'I always forget that I'm a woman'

MAGSAYSAY AWARDS

By DJ Yap
Philippine Daily Inquirer

On her first day at university in the late 1960s, Lahpai Seng Raw was put in the boys' dormitory by mistake because school administrators thought her native Kachin name meant she was a boy.

The only daughter in a house full of boys, Seng Raw didn't make a fuss and proceeded to drop her bags and boxes in her assigned room in the dormitory. "So all the boys left and right looked at me and told me, 'Hey, you cannot stay here,'" she said, laughing.

"And I said, 'Why not? That's my name there,'" said the woman who would later on become a leading light of Burma's civil society and a recipient of the 2013 Ramon Magsaysay Award.

Eventually, administrators at Rangoon University resolved the mix-up and placed the psychology major in the girls' dormitory.

The incident illustrates how Seng Raw, a widowed mother of one, has never considered her gender to be an impediment to her endeavors, especially in spurring development in the marginalized borderlands of her country, which is still reeling from decades of military dictatorship.

"I always forget that I'm a woman, anyway," Seng Raw, 63, said in an interview with the Inquirer ahead of the presentation ceremony tomorrow of the Ramon Magsaysay Awards, one of Asia's highest honors and sometimes described as its version of the Nobel Prize.

http://www.information.myanmaronlinecentre.com/i-always-forget-that-im-a-woman/