Twenty years ago, every day I did "textbook production in two days" at a Karen refugee camp!

In September 2001, I was asked to cooperate with a Japanese NGO's library activities at the Mekongka refugee camp in Burma, where the Karen people live in Thailand. For many years, I have been conducting literacy education, creation, library activities, etc. in Asian countries through UNESCO, etc., so I immediately agreed, "Of course, I am happy to cooperate with you at any time." We headed to the Mekongka refugee camp in the Thai border area.

At that time, the Karen people were in a fierce conflict with the Myanmar military government, and there were constant military conflicts around the border. At that time, more than 100,000 refugees were evacuated to the Thai side from the country and lived in this refugee camp. The purpose of the request was to train the staff of the library established by the refugees with the cooperation of a Japanese NGO, to revise textbooks, to create picture-story shows, and to create picture books. It was also to practice the know-how of papermaking technology for refugee young people, including vocational training.

On the first day, we talked to Karen women who run a beautifully made bamboo library. At that time, all the books in the library were written in Karen. At that time, I was an advisor for basic education in Myanmar, so I immediately asked the person in charge. "The language of the book is all Karen, which is a native language of the Karen people. I understand the desire to publish in Karen, but if everyone wants to return to Myanmar and live in Myanmar in the future, Burmese If you don't understand, you won't be able to communicate in words at all. This will be very difficult. Please publish a picture book in two languages, Burmese and Karen. " Since then, picture books and picture-story shows have been produced in two languages ​​in refugee camps.

Not only is the entrance to the library the same for both adults and children, but adults have to go through the children's room to enter the adults' room, so be completely concerned about the eyes of the children. We devised another entrance for adults so that anyone could easily enter the library so that adults could reach the room without having to. Adults who cannot read and write letters always feel embarrassed about literacy (unliteracy), so it is quite difficult to promote literacy education without understanding this. We also received a request from Karen's women's group to make major revisions to textbooks for young people, women and men. The time is only two days. "Yes, that's okay. Let's make the textbook you need in two days. To do that, first gather 10 women who are thinking about what kind of message they want to convey to young people. Please. " It all started by asking the gathered women in detail why they wanted to revise their existing textbooks.

Then, the leader of Karen's women's group said, "Since most of the textbooks now contain knowledge and skills related to combat, I would like to teach practical knowledge and skills on how to live in refugee camps." It is. So I told 10 women, "Please itemize all the problems that everyone is facing in this camp." Immediately after that, many problems emerged, such as "hygiene such as toilets, nutrition of children, health such as malaria and dengue fever, phytotoxicity such as marijuana that is eating young people, human relations, worries about family structure, agricultural production, etc." I've been doing it.

So I wrote it all down and used the NP method (predecessor of pictorial map analysis) to classify the most important tasks into 10 areas, and assigned all the tasks to 10 staff members according to their interests and interests. Under each theme, I decided to ask the staff to write down what kind of practical knowledge, wisdom, and skills they would like to convey to young people. The authors started their work immediately, meeting people who knew more specialized things and elders on each theme, and by the next morning, the prototype of the textbook that everyone was looking for was almost completed. And with illustrations, it seems that it was very confident that the women created textbooks and picture-story shows by themselves. Banzai!

Yuriko Watanabe, who was working as a staff member at this library at that time, wrote in detail in her "Road to the Library".
"I'm not the only one who left an unforgettable impression on them at this workshop. It was the first day of the workshop, when Mr. Tajima introduced himself, the Japanese army was once in Burma, or Karen. I started by deeply apologizing for the mistakes I made to people in the past. Mr. Tajima is really pleased that we can now hold a workshop together despite this past. I said with tears. Karen's women who participated were also weeping at that attitude. In Asia, there are still deep scars left by the Japanese army here and there. Even our generation, who are unaware of the war, knew the scars and pains of their hearts and felt that treating them with a sincere atonement would be a prerequisite for living together in a new future. "

I was keenly aware that this is an important point of view that Japan, which has a serious past, must be most careful when conducting joint ventures with Asian countries for the future.