A short history of Westgate Refugee Support.

A group of members and friends of the Westgate Baptist Community in Yarraville, Victoria formed Westgate Refugee Support group in 2014. The group’s vision was to use the skills of our members and resources to help refugee children achieve their potential. This has included providing refugee students in Kuala Lumpur with a range of educational opportunities, enhanced health and safety information and a framework of child protection guidelines. Members are involved for a variety of reasons, but all share a compassionate and committed intention to do what we can to contribute to the education of Burmese refugee children in KL.

This work began around 1994, when Westgate Baptist Church members (WBC) first started visiting the Karen refugee camps on the Thai/Burma border to set up a school and an IT facility. Those visits with various groups continued for many years with more schools being set up. In 1998 members of the WBC became active in resettling Burmese refugees in the inner western suburbs. The WBC community assisted them with accommodation and various other practical needs, as well as personal and spiritual support.

In 2013, two WBC members, Kaye and Laurie, spent their school holidays teaching in several of the KL refugee learning centres. This led to the development of relationships with the KL schools and a group of 12 WBC members visited KL in July of 2014 for the first group tour. After this tour, WRS was established as a mission group of WBC.

Since then, WRS has made numerous tours to KL providing precious educational materials to the children, paying for basic utilities, school lunches, teachers’ salaries, teaching at all the schools or learning centres and presenting teacher training programs for the older students so that they may be equipped to teach at their own schools.

We have also provided scholarships to allow young members of the WBC community to be part of the visiting tour groups. Many of them were refugees themselves but have now set roots in Victoria. Both the students in KL and those visiting from Victoria forged beautiful bonds with each other.

Between tours, very small groups of 2 or 3 have continued to visit for policy developments and relationship building as well as teaching at some of the schools. At present the teacher training program continues to be delivered via online portals.

With the growing COVID-19 cases all over the world and the critical and rising numbers of infections and deaths in KL as well as our restricted travel plans, we will continue to support these learning centres the best we can, but the situation for the refugees is dire! Families have lost their low-income jobs, people are starving, schools are closed, and life is so hard for so many.

With your continued financial help and our contact with the schools and their administrations, we are committed to providing help to keep these Learning Centres open and functioning and support for some of the families.