TAUNGGYI, Myanmar – Thae Thae Su Aung, 14, knows what she wants for her future. “I want to go to school, study hard and become a doctor my family can depend on,” she says. “My sister and mother are frail and have chronic illnesses, so I want to help them.”
Yet, like many adolescents in Myanmar, Thae Thae Su Aung had to stop her learning first due to the COVID-19 pandemic and then due to armed conflict. As a result, she was out of formal education for two years and now lives in a camp for displaced people in Shan State, in the north of the country.
Before the security situation deteriorated, Thae Thae Su Aung lived with her family in Demoso Town in the eastern state of Kayah, where she finished 6th Grade. However, Thae Thae Su Aung explains that after the armed conflict intensified in July 2021, a friend of her mother’s, already living in the camp, suggested they would be safer there than in Demoso Town.