2015 Ramon Magsaysay Awards: Myanmar film star helps bury the dead

MANILA, Philippines - As a hugely popular, award-winning actor in Myanmar, Kyaw Thu used to find glory in fame. With over 200 films under his belt, everything just seemed perfect. It was not until he came upon the story of a woman left to die alone in the hospital that he discovered his greater purpose.

“The doctor warned the patient’s family that she was close to death. After that they disappeared. A few days later, she passed away – so this dead body had no owner,” Kyaw Thu recalled in an interview with CNN in 2013.

He later discovered that the woman’s family could not afford a funeral service, not exactly an uncommon scenario in early 2000.

With the heartbreaking story, Kyaw Thu founded the Free Funeral Services Society (FFSS) in Yangon in 2001 to help those who cannot afford proper burial for their dead.

This type of public service is both essential and unique in a predominantly Buddhist society, where proper funerary rights are important but often beyond reach because of high costs, lack of welfare assistance from the state and taboos surrounding the handling of the dead.

Starting with just a single hearse, the FFSS has grown to become not only a provider of free funeral services but also of a range of other social services.

Its free funeral services cover everything from caskets, a fleet of hearses, mortuary facilities, burial and cremation and funeral coordinators.

To date, the FFSS has undertaken over 150,000 free funeral services.

It operates almost entirely through private donations and hundreds of volunteers.

A few years after it was established, the FFSS evolved into a service caring not just for the dead, but also for the living.

It opened a charity clinic manned by 50 volunteer doctors and a full staff.

With five ambulances and a 24-hour medical emergency response service, it offers services from maternal and dental care to blood transfusions and eye surgeries.

It has provided health care to over 143,000 patients since it opened in 2007.

An FFSS school, meanwhile, offers free vocational training courses, classes for children, review classes for academic qualification examinations and a library.

The FFSS also mobilizes and provides humanitarian assistance to refugees and victims of war and natural disasters. The society’s services are available to all those in need, regardless of ethnicity and religion.

Leading by example

Kyaw Thu not only uses his personal funds and popularity in generating donations and support from all sectors. He does even more.

In a country where people handling the dead, like coffin makers and gravediggers, are viewed as lowly social outcasts, Kyaw Thu, a scion of a wealthy family, himself carries coffins and drives the funeral hearse.

For his generosity in addressing the needs of both the living and the dead in Myanmar and for channeling his personal fame and privilege to mobilize others toward serving the greater social good, Kyaw Thu, 55, has been chosen as one of five recipients of this year’s Ramon Magsaysay Awards, Asia’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

“Every day, the stories of these people we help really touch my heart,” Kyaw Thu told Myanmar Times.

He said there are times that the number of funerals reaches 80 per day.

Kyaw Thu said his humanitarian work has taught him to understand more about the value of life. “Rich or poor, famous or infamous, you will have to walk this way without your attachments, only good merits,” he said.