Ma Lynn Pwint Naddy, 11, likes to think of herself as Burmese, not American. She speaks Burmese with her parents, she explains Burmese history and culture with her classmates, and she is learning the traditional dances of her native Yangon.
But Ma Lynn Pwint Naddy has not been to Burma (as her family chooses to call it) since she was a baby. For the last four years she has attended the Thabyay Nyo Burmese school, where her distant language and culture has been restored to her one Saturday at a time.
Thabyay Nyo, which is Myanmar for “Image of Burmese History”, holds weekly classes in a rented elementary school at Rockville, a small town just north of Washington DC. The school teaches Burmese language, history and culture for free to children from the 40 or so migrant families in the area. It was founded by Daw May Nyein, an activist and former literary criticism professor at Yangon University who went to the US in 2009 and began tutoring the children of political exiles from Myanmar. Thabyay Nyo launched in 2010 when Daw May Nyein and the other parents decided to make their sessions official. (Courtesy of Frontier Myanmar)
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