Our Projects

Ngagyiinn School
Ngagyiinn Village, Bago Township, Bago Division, Lower Myanmar.

Ngagyiinn is a small village of about 300 people at the end of long and bumpy road. About two hours drive north east of Yangon. The villagers are innocent farmers and are the most welcoming and friendly of people. Transport is by bullock cart. There is no electricity and – until recently – no school. Life revolves about work, children and a small Buddhist Monastery. In keeping with rural traditions families are big and the older children are expected to look after younger siblings while their parents work in the fields. Most of Ngagyiinn's children end up play on the village streets, catching frogs and fish in the paddy fields, or finding mushrooms and bamboo shoots in a nearby forest. Those few who made it to school would walk an hour to Htonegyi – the biggest village of the area.

In April 2003, the monk said to the villagers that there should be a school for their children in Ngagyiinn. Everybody agreed and local contributions were collected to start the school. The monastery was the class room : there were neither chairs nor tables – but they did find three volunteer teachers and thirty seven children. No uniform. No enrollment fee. No restriction for having the baby siblings along with the students. Then by June 2007 they had eighty seven children from Grade One to Grade Five with four teachers. And that's where the great idea began to unravel.

It had been a huge effort to get the school up and running but maintaining it was going to be impossible. The salary for a teacher at the time was 10US$ dollar a month and 2007 was a hard year for everybody in Myanmar. The villagers called for urgent help as local contributions got smaller and smaller. Their voice reached to us through a famous social activist. From June 2007 on we bought tables and chairs, we made a 2,000 square feet concrete platform under the monastery as a class room. We now pay the teacher's salary, provide stationary, text books, clothes and school uniforms, and organize capacity building workshops for the teachers. We also sponsor the children from the poorest families to continue to the Htonegyi Middle and High School once they graduate from Ngagyiinn School.

Our support of Ngagyiinn School helps 100 children access a basic education they would not otherwise receive.

Supported by Parami Foundation from 2007 to 2019