SANDAR LWIN: GIVING BACK TO THE COMMUNITY

Sandar Lwin was a student at Wide Horizons (WH) from 2008 to 2009. “WH has been very

important part of my life. I can’t even imagine what would have happened if I hadn’t been able

to attend”, she says today. Having overcome significant obstacles in her life, she is today

working with providing education opportunities for other young migrants in need of a hand.

Sandar Lwin grew up in Yangon with her

grandparents and two younger brothers. Her

brothers gave up their education to support her

to go to university, where she earned a

bachelor’s degree in math. After graduating,

Sandar Lwin stayed in Yangon to look after her

grandparents, but she was never really happy

there. She felt she was being discriminated

against because she was Muslim and rarely left

the compound unless she had to. “Most of my problems have been due to my skin color.

Religion doesn’t actually matter. Skin color matters”, she says. Sandar Lwin’s youngest brother

had gone to Malaysia to find work and in 2007, her and her other brother decided to join him.

On their way to Malaysia, they were arrested in Mae Sot in Thailand and at this time also lost all

their travel funds. Unable to continue their journey, the two siblings ended up in the nearby

Mae La refugee camp instead. They felt safe in the camp, but Sandar Lwin also saw a lot of need

around her. She contacted the IRC office in the camp and soon began working as a volunteer

with victims of Sex and Gender Based Violence and later found a position as peer educator on

HIV/AIDS with a French organization. But she still struggled with feelings of discrimination and

felt that this was preventing her from advancing.

One day in 2008, she saw a flyer for a

program called Wide Horizons in Mae Sot

nailed up on a jackfruit tree in the camp.

She applied and was accepted. The WH

Program is a 10 month intensive study and

field work course in community

development followed by a one year

internship with a Community Based

Organization. The program brings in young

adults from a wide variety of ethnicities to

live and work together while learning the skills to build community services in a collaborative

way. Since it was established in 2006, WH has trained hundreds of young adults who are now

community workers and leaders. “I had only planned on passing through Mae Sot on my way to

Malaysia”, she says. But with her acceptance to WH, Sandar Lwin became a Mae Sot resident.

Because of her past experiences with discrimination, Sandar Lwin herself had strong

stereotypes about other ethnic groups, but at WH all these ideas were challenged. In the

beginning it was very difficult for her to let her guard down, but she quickly learned to identify

similarities, rather than differences. “At WH, I learned that people, not ethnicity or religion is

important”, she says.

After her academic year, Sandar Lwin found an internship with the Minmahaw Education

Foundation, a migrant education center in Mae Sot that trains and assists migrants and

refugees from Myanmar in pursuing further studies in Thailand and abroad. Sandar Lwin

became their new math teacher and after her internship ended, they were so pleased with her

efforts that they asked her to stay. “Thanks to WH

I had the confidence to teach and also to work

with diverse communities”, she says. Finally,

Sandar Lwin decided to apply for a scholarship

herself and in 2011, she enrolled in a Master’s

program in Education at Assumption University in

Bangkok. She will be handing in her master’s

thesis on ‘student motivation in learning math

according to gender’ In July 2014. In December

2013, Sandar Lwin decided to leave Bangkok and

move back to Mae Sot. “I felt a debt to the Mae Sot Community and therefore I came back”, she

says. Today, she is working as the Program Officer for the Exam Preparation Outreach Program

(EPOP), an organization that assists youth from low-resource communities in Southeast Asia to

overcome the obstacles standing between them and university education. This was the very

program that assisted Sandar Lwin in applying for a scholarship to her university course. As

EPOP’s Program Officer in Thailand, Sandar Lwin is in charge of facilitating student testing,

mentoring students, assisting with scholarship applications and communicating with EPOP’s

partner organizations. And she feels great gratitude to the WH program for helping her get

where she is today. “I have used both the professional and personal skills from WH, but mainly I

have used the self-confidence the program gave me”, she says.

For more information about Wide Horizons, contact: widehorizonsmaesot@gmail.com

or visit our page on Facebook (Wide Horizons, Community Development Program).