Editor’s Note: ‘wOw Friend’ Adelle Lutz, an artist and Burma activist, is reporting from Bangkok, Thailand, on the post-cyclone situation in Burma.

Continually alarming though the news is coming out of Burma, all is not hopeless. Each day as I travel through the neighboring Thailand, I am knocked sideways by how many are working – all ages and nationalities and at all hours – to create an engaged and free Burma. Much of it is very quietly done over here for safety’s sake.

The School for Shan State Nationalities Youth (SSSNY) voted on whether or not I should be permitted to enter their compound as I represented a possible security breach. (This was true with most organizations I visited. Because Thailand is the largest economic supporter of the military dictatorship in Burma, most advocacy groups are never openly acknowledged by the Thai government. A hide-in-plain-sight scenario). Hurrah. They voted me in. The 43 students (ages 16 to 30) have worked hard to get here. Some traveled for days to take the entrance exam — seriously, one walked more than 20 days. Another young man only got in on his fourth try. Their American teacher told of one student who crossed the border and waited a month to take the five-and-one-half-hour entrance examination. She did not make the cut. They take education very seriously.

These young men and women study gender equality, democracy, human rights, English and computer skills to give but a partial list. The teacher asked what they had planned after the nine months of classes finished. "Will you go to Singapore and get a job working with computers?" They laughed and whooped. When this crew graduates, they will join former students out in the field sharing their skills along the border and inside Burma.

Later that night, I rode out to a "camp" for migrant Burmese laborers. After a breezy 40-minute truck ride (bumping comfortably along on a bench in the back), we passed a guard post, drove off the paved streets, then along rutted muddy roads and finally parked in a soupy field. The workers’ hovels were made of corrugated metal tacked onto poles with woven or slatted floors. Here in the moonlit field another school was in session — night school for children ages five to15. Surrounded by all manner of bugs both swarming and crawling, by the light of two flickering fluorescents, the workers’ children have classes each weeknight until nine o’clock at night. They sit on the wobbly raised floor of a thatch-covered platform.  "Apple, house, fish, bird." They spelled and pronounced loudly and were completely understandable in English. The teachers are volunteers. A refugee youth group, Shan Youth Power, runs ten such camp schools.

As the education budget in Burma is less than 40 cents per child per year, you can bet your army boots that graduates will be functionally illiterate by the time education ends at seventh grade — and that is if the student is a boy. Sorry, village girls — you deserve even less. Before the junta seized power, Burma had one of the highest literacy rates in the world — in the 90-plus percentile. The regime reasons that if the people are kept functionally illiterate, they will never have the tools to connect or engage with the world and certainly not govern themselves.