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N e w s l e t t e rVolume I. November 2014

UNESCO Wenhui Award for Educational Innovation in Lifelong Learning 2014

“Without hope, no life”

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Introduction Wide Horizons Background

Respect

Articles Wide Horizons -A beautiful place to study! Studying at Wide Horizons WH Mission and Gaol Training at Wide Horizons Happy Birthday to you....all 288 The daily life of a Wide Horizons student Wide Horizons student are sport crazy Be positive and don’t give up Skills + Opportunity + Experience + Money = Happy WH students Why did you come to WH UNESCO Commendation

Interview What skills did you gain from Wide Horizons?

Creative writing Wide Horizons makes new friends! Advantages of learning English Always give 100% Keep Your Hope Alive Poems Too much home work makes big head Wide Horizons food recipe Health benifits of green tea and cucumber

Contents

Welcome to the first Wide Horizons’ Newsletter 2014-15! Wide Horizons is located in Mae Sot, Tak which is on the Thai-Burma border. It

is a 10-month academic learning program followed by a 1-year work placement. It is well-known for its courses in Community Development, advanced English and Computer skills. Wide Horizons carefully selects 24 students from different organizations, both from within different ethnic groups inside Burma, as well as along the Thai-Burma border.

The purpose of this Wide Horizons’ newsletter is to illustrate what Wide Horizons stu-dents have been studying and doing so far in this 2014-15 academic year. We want to share our experiences with you so we can share this happy time. Enjoy!

By: Saw Blet , Lahtaw Roi Nan

Introduction

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By: Htoo Htoo and Nan Min Min Soe.

Wide Horizons Background

Wide Horizons School (WH) was established in 2006 by World Education.The school was founded by Mr. Patrick Kearns who had a dream for young people to be good leaders in their community inside Burma and along the Thai-Burma border, and to work more effectively for the community-based organizations (CBOs).

Each year Wide Horizons selects students from different ethnic groups, reli-gions and different places and enrols them in a community development pro-gram dedicated to providing vocational training to them, Wide Horizons is a two year program which trains students; one year at school and one year work placement in their organization. During the first year students learn Commu-nity Development, advanced English and Computer skills. These skills will be vital for their return to work in their organizations.

RESPECT is at the heart of Wide Hori-

zons – respecting each other and treating each other in the way we would like to be treated is what makes Wide Horizons such a special place to live, study and work in. Sharing in each other’s lives and cultures is also a won-derful part of our daily school life, ranging from food to music to dancing.

This painting was designed and painted by our Wide Horizons 2014-15 students. In the middle is the Wide Horizons logo, showing that we are united around education and our school’s aim. Around the logo are the flags of each ethnic group represented at our school this year including Mon, Shan, Kachin, Karen, Rakhine, Karenni, Kayan and Burmese.

The hand prints represent that although we are all slightly different, we are all essentially the same and therefore everyone deserves respect.

By: Teacher Ruth

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“The word that comes from your mouth is as fast the wind. The main thing is before your set it up. Make sure it is suitable Otherwise, it can complicate your audience’s fact or opinion’’

By: Khun Like Yu

sons. There are two big and old trees that gives us shade to shelter and the roots are going around in-side the compound under the soil. Sometimes we can see the roots come out on the ground. Behind the school compound, there is a small stream that comes from the Mae Sot dam. The stream goes around the Mae Sot channel.

There is a pond near our school. In the pond, there are lots of fishes for curry. The highway to Umphieum and Nu Poe refugee camp is near with our school. Every Sunday, the students go to the Sunday Market because it’s near with our school.

Our school environment is very nice scenic and a good place to visit. It’s more beautiful than I can explain to you.

If you would like to visit to our school, our stu-dents will welcome you anytime.

Before I’m going to describe about my school en-vironment, I’d like to give some information about the distance between Wide Horizons to or from somewhere and the time.

1. It’s about 2 miles (9 minutes without traffic) to drive and (38 minutes) to walk from Wide Hori-zons to Mae Sot city.

2. It’s about 6.7 miles (30.15 minutes without traffic) to drive from Thai-Myanmar Friendship Bridge to Wide Horizons.

3. It’s about 5.8 miles (26.1 minutes without traffic) to drive from Mae Sot airport to Wide Horizons.

4. It’s about 2.6 miles (11.7 minutes) to drive from our school to the Mae Sot dam.

(Source from Google Map by Satellite)

I would like to share with you a little bit about our school environment. Our school is located in a lowland. Therefore, in the past year, it was flooded during the rainy season. It’s very nice and a cool place because there are many different trees that give us shade. In front of our school, you will see our school signboard and the school door is big strong and sky blue.

There are four buildings inside our school com-pound area but one of the buildings is the neigh-bor’s house. Our biggest building has two levels; the girls live upstairs and downstairs we use for the classroom, cooking room, library and comput-er room. The boys live in a second bigger building and the coordinator lives in the smaller building. Only the biggest building in the downstairs was built with concrete and the other buildings were built with wood and some bamboo.

We have a small ground for playing volleyball and cane-ball in our free time and a small well to get enough water in the summer and winter sea-

wide HorizoNs -A beAutiful plAce to study!

Our Wide Horizons is located in Ban Hua Fai, Mae Sot, near with a migrant school named Hsa Thoo Lei Orphanage Learning Centre.

By: Saw Than Than Lay & Naw Lay Lit Ray Thaw

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I would like to give some information about what we learn at Wide Horizons, which targets young adults from inside Burma, Thai-Burma border and refugee camps. We learn three main subjects at Wide Horizons, including:

1. Advanced English 2. Computer

3. Community Development

Firstly, from the advanced English subject, we learn about listening skills, writing skills, reading skills (in-cluding literature), speaking skills and grammar. We can employ them all when we work in our organizations. We also learn about many other subjects through learning advanced English, such as philosophy and ethics, sociology, politics, law, geography and history and have studied the lives of Gandhi and Anne Frank. We have also learned about discussion skills, including active listening and presentation skills. Additionally, we always work on critical thinking and explaining and justifying everything we say. As for me, I have improved a lot if I compare with before. I strongly agree, it is the helpful subject for everyone who is working everywhere. More-over, English is the official language, which everyone uses around the world and can help us to communicate smoothly with people from all over the world in the future.

Secondly, in the advanced Computer subject, we have to study many topics. There is Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Photoshop, Video editing and web building that is essential when we need to work with the computer for our organizations. We also learn about using social media and its importance for the world. Nowadays, the computer is the most important equipment if we want to do our jobs effectively.

Thirdly, in Community Development subject, we have learned about project cycle management, experiential learning cycle and proposal writing skills. I was very interested to learn those concepts, because one day I will share my knowledge and experiences from Wide Horizons with my community. Now we are doing practical community development, visiting communities and writing proposals based on our needs assessments and problem statements. We don’t just learn theory in a classroom, but we practice and try it ourselves so we can learn more. We learn through experience.

I like to study every subject because the subjects are very useful for my host or-ganization. Furthermore, my organization needs a person who is skillful and has many experiences about these subjects. For that reason, I perceive that is significant for me to be professional when I work for the community improvement because Wide Horizons trains me to be a good organizer and to be able to work for my community. Wide Horizons also teaches me general knowledge about the world, both national and international issues. I can learn how to be able to understand the world more and how to be a more useful person. By: Hser Khu Paw and Min Min Soe

studyiNg At wide HorizoNs

“The limits of your eyes, your mind, your heart and your future will be wider than ever!”

Wide Horizons develops students from all over Burma into smart lead-ers, who will be able to serve and develop their communities when they

return.

WH Mission and Goal

-Developed and written by WH students 2014-15

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Wide Horizons (WH) students have participated in many train-ing workshops this year already, including the following: Social Entrepreneurship (Mark Rheault – trainer from-America), Cre-ative Writing (Susan Rolf - trainer from Australia), Law Workshop (Connecting Myanmar - law stu-dents from Hong Kong Universi-ty) and Translation and Interpre-tation (Myo Htun - trainer from Burma and current WH staff). WH students learned about so-cial entrepreneurship from a suc-cessful American entrepreneur. Initially, we learned about estab-lishing the right mindset. There are seven categories for this, such as: believing everything is pos-sible, having passion first, living to give, being 100% accountable, having an attitude of gratitude, believing we are connected and understanding that the time is now. Similarly, we learned how to begin a business by knowing our skills and talents, knowing

our interests, and knowing our strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, we also learned about building a business plan by way of sustainable business models, such as; selling prod-ucts and services, multiple revenue streams, and creating jobs in a community. As a final point, we understood how to replicate and expand our own business as well as develop scalable business models.

Additionally, WH learned about translation and interpretation from a former WH student, and current staff member. He taught us how many types of interpretation and translation do we have? There are 4 kinds of interpre-tation and translation in each section; highly literal (it is to-tally incorrectly interpreted or translated a sentence), mod-ified literal (it is quite correct but not 100% correct), idiom-

atic (100% translate and inter-pretation), and unduly free (it is correct but it is over inter-preted or translated). All these skills are needed in the com-munity and very important to be an interpreter and transla-tor.

WH students also col-laborated and enjoyed with Hong Kong University stu-dents’ 2-day law workshop training. We learned about human rights, investigating the people in order to find out about a pretend murder, per-fect decision making when the emergency case needs and how to negotiate with the community members. This law workshop guided us and made us aware of the real world sit-uations that this training will help us with in the future. Therefore, we are really proud of ourselves to participate and learn about law and human rights.

WH students were given creative writing training workshop by a published author, who taught us about how to write beautiful essays by using adjectives, adverbs, metaphors and similes. It is really interesting sub-jects for the learners. In addition, we learned about how to write poems and short stories using personifica-tion. Consequently, all students enjoyed attending these training workshops at Wide Horizons and will use the lessons in the future.

Written by: Maung Sunn & Saw Blet

Training at Wide Horizons Wide Horizons (WH) students have participated in many training workshops this year already, including the following: Social Entrepreneurship (Mark Rheault – trainer from-America), Creative Writing (Susan Rolf - trainer from Australia), Law Workshop (Connecting Myanmar - law students from Hong Kong University) and Translation and Interpretation (Myo Htun - trainer from Burma and current WH staff).

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Happy Birthday to you…all 288 of you!! There are many different migrant schools in Mae Sot. Most of the children are from different ethnic groups in Burma who attended school and studied the education in migrant school for their future. According to this situation, some students lose their way of the education in their life because of instability situation in Burma. That’s why, a Singaporean donor tries to solve this problem with the Wide Horizons students and celebrated birthday for more than 288 children for this problem statement until now.

Based on the situation, they chose the place where the most insufficient things for the students and school, and they propose to the donor to solve it. This year, at Irrawaddy Flower Garden School and Agape School and Orphanage. The party helped the students to be happy, to remember their birthday, via improvement their education. Wide Horizon students got good experience of project planning and managing time and budget ef-fectively. However, Wide Horizons students’ main responsibility was to play the games for the children with encouragement in the migrant school 2014-15 academic year and celebrate their lives. It was a very tiring but happy time! By: Maung Suun

“ The two important things we cannot copy..... Parents and Yesterday

By: Khun Like Yu

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“Try your best and you will be success-ful. Don’t listen to negative thoughts you will fall down, but keep give up, Do the best that you can!” -Saw Wah.Ler.Shee

“You can pass over every-thing if you are correct,

but confess if you are wrong”

-Khun Michael

Hello everyone!! Here we would like to tell you about our daily life in WH. We

can say that life in WH is quite busy because we have to learn many things in the whole week without holiday. Firstly, we are going to express to you about cooking duty. We sep-arated the 23 WH students into 6 groups for daily cooking and we take responsibility one day for one group. The cooking group has to wake up at 6:00am every morning to get breakfast ready at 7:30 am.After that, our class starts at 9:00am to 4:00pm but we have lunch time at 12:00 pm to 1:00pm. For lessons, if we start community development class in the morning, English class starts in the afternoon. On the week-end, we study computer from 9am to 12pm. In the afternoon around 4:30pm, the cooking duty group

for the next day need to go to Mae Sot market to arrange on their duty day. They manage the budget and, after shopping, they take an accountability to write a food receipt. For the students who left at school, they are playing guitar, playing volleyball, table tennis, cane-ball and doing homework. Every day, we have a dinner at 6:30pm. However, the cook-ing group need to prepare food for next day. For example, cut-ting meat, vegetables, chopping onions and garlic. Moreover, we have student meeting at 7:30pm every Friday where we discuss issues and duties, and organize events. Therefore, ev-ery Saturday morning around 6:30 am to 7:30am we have our cleaning duty. Every trimester, we choose six leaders such as; student lead-er, in/out-class leaders, dormi-tory leaders, and a computer class leader. Their responsibil-ities are reporting about event and challenges of students and

school needs, to the coordina-tor, as student representatives. Being a WH student is very ex-citing and interesting because it really can promote us to become smart leaders by learning from different parts such as different culture from different ethnic groups, and a variety of back-grounds. In the same way, we can learn basic management and accounting skills according to our cooking duty. Furthermore, we know more how to take our own responsibilities by cleaning our school inside and outside compound. Even though we are busy, we take care of each other and discuss whenever someone have problems and in need. That teaches us how to deal with peo-ple and understand more about our communities. Thus, WH is a good program for youth who want to be successful people in their lives. For us, we will always memorize and never forget it.

“We can say that life in WH is quite busy because we have to learn many things in the whole week without holiday”.

By: Ne Hser and Moe Moe Myint

The Daily Life of a Wide Horizons student

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Be positive and don’t give up.

Written by: Khaing Zaw Win

Wide Horizons (WH) School is based in Mae Sot, Thailand and is a Community Development

program dedicated to building the capacity of young adults from Burma to work effectively in civil society organizations. Each year 24 students are chosen by (WH), according to an exam, and interview, and further research and follow up with references. Moreover, Wide Horizons collects migrant students from many different places along the Thai-Burma border, in refugee camps and some of them are from inner/inside Burma. All students at Wide Horizons feel very lucky and hap-

py to be here. Sometimes we face difficulties in our lives, but we love to learn at (WH) and so we try our best to be positive and not give up. Our futures are not certain and sometimes we feel worried and confused. However, we will try to study hard and do our best to be useful people who respect everyone and can be happy in their lives.

Caneball with Denmark studentsFootball with former students

Wide Horizons students are sport crazy!Nowadays, most people in the world like to play sport to be healthy and getting happiness moreover, they are becoming famous with sport, such as football, boxing, volleyball, table tennis and caneball. Those sports are very good exercise for people. Furthermore, it is very important for people to have energy and be healthy. In the same way, sport can make people a good relationship to know each other.

Therefore, in our school we also have many kinds of sports, including the following: football, volleyball, table tennis, caneball, hula hoop, skipping rope, and weights. All of the students enjoy playing sport, because it makes our brains fresher after we play. We even have a school sports shirt! On the other hand, we have to remember to finish our homework!

For football we usually play every weekend. Mostly we organize games with Minmahaw Higher Educa-tion program students, staff at Mae Tao Clinic, Australian Catholic University (ACU), former Wide Horizons students and Hsar Thoo Lei high school students. Sometimes we also play with visitors and trainers who come to Wide Horizons. Honestly, we just play for exercise, to build relationships with each other and to stay healthy but we also really enjoy socializing with everyone.

We would like to encourage everyone to do exercise to keep your body and mind fresh and healthy. If you would like to organize a football game with Wide Horizons, or play sport with us, please feel free to contact us as we always want to make more friends and be healthy together!

By:Wah Ler Shee, Michael and Like Yu

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Wide Horizons (WH) stu-dents helped

with a short term project during trimester break (Au-gust 2014). We learned many things and we also had a chance to earn some money for the school.

Why did we help with a short term project? We would like to apply our theory skills that we have learned in the class, to improve by gaining practical experience. We also want to assist projects where we can because we want to help our community. We also need to do fundraising for our school and this is a good chance. In order to improve WH sustainability, and get more experience and make new contacts, we therefore helped with this short project.

What did we do? This year we helped World Edu-cation (WE) and Save the Children with a week’s liter-acy assessment project. We were taught the techniques of literacy assessment for 3 days. After that we had to go to several migrant schools in groups and did as-sessments for 2 days by interviewing school children (grade 2-3). We interviewed 160 school children from different migrant schools. We then collected the data and presented it by entering the information onto a standard form, for later analysis. We did the project successfully with great excitement. We gained litera-cy assessment skills which will be useful in our job when we work with communities in the future and we helped with a very important project.

Where did the received money go and how did we use it? Some amount went to WH and some went to students who were involved in the project. For the money, we made the decision by ourselves about how much would be used for WH and our own. WH used it for school material needs, such as stationary, cook-

Skills +

Opportunity +

Experience +

Money =

Happy WH students!

Photo: WH students interviewing with Has Mu Htow students

ing gas, water bills, internet bills, electric bills, and for food. For us, we can solve some of our private needs with that money.

What next? The training that we attended gave us practical community development (CD) skills - we are not only looking for funds by helping with projects but we are also looking for useful experiences for our future. We want to be useful to our communities so the more experience we have, the better!

Thus, we are wishing to get a new short term project for the next trimester break, because we really enjoy helping with projects in order to gain our practical skills, solve our pocket money problems and on the other hand to help WH, both now and in the future.

Please contact us if you have any suggestions!

By: Aung Than & Khun Like Yu

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Why did we come to Wide Horizons School???

Wide Horizons is very grateful and extremely proud to have received an honorable commendation from UNESCO. Our very own Community Development teacher, Kristian, has been invited to CHINA to accept the certificate on behalf of Wide Horizons on 26 November 2014. We are so excited!

The UNESCO Wenhui Award for Educational Innovation 2014 was for Innovation for Lifelong Learning: Bridging to the Future. The theme of the award, according to UNESCO, “surrounds the importance of learning throughout life for human fulfillment, peace, sustainable development, economic growth, gender equality and responsible global citizenship.”

This award shows that Wide Horizons is an establishment which encourages “formal, non-formal and in-formal learning that enhances knowledge, skills and competencies for personal, social and economic devel-opment.”

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.

China - here we come! For more details, please visit the UNESCO Bangkok website or contact us!

...and the 2014 UNESCO Honourable Commendation is awarded to…WIDE HORIZONS!

Education is a necessary for all people in the world. We also love Education! However, we would like to share about why we came to Wide Horizons school. We can say that, we are lucky enough to have been given this great opportunity to continue further study and we are so happy to be students here!

Before we came here we had heard that Wide Horizons school trains young people to improve their qualities such as: community de-velopment, computer skills and advanced En-glish - we have to speak an English for 24-hours. This school especially focuses on Community Development. This subject is really import-ant for us to help our community to survive their future and how to run project proposal smoothly. Furthermore, we also learn manage-ment skills to promote community. Along the same lines, they teach students about writing proposal skills to donors and have practical to visit community and CBOs. We learn how to solve problems of community and how to make dreams into reality. We came to Wide Horizons to learn En-glish so that we can improve our writing and speaking skills. We could speak English but want to learn more and enjoy studying it. We By: Saw Gay Nay Dee

Htoo Lar Paw

learn about how to write clear essays and reports. We also learn about note-taking skills and giving presenta-tions. These skills will help us in our future. We wanted to learn Computer so we can use Power-point, Photoshop and Excel in our organizations and support them more. Living at the school and managing three subjects, lots of homework and many duties helps us to learn time management and teamwork. In our commu-nity we really need expert person who can guide and de-velop us as well. That’s why we came here to gain more experience and to learn more new different things from our community. We will be good leaders in the future.Absolutely, we believe that this program will useful for us to work with our community. Before we came to Wide Horizons we did not know how much we can learn – we get experience and better skills when we re-turn to our organization and forever for our future lives.

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Aung Than, a current Wide Horizons (WH) student, interviewed with a WH alumni (2012-13), Zin Min Kyaw, who has been successfully working at Burma Migrant Worker Education Committee (BMWEC) as an administrative officer. He was interviewed because current students wanted to know how WH alumni are working after they graduated. We want to share this with you as we all felt happy after hearing his information.

If you are thinking of applying to Wide Horizons school next year, please check our website for more details at http://widehorizonsprogram.blogspot.com/ or feel free to contact us for more informa-tion!

‘What skills did you gain from Wide Horizons?’- Current students interview an alumni student to find out the truth -

Aung Than: Which year did you gradu-ate WH program?

Zin Min Kyaw: I graduated WH program in 2013.

Aung Than: Why did you apply WH pro-gram?

Zin Min Kyaw: I applied WH program, be-cause I want to improve my computer and En-glish skills. That was my aim.

Aung Than: What skills did you gain from WH program?

Zin Min Kyaw: I gained many skills from WH program. The program has three main subjects they are: advanced English, community devel-opment, and computer. In English, I got formal writing skills such as report, proposal, newsletter, cover letter, reference, and recommendation. In community development, I learned how to nego-tiate with communities, stake holders, and knew about donor perspective like their strength and weakness. Moreover, I got project management skills.

Aung Than: Did you have those skills before you join WH?

Zin Min Kyaw: Before I joined WH, I already have a basic computer skills, organization struc-ture, and English writing, speaking, and listening skills. But I didn’t know about community devel-opment (CD) subject.

Aung Than: How did you feel with CD sub-ject?

Zin Min Kyaw: I was happy studying CD sub-ject. But first time I didn’t understand CD termi-nology. Later teacher taught me and explain with example, showed plot by comparing with real sit-uation. That’s why I could follow easily.

Aung Than: Do you like WH program?Zin Min Kyaw: I like WH program because it

improved me. Moreover, I would like to thanks my friends, teachers, coworkers, community peo-

ple who support me to work together with them.Aung Than: What is your position at BMWEC?Zin Min Kyaw: Now I am an admin officer at BM-

WEC.Aung Than: What are your responsibilities at

BMWEC?Zin Min Kyaw: I have to coach to admin team and

work with office supervisor who is a part of admin team. Moreover, I usually work with two field offi-cers and guide them to write report. Sometimes I check what they have done and give them feedback.

Aung Than: What is your future plan?Zin Min Kyaw: In future, I want to be an educator

in my home town in Myanmar. I really want to help students in our home town.

Aung Than: What message would you like to give to WH new generations?

Zin Min Kyaw: I would like to say to WH new generations that you are the future of Myanmar and communities. If we have more community develop-er in Myanmar and work together like at WH, we could develop our community quickly. Moreover, I want students to improve in note taking and record-ing skills because it is very useful when you work with your organization. Finally, I would like to say that keep contact with all of WH alumni and share your ideas and information.

“You are the future of Myanmar and communities.”

By; Aung Than and Ne Hser

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Our Wide Horizons students have done many activities in first trimester (June – August 2014). The activities are very interesting and useful for the students at WH. All activities have many different lessons to learn. Now, we will mainly focus to let all our readers to know some of our

activities we have done. The activities that we would like to present to you are our community based or-ganization visits (CBO) visits and student social exchanges.

Firstly, we would like to present about our CBO visits. We visited many CBOs around Mae Sot area. Those CBOs are as follows: Youth Connect (YC) which includes Puzzle Box, and Picture Book, Assistance Association for Political Prison-ers (AAPP), Mae Tao Clinic (MTC), Karen Hu-man Rights Organization (KHRG), Burma Part-nership (BP), and Burma Border Projects (BBP). Our students have learnt many different things from those organizations and know about the migrants’ situation along the Thai- Burma Bor-der area. We learned about the following; why the many different CBOs were established, who they are working for, what they are doing, how they are working and what problems they have confront-ed. When we visited, we asked questions to know more information about their organizations and the migrant community situation around Mae Sot area. After we had visited those organizations, we realized more about the people’s needs or commu-nities’ needs.

Secondly, our school’s students have organized some students’ social exchanges. It’s really fun and good to build our relationships between the students from different schools and countries. We have conducted two exchanges with Minma-haw Higher Education Program (MHEP); the first time was at our school and the second time was at MHEP. Moreover, our students had an exchange with Vallekilde Folk high school students who came from Denmark. The students have learned

about each other by sharing their experiences and playing games for fun. Our students felt excited because they had to work with other students and lead the exchanges. There were many things that we learnt such as; teamwork, facilitation, commu-nication, planning, leadership, participation, and other skills. Furthermore, we are pen pals with the English Immersion Program (EIP) stu-dents in Umphiem refugee camp. We decided to write letters once a week. The purpose of the let-ters are so the students get to know each other and learn from each other even though they live far away. It also helps everyone to practice their writ-ing skills.

Those are our activities which make us excited and interested. From each different activity there are important lessons for our students who will be-come leaders in the future. A leader needs to get to know about the communities and their needs, a leader needs friends with other leaders or people, and a leader needs helps from other people. So, it’s good to visit organizations that work for commu-nities, make friendship with other students for the future to build useful networks and continue to have communication with each other. I hope that in the future we will continue to do more activities in order to learn more things and meet more in-spirational people who we can learn from.

By: Saw Than Than Lay & Htoo Htoo

Wide Horizons makes new friends! - Current students interview an alumni student to find out the truth -

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At Wide Horizons School, we have been learning advanced English over the past 5 months. We know that English is the most important language in the world, because it is an international language. When we learn English, we learn about reading, writing and speaking skills. Thus, we see many advantage of learning En-glish. have to interconnect with our donors. Especially, when we work with a big organization like

Nowadays, if we work with our community we really need English skills, because we an NGO (Non-govern-ment organization) we must have the best English skills. Moreover, we can read news articles and listen to the news on television or on the internet, to distinguish what is ensuing in the world.

According to a current Wide Horizons student, San San Moe, “we must have English skills when we work with community and organization. If we cannot speak English very well, as a result we cannot crack our prob-lems even if we are right. For example, if we cannot clarify what we mean or explain why we are right in En-glish, they will think that we are wrong. Learning English is very useful and popular. We can learn at school, from the internet, and outside class”.

Another Wide Horizons classmate, Tai Leng said that, “we have advantage by learning English, because we can communicate and travel to other countries. For instance, if we can speak English we can go to another coun-try and we can communicate with them. On the other hand, if we learn Thai, we cannot use it when travelling in another country. Learning English is extremely imperative, because we are linking our community with other countries. Consequently, we appreciate that orderly and efficient learning of English can promote, and help us achieve success in our life and our community all over the world.”

In conclusion, the advantages of learning English include the ability to travel to other countries and under-stand, to solve our problems and work effectively in our community and to understand international news. These are a few advantages of learning English. By; Lahtaw Roi Nan & Naw Lay Lit Ray Thaw

Advantages of Learning English

Always give 100%The boy was playing with the girl. The boy

was collecting small, beautiful, bright stones. The girl had a lot of sweet candy. The boy asked to the girl to swap the beautiful stones for the candy. Consequently, the girl agreed to swap. However, the boy hid some of the most beau-tiful stones and only swapped the other stones. Nevertheless, the girl gave all of the candy. That night, the girl slept soundly but the boy couldn’t sleep very well. He thought that the girl also hid the candy like him.

If you cannot give 100% to someone hon-estly, you will think that they also cannot give 100% to you. In reality, most of the people ex-perience this situation and consequently, are suspicious of each other. As a result, relation-ships can become confusing because of sus-picions. Suspicious means you don’t believe someone else and moreover, you don’t believe

yourself either. Being suspicious can change the rela-tionship with each other. In reality, things have a ‘cause’ and an ‘effect.’ What do I mean by this? I mean that, when you deal honestly some-one, you should not think about what you will get back from them but rather you should wait silently and the result will come to you. According to traditional people’s ideas, the person who believes in themselves, they aren’t suspicious. The outcome is that people also believe in them. Therefore, if you deal with friends, family or col-leagues honestly 100% then you will able to sleep very well and have a good relationship with everyone. By: San San Moe

“Unless you zip up a small pouch or a big pouch, you can’t judge which one has more money in it.”

By: Naw Lay Lit Ray Thaw

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Keep your Hope AliveOnce upon a time, there were four candles lighting atiny, dark room. The people walked out of the

room and then the candles spoke quietly to each other. The first candle said, sadly, “I am wealth. Everyone in the world wants me to stay with him or her. I also

helped them as much as I could. I wanted the people to be rich. But somebody said I am an evil spirit. So I am not useful for them.” Suddenly the wind blew and the light turned off. The second candle said, forlorn-ly, “I am love. Everyone has forgotten me now, but they will know my value when I am lost. However, even though I made a good relationship between them, now they have forgotten me. I am useless now.” The light turned off. The third candle said, “I am peace. I can make the world peaceful and help people to live together with love. However, now I am abandoned by humans and they make war.” The light turned off.

The people walked into the room again. They saw the lights were off and started to cry. Their happiness was waning rapidly and they were very sad because they didn’t know how to light the three candles again. There was no lighter there.

Luckily, a small child found a little candle in the corner of the room, with a small flame.The child took it and the little candle spoke, saying “Don’t worry. I can share my light to these three candles, because I am HOPE. Oh my dear child, keep your hope alive and do it with your strongest effort. Then you will get everything that you want in the world.”

Credit to Mg Sai Translated by Moe Nyan

Growing up in this day and ageWe work hard day and night

We started learning since we were young Sometimes we feel troubled but sometimes

reading is funThere is so much writing and drawing

Sometimes we love it but sometimes it is boringFor every child, it is essentialTo realize their full potential

And teachers always do their bestTo stimulate their interest

When years of school days end at lastWith all examinations passed

With our mind coming to reminisce“We will miss our school days”

And as the final day arrivesWe realize these were the best

days of our lives.

By Mi Chan Lawi

scHool dAys

With ebullience,Creative ideas,And unlimited thoughtThese hands of ours could Change the world. Peace lives in our heartsTo crack down the hatredThese hands of ours couldBe a peaceful dove. With sympathetic handsTo balance the worldWe all can console Those who fall in woe………… With wise handsTo guide the world By lighting the way for children Away from the darkness To beauty and brightness Our youthful hearts Encompassed byLove, sympathy, and courageTo save the world.

Youth

By: Si thu Aung

16

By: Khun Like Yu

By: Wa Wa and Gay Nay Dee

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wide HorizoNs food recipes Wide Horizons students come from many dif-ferent ethnic groups and different places. We have many different experiences to share, both inside the classroom as well as in the kitchen.

In this 2014-2015 academic year, we have many kinds of food, and we also have many different favorite foods. Furthermore, we have good food for every day, such as fish curry, chicken curry, rollers fries and egg curry. Ev-erything should include chili (unless it is in-stant fish curry) - if we didn’t have chili, some students would not survive! Furthermore, chili is good and makes our stomach hurt. What do I mean by this? I mean, those who are fat should eat chili because it can reduce your weight. ….. Ha Ha Ha. If you eat a lot of chili, you can also speak English very clearly and your pronunci-ation will be very good. Moreover, chili is the most delicious food in our school – especially sweet chili.

If you want to eat well, you can come and study at Wide Horizons school. We always wel-come you to visit us!

Now we will teach you how to cook chili powder and roselle fries.

Firstly, we pound chili with onions, garlic, to-matoes, canned fish and seasoning powder. We peel onions and garlic, we boil the tomatoes for a few minutes, open the canned fish, and then add coriander and seasoning powder. After this, we pound all the ingredients.

Next, we collect the ingredients for roselle fries, including the

following: roselle leaves, pork, chili, bamboo shoots, salt, sweet power, sugar, fish paste, oil, onions, masala and coriander. Firstly, (1) clean all the ingredients, (2) boil the roselle leaves for a few minutes, (3) fry pork and bamboo shoots (4) peel onions after mixing everything and cooking.

Enjoy your meal! Please feel free to send us your food recipe

suggestions for Wide Horizons students to try! Food is our passion (after education and our communities of course…hahaha)

HEALTH BENEFITS OF GREEN TEA AND CUCUMBER

There are many benefits of green tea. It helps us to protect skin from sun damage, it improves cardiovascu-lar health, weight management, and protects against gas-trointestinal cancer. If you drink two cups of green tea per day, it will help your skin to look much better than usual. Moreover, it protects against sunburn inflamma-tion and potentially longer-term mediated damage. There are many benefits of cucumbers - if you eat cucumber every day, automatically 95% of water will go into your body. Additionally, cucumber helps to moti-vate hair growth. Furthermore, it can fight cancer such as: breast cancer, ovarian cancer, uterine cancer and prostate cancer. Thus, if you mix cucumber and carrot juice, it can relieve gout and arthritis pain. Therefore, cu-cumber and tea leaves are good for your health and make your skin become beautiful and smooth.

By: Htoo Lar Paw, Ah Kin

By: Chai Lawi & Saw WahLerShee

18

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Wide Horizons School,

P.O. Box 27, Mae Sot,Tak ,63110,Thailand

Coordinator - Maung Myo Htun

Ph; 0856066973

widehorizonsmaesot@gmail.com

http://widehorizonsprogram.blogspot.

com/p/home.html

www.facebook.com/ Wide Horizons, Com-

munity Development Program

wide HorizoNs coNtAct Address

Danish, WH students’ exchange picture.....