Friday, May 21, 2010

You don't have to live like a refugee (unless of course, you are one)


My nephew Andrew Blake wrote a nice article for Artvoice about a guy from Burma who operates a laundromat on the West Side of Buffalo. His name is Zaw Win (no relation to Tom Finn). He learned to speak Eglish while reading and writing on a prison floor in Burma (the laundry owner, not my nephew):

Zaw Win, a neighborhood resident and proprietor of the newly opened West Side Value Laundromat, remembers 1991 all too well. “They put me in a prison with hard labor for four years because I was fighting for freedom and democracy,” he says.

Zaw, now 40 years old, became a political prisoner in his native Burma at age 18, while still in high school. He picked up a good chunk of his secondary education (including the English language) by reading and writing on the prison floor. Pencil and paper weren’t allowed.
So what? We did the same thing at St. Agatha's.
For the full article, please go to:
http://artvoice.com/issues/v9n20/freedom_fighters

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