The Boy from Myanmar(Moira Howee) The Boy from Myanmar
In Northeast Philadelphia, a school looks like a castle from a fairy tale where children from different nationalities and ethnicities go. The school’s beauty hides the ugliest that goes inside of these walls. These students were rarely peaceful or calm.
Five years ago, I was an ESOL/English teacher at this high school in Northeast Philadelphia. I taught a Linguistic Development class. The purpose of this class was to help beginning English Language Learner students improve their reading, writing, and speaking skills. Most of my students were Hispanic. I had one student Zara from Myanmar, which used to be Burma.
There was a civil war in Myanmar. Christian soldiers were killing Muslims and destroying their villages. This student’s mother told him to leave Myanmar with his younger sister and go to Indonesia for their safety. He and his sister almost died on the trip to Indonesia. The boat capsized, and he and his sister almost drowned. In Indonesia, he lived in a refugee camp on the beach. With day, someone from the United Nations recommended that he and his sister go to the United States. For him, this was a great opportunity. He was delighted to go to the United States.
In the United States, he lived with a Hispanic family. His foster mother only spoke Spanish, so he learned Spanish while living with her. The agency placed his sister with another family, but he saw her daily.
He was very enthusiastic and a diligent student in a class where few students wanted to learn English. When he answered questions, the other students made fun of him. When he responded to questions, students would throw paper balls at him. They would snicker when a ball hit him. The problem was that the other students were not interested in learning English. They spent most of the time speaking Spanish. It seemed that they did not want him to learn English either and were jealous of the amount of attention that I gave him.
One day, after the students had completed the warm-up, he looked down and noticed that his bookbag was gone. He looked like he had witnessed something horrible.
“Where is my bookbag?” he said with a worried look.
Upon hearing this, the other students looked at each and smiled. When they did this, I knew that one of them had taken it. “Where is his bookbag?” I asked them. Most of them responded that they did not know or did not understand my question. He ran around the classroom, looking under desks and closets while the other students were smiling and laughing at him. I felt his pain. When you lose everything, you value what people give to you. For him, the backpack symbolized his future and happiness. Also, he would be ashamed to tell his social worker that he had lost his book bag. How dare they ruin his opportunity to be happy and prosperous.
“Where is his bookbag,” I shouted.
“No sé.”
“No entiendo lo que has dicho.”
Then one student said, “Is this his bookbag. I found it in the closet.”
He was lying because nobody used that closet. After I gave him his book bag, he thanked me and returned to doing his work. The other students looked at each other and continued talking in Spanish.
I did not realize that something worse would happen to him in the following weeks.
Although I reprimanded the students, reported them to the administration, and called their parents, they continued to bully him. One day, while he was walking home, students assaulted him. I felt so sorry for him.
The next day, he came to school. He sat down, participated, and did his work. I noticed that the other students were looking at him and whispering. I wondered what they were whispering about. A day later, the vice principal informed me that students in my class had assaulted him. Zara did not report it to the school. The police informed the school of the assault. After class, I spoke to him about the event. I asked, “Why did you not tell someone?”
“It wasn’t a big deal,” he responded with a shrug of his shoulders.
Despite this bullying, he persevered and learned English. At the end of the year, I was transferred to another school. Two years after I left this school, I learned that he had transferred to a better high school where he could learn peace and safety.

M. Howee

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