VIOLET CHO
Monday, June 16, 2008,
Increasing numbers of Burmese children, some as young as 10 years old, are stealing food to offset starvation, say Rangoon residents.
Rangoon residents say the theft of food and other goods has increased in the former capital and elsewhere in cyclone-damaged areas.
Children are seen in a village that was hit by Cyclone Nargis in the town of Dedaye in the Irrawaddy delta. An estimated 1 million of the survivors are children, according to UNICEF. (Photo: AFP)Food products at one large department store in downtown Rangoon are being stolen by children in broad daylight, said the store’s owner who said he chased after one 13-year-old boy, but was then touched by the boy’s plight.
“I ended up providing food for him when he told me that he was from a village in Hlaing Tharyar Township,” he said. “The boy came to find a job in the city for his family, and he stole food from the shop because he was hungry.”
He said more children are begging for handouts around the city while others sneak inside people’s homes to steal anything they can sell.
Meanwhile UNICEF and other aid groups working in Burma say there is cause to worry about the fate of children in the cyclone-affected area.
“We have deep concern over the future of children who have lost their parents and family members,” said a Burmese staffer with UNICEF.
A recent decision by the Burmese junta that ordered storm refugees to return to the location of their homes, many totally destroyed, was a decision that threatens the physical and mental health of many children, aid workers said. Children who have lost their parents and relatives are especially vulnerable and need extra care at this time in their lives.
Children who have no adults to care for them usually end up following people who they have met during the relief operations, they say.
According to Rangoon residents, many children from the cyclone-affected area end up working at teashops and restaurants where they receive food and very small salaries.
“I felt bad when I saw people take parentless children to work,” said a Rangoon woman, who said she saw two boys from the Irrawaddy delta as young as eight years old working in a teashop.
One 9-year-old boy who lost his parents and was begging near Rangoon’s main train station, told The Irrawaddy, “I can’t go back to my village anymore. There are no people who will give me food, and I do not know where my parents and brothers and sisters are.”
The boy said he befriended a 14-year-old boy who had also lost his parents during the storm.
“I decided to come to Rangoon after I realized that I lost my family,” the 14-year-old boy said. “I didn’t know what I should do or where to go. I came here with another friend who also lost his family.”
The older boy said, “I felt pity on him [the 9-year-old boy] when I saw him crying near the train station. I asked him to come with me. I promised myself that I would try to help him, but I can only give him one meal a day, so he has to beg for more food if he is hungry.”
The UN children’s fund has established more than 30 children support centers and about 60 dormitories for orphans, according to a UNICEF statement.
However, the number is not sufficient to meet the needs of homeless children who need assistance and shelter.
The Burmese government’s effort to care for homeless children has been haphazard and disorganized, say observers. The government is still rejecting offers to provide humanitarian assistance from many international aid groups.
“I can not imagine the future of these homeless children,” said the editor of a Rangoon journal.
Tropical Cyclone Nargis affected about 2.4 million people. An estimated 1 million of those are children, according to UNICEF.
Irrawaddy correspondents Kyi Wai and Aung Thet Wine contributed to this story. -->
ေကာ႔မႉးတြင္ စာသင္ေက်ာင္းမ်ား မျပင္ႏိုင္၍ ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားအခက္ေတြ႔NEJ/ ၁၆ ဇြန္ ၂၀၀၈
နအဖစစ္အစိုးရက ေလေဘးသင့္ ၿမိဳ႕နယ္အလုိက္ စာသင္ေက်ာင္းမ်ား ျပန္လည္တည္ေဆာက္ေရး လုပ္ငန္းမ်ားကို လုပ္ေဆာင္ေနသည္ဟု ေျပာၾကားေနေသာ္လည္း ေကာ့မႉးၿမိဳ႕နယ္တြင္ ေက်ာင္း အမ်ားအျပား မျပင္ဆင္ႏိုင္ေသးသျဖင့္ ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ား အခက္အခဲ ေတြ႔ေနသည္။
ေကာ့မႉးၿမိဳ႕နယ္တြင္ ေက်ာင္းအေရအတြက္ (၁၂၆) ေက်ာင္း ပ်က္စီးသြားၿပီး ယခုအခါ အထကႏွင့္ အလကေက်ာင္းမ်ား ျပန္လည္ျပင္ဆင္ၿပီးစီးၿပီျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ေကာ့မႉးၿမိဳ႕နယ္ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးမႉးက ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံစာေပနွင့္ စာနယ္ဇင္း ေလေဘးအလႉတြင္ ယခုလ (၉) ရက္၌ ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည္။
လက္ရိွတြင္ ေကာ့မႉးၿမိဳ႕နယ္ ေက်းရြာအုပ္စု (၅၅) ခုတြင္ ရိွေသာ ေက်းရြာမ်ားမွ စာသင္ေက်ာင္း မ်ား၏ ျပင္ဆင္မႈအေျခအေနမွန္မွာ ယင္းသို႔မဟုတ္ေၾကာင္း ရန္ကုန္အေျခစိုက္ သတင္းဂ်ာနယ္ တခုမွ သတင္းသမားတဦးက ေျပာသည္။
၎က “တကယ္ေတာ့ ဘာမွမလုပ္ရေသးတဲ့ ေက်ာင္းေတြ မ်ားတယ္။ တခ်ဳိ႕တေလပဲ ျပဳျပင္ၿပီး ေသးတာကို အားလုံးျပဳျပင္ၿပီးေနၿပီလို႔ ၿခံဳေျပာလို႔မရဘူး” ဟုေျပာသည္။
ထုိ႔အျပင္ ေက်ာင္းေဆာက္လုပ္ေရး၊ ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ား၏ စာသင္ၾကားမႈအေျခအေနမ်ားႏွင့္ ပတ္ သက္၍လည္း အေျခအေနမွန္မ်ားကို တင္ျပေရးသားသည့္ ျပည္တြင္းသတင္းဂ်ာနယ္မ်ားကို စာေပစိစစ္ေရးက ထည့္ခြင့္မေပးေၾကာင္း အဆိုပါ ျပည္တြင္းမွ သတင္းသမားတဦးက ေျပာသည္။
ေကာ့မႉးၿမိဳ႕ေပၚရိွ အမက (ၿမိဳ႕မ) စာသင္ေက်ာင္း လုံး၀ၿပိဳပ်က္သြားသည့္ သတင္းေရးသည့္ ျပည္တြင္းဂ်ာနယ္မ်ား ပယ္ခ်ခံရေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။
အဆိုပါေက်ာင္းအား ျပန္လည္တည္ေဆာက္ေရးလုပ္ငန္းအတြက္ စီမံခ်က္ခ်ရာထားမႈမ်ားအရ ေဆာက္လုပ္ေရးအဖြဲ႕မ်ားက လာေရာက္ၾကည့္႐ႈ႐ုံမွ်သာ ရိွေသးသည္ဟု ေကာ့မႉးမွ မူလတန္း ေက်ာင္းဆရာတဦးက ေျပာသည္။
“အမွန္ေတာ့ သူတို႔ေျပာတာနဲ႔ လုပ္တာနဲ႔က တျခားစီပဲ၊ အခုခ်က္ခ်င္းျပန္လည္တည္ ေဆာက္ေတာ့ မလိုနဲ႔ ေနာက္ေတာ့ ေပၚမလာေတာ့ဘူး။ ကေလးေတြကို စာသင္ရတာ အခက္အခဲရိွတယ္၊ အဓိက ေနရာေပါ့။ အခု ရပ္ကြက္ဓမၼာ႐ုံေတြမွာ သင္ေနရတယ္။ ဘုန္ႀကီးေက်ာင္းေတြမွာ သင္မယ္ဆိုလည္း သူတို႔က မႀကိဳက္ဘူး” ဟု ၎က ေျပာသည္။
ၿမိဳ႕မေက်ာင္းကဲ့သို႔ မူလတန္းေက်ာင္းအမ်ားအျပား ပ်က္စီးၿပိဳက်မႈေၾကာင့္ စာသင္ၾကားေရး အခက္ အခဲရိွေနေၾကာင္း ေကာ့မႉးေဒသခံမ်ားက ေျပာသည္။
ေကာ့မႉးၿမိဳ႕နယ္တြင္ ဇြန္(၂) ရက္တြင္ ေက်ာင္းမ်ားျပန္လည္ဖြင္လွစ္ခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း ေလေဘးဒဏ္ အျပင္းထန္ဆုံးခံရသည့္ ဘိုကေလး၊ လပြတၱာ၊ ေမာ္လၿမိဳင္ကၽြန္းႏွင့္ ၿမိဳ႕နယ္အခ်ဳိ႕တြင္ ေက်ာင္းဖြင့္ ရက္ကို တလေနာက္ဆုတ္ထားသည္။ ။
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