Support Teacher Trainings in rural Myanmar

Dear Friends and Family,

It has been a long rainy season here in Myanmar and we have taken a short break from our trainings to plan for the upcoming year. Our programs will begin again starting once the rains have completed around October-November.

We are taking this time to plan a variety of trainings and also materials to better assist our partners and participants of our trainings during the upcoming year.

We thank you greatly for all of your support and look forward to sharing our programs and more images with you from the trainings once the weather clears. We are always grateful for your support and look forward to sharing further news from our fall activities!

Warmly,

Jim Connor

Dear Friends and Family

We are very excited to share a little about the work we have been involved in during the last few months for the Teacher Training projects. 

International Democratic Education Conference (IDEC) Israel

At the end of March I had the pleasure of accompanying five teacher, principles and educators from Kachin State to the 24th annual IDEC in Israel. We were very excited about the opportunity to bring these teachers to the conference in Israel. 

Our friends from Israel are work in extremely innovative programs linking democratic schools, public schools and the Ministry of Education. It is exciting work and an extremely unique opportunity to visit the schools and meet with people first hand. 

We were able to meet with participants at the conference from over 40 different countries, all running democratic schools. Within Israel, we were able to take trips around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and other cities to see some of the innovative schools in action, where we were able to meet with students, teachers and parents. 

We also had the rare opportunity to visit Palestine and meet with a Palestinian Peace Group. They took us to see some of their work in Bethlehem and also in Hebron. It was a unique experience for the Kachin delegation to see and experience and discuss with Palestinians with the challenges they face. 

During the conference, the venue for next year IDEC 2018 was chosen to be held in India. We have agreed to help suppor the conference in India and will be traveling for planning meetings in July this year and will be working to support networking for holistic education in South and Southeast Asia. 

The conference in Israel was a wonderful learning experience for all of us!

Kachin Church-based Community Schools

As you may remember we have been working with several community schools in Kachin State, supporting them with Holistic Education Teacher Training Projects and also with natural building projects through Whispering Earth, to support the skills development for them to build their own schools. 

We made another trip up to Myitkyina, Kachin State to work on planning for the next phase of building the community school at Nawng Nang. Preparations were made and due to early rains this year, we have decided to postpone the building of 2 more classrooms until the end of the rains in October. 

We are excited to keep you posted on further developments with the Kachin schools and also with the other trainings we are involved in. 

Thank you so much for all of your kind support and we are happy to share this report with you.