Give Love February: Grace and Hope
This is the first year of De Ziremi’s Give Love February — an initiative to support children who are in need. This year, we’re donating 5% of our revenue in February to Grace Training Centre (based in our hometown, Tawau).
Know also that wisdom is like honey for you:
If you find it, there is a future hope for you,
and your hope will not be cut off.Proverbs 24:14
TL;DR: Being undocumented means being unseen by the government: no school, no employment, no protection. Grace Training Centre is a school for undocumented (sometimes called ‘stateless’) children in Sabah, Malaysia. Currently, they have over 400 students who would’ve not been able to attend a school otherwise.
It’s easy for me to take education for granted, especially as I grew up here in the UK. My father was worried that I wouldn’t be able to get schooling when we immigrated twenty years ago. He thought we’d have to pay. So, for a while, he would teach me to trace the alphabet in his spare time. Can you imagine how surprised he was when council workers turned up at our door?
Education. Free? Even for us? That’s crazy.
That was just the way he thought because, back home in Malaysia, that really was crazy.
If you didn’t have the right documents, you couldn’t study in a government school for free. In general, this meant that foreigners couldn’t get free education. If you didn’t have documents altogether, you wouldn’t even be able to fill out the first page of the application.
Last year, I had the privilege of travelling back to Malaysia with my parents. Our first stop was our hometown, Tawau. On top of visiting the endless list of friends and family, we had the chance to visit the church that my family used to attend. One of the charities that had been set up by the church was called the Grace Training Centre (in Malay, ‘Pusat Bimbingan Grace Alternatif’). It was a school for undocumented children.
I’d heard about this school from my father plenty of times before. But, a mixture of the distance and being so preoccupied with my own school exams meant that I failed to really understand the transformative work that this school does.
When I was in this shop-lots-turned-school, I found myself thinking: this is crazy. Education? Not free?
For me, free education helped me find a future. Even as I’m feeling my way in the world, at least I have a means: my ‘根本‘, my foundation. And here I am behind this screen, typing away, selling books, writing blogs, hoping others can learn in ways I couldn’t.
But for these children, simply not owning a piece of paper that says the government recognises them as existing people means that they miss out on that. What becomes of their foundation? What is their future like?
In their concrete classrooms, love and joy resonate amongst the children and the teachers. Here, there is a sense of belonging — a safe place. They learn to love each other as well as love their learning. This is Grace. And I was moved to tears by it.
So, in the first year of our Give Love Februarys, I wanted to share the amazing work that happens in Grace Training Centre and why we have chosen to support them.