Social Work and Politics
Kyaw Thu has used his prominence to help the country's poor. He is founder and vice president (now President) of the Free Funeral Service Society (FFSS), which provides free funeral services to the poor. As of June 2008, the society had paid for over 50,000 funerals. Since 2003, his society has also helped pay medical costs in poor neighborhoods of Yangon, and since 2007, started a free clinic for the poor. Through his funeral services society, Kyaw Thu was active in rescue and support efforts in the aftermath of May 2008 Cyclone Nargis which completely devastated Burma's Irrawaddy delta and cost over 130,000 lives. As of June 2008, the society had helped to raise K500 million (~US$400,000) for the victims of the disaster.
Kyaw Thu and his wife were arrested for publicly supporting the protesting monks in September 2007. He was awarded by the Myanmar community in London with the prize of "the artist who stands for the fellow people" for the year 2009.
Read more about this topic: Kyaw Thu
Famous quotes containing the words social, work and/or politics:
“American feminists have generally stressed the ways in which men and women should be equal and have therefore tried to put aside differences.... Social feminists [in Europe] ... believe that men and society at large should provide systematic support to women in recognition of their dual role as mothers and workers.”
—Sylvia Ann Hewitt (20th century)
“You haf slafed your life away in de bosses’ mills and your fadhers before you and your kids after you yet. Vat is a man to do with seventeen-fifty a week? His wife must work nights to make another ten, must vork nights and cook and wash in day an’ vatfor? So that the bosses can get rich an’ the stockholders and bondholders. It is too much... ve stood it before because ve vere not organized. Now we have union... We must all stand together for union.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“One might imagine that a movement which is so preoccupied with the fulfillment of human potential would have a measure of respect for those who nourish its source. But politics make strange bedfellows, and liberated women have elected to become part of a long tradition of hostility to mothers.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)