Enhancing My Skills

“I am a student at Payap University majoring in English Communication. I was born in Dawei, Myanmar. When I was 11, my family moved to one of the Karen Refugee camps. I am currently living in Chiang Mai, Thailand finishing my university studies. I begin with my childhood hobby– reading.

There were few entertaining options as the internet was not easily accessible. There was no smartphone or social media that would play a role in our daily lives. Many people passed the time by reading, and my grandmother was one of them. She read a lot and had many different books in Karen and Burmese. Whenever I visited her, I would lay my head on a pile of books that I was going to read, laying down next to her. And we would spend hours and hours reading the books together. That was when I was about 7-years-old or so. Next, I started going to the bookstore all by myself with my bicycle to search for more books to read. As a little girl, I had a hard time at the bookstore. No one would let me borrow books because I was too young to rent them. 

Reading has never satisfied me with simply knowing about something. It makes me explore more than I read. Furthermore, it is a fact that it motivates me to write down my ideas into pieces, beginning with notes, phrases, quotes, sentences, articles, etc. I have many writing pieces, such as quotes, journals, and stories.  I keep them all. I once started to write a novel in Karen, but I gave up in the middle. I have some pieces of writing that I would like to turn into books just for myself. But, again, I never finished one for so many reasons. However, I indeed enjoyed writing. You have no idea how satisfying it is to reread what you used to write by hand or from your thoughts and ideas. You feel proud of yourself, even though it is just a little piece.

It’s the best source to evaluate yourself. It’s also an access point for you to go back in time and see your version of yourself that you once were. In addition, it’s one of the best inspirations to become a better version of yourself.

I want to admit that my hobby has waned as my daily life is influenced by spending time on internet-platform options to entertain myself. Accordingly, my enjoyment of writing has gradually vanished. But now, as an intern for EMA (Communication Department), I am back on the path of my favorite hobby.  As an intern in the Communication Department, it has helped me practice communicating by writing stories from the source of people’s real lives. There are some steps to writing people’s stories to use as a resource to share. They are interviewing people to get sources, translating into English, and creating them into stories to be enjoyable to read (but never leaving out facts from the source), editing them over and over again to make them stick in the readers’ minds.  

Writing stories is one way to communicate with anyone who reads, whenever and wherever they are. That is where change starts!!! The change leads to better societies, communities, and so on because some people read the stories and want to bring something to change their community into a better one. 

I loved my moments at EMA, mainly when I wrote stories about people. I learned so much from different stories, and it is beautiful to know that the stories will reach more people so that they can also learn from them and make some changes we never knew. Again, it’s delightful that I’m a part of the stories that happen. Above all, whenever I write, it makes me feel like this is my thing, and I belong to it. Again, when I think it is one of my favorite things that I once enjoyed doing, I want to engage, explore, and learn more and more about it. 

This article is not about how I want to become an author. I need experience and skills to become an author. Writing is one way of communication, whereas I am an intern practicing it in the workplace. But I’m glad my internship experience has reinforced my commitment to it.  With the skills I learned and gained from my internship, I hope and believe I can reach more people to communicate with each other in the future, mainly from my Karen people to different groups of people. It is necessary for Karen communities because very few Karen people write to communicate. ” – Bway, EMA Intern