 300 adolescents from all over the country are housed in this center for different reasons. Kaw Hmu, the New Humanity association, has organized professional courses to promote their reintegration into society and also the teaching of basic school courses. Among these young people and children there are some who come from the street and in just over a year they have increased impressively. The local operators do not know what to do because they have to manage not only large numbers, but also a heterogeneous group of young people who speak different languages and who have suffered the traumas of war.
Here New Humanity International has created a school for 150 adolescents and organized professional courses. At the same time, precisely in this very difficult year, a professional training and psychological counseling project was launched in the Dala district to help prevent juvenile delinquency and face the difficult situation that young people are experiencing, while continuing to look to the future with hope.
It is important to point out the harmony between the personnel who work in education in these environments and the local authorities, who are concerned that everything happens in the most orderly and positive way possible for the young people themselves.
Small seeds that have been sown thanks to work from below, walking alongside the local population, and that offer hope even in these difficult times for the country.
