Stories of Friendship for Peace and Tolerance in Myanmar

Years of government propaganda has created great confusion and misunderstanding between communities in Myanmar. The Burmese majority thinks that federalism means separation and peace is a minority issue. Ethnic minorities feel maligned in all spheres, such as governance, economics and education. It is not easy to make all people understand and increase their participation in a short time. The lack of trust and understanding in Myanmar leaves communities to further divide and isolate themselves, instead of working together for a more unified country. Instead of reacting to crises after the fact, Swe Tha Har and Third Story Project are trying to build the trust between communities by sharing and communicating in creative ways and building their own bridges to prevent future communal conflict.

By integrating ideas of peace and tolerance into all communities, the dream of building peace in communities and being involved in local development will come true.

Swe Tha Har has implemented peace building awareness and related life skills training in ethnically diverse areas and Burmese majority areas as well. Adapting to local culture and experience, a peace and development curriculum was developed through weekly trainings/meetings with young people from our previous program (PBCT-Peace Building and Conflict Transformation program) in predominantly Burmese Magway Division and in conflict sensitive Rakhine State. In all education sectors, be it formal or non-formal, the peace and diversity awareness to young people and key actors had a tremendous impact. Therefore, we plan to move forward by integrating more tools like storytelling to bring communities closer to mutual understanding.

Since mid-2014, the Third Story Project has been using storytelling methods to provide a safe space for discussions on peace and tolerance. In addition to creating 22 books that address topics of diversity, environment and gender, they have developed a teacher training guide that teachers can use to create an interactive classroom and share ideas of tolerance with a young audience. Over the past year, the Third Story Project has collaborated with the Myanmar Storytellers who lead storyteller training for educators and volunteers in diverse communities around Myanmar. The training have been very popular with participants who go on to use the tools in their schools and communities.