Daw Nyein Tha – or ‘Ma Mi’ as her family and friends called her – became the youngest headmistress in Myanmar in 1921, aged 21. Her style was authoritarian. After 10 years, her staff and pupils finally rebelled when, as the Christian head of a Christian school, she refused to allow the Buddhist girls to observe a religious fast day. The incident caused a national furore.
The issue was finally resolved when she accepted that she disliked the girls and that her pride and conceit made it hard for the teachers to work with her. She apologized publicly. ‘Now I knew why Christ had put me in the school – not just to be headmistress but to learn to love people,’ she said later. This lesson stayed with her throughout her life, as she moved away from teaching and into work for reconciliation and justice both at home and around the world. She first encountered Moral Re-Armament (now Initiatives of Change) on a visit to Britain in 1932 and embraced its message of inner listening and starting with yourself.
Wherever she was, Daw Nyein Tha remained a teacher – often using her hands to convey her truth. She liked to demonstrate a Burmese proverb: ‘When I point my finger at my neighbour, there are three more pointing back at me.’ The phrase became one of MRA’s best known songs, written by Cecil Broadhurst for the musical Jotham Valley and made famous by the Colwell Brothers.
When she visited Mahatma Gandhi in his ashram in 1941, she used a handkerchief pulled taut between two hands to show the tension between two people who each insist on having their way. When one hand stops pulling, the other also has to yield and they can work together. ‘Yes,’ responded Gandhi mischievously. ‘It works very well with a handkerchief, but does it work with people?’
In Thailand in the early 1950s, she used a hollowed-out seed containing three tiny ivory elephants to make her point. Thailand and Burma had nursed a smouldering enmity ever since the Burmese destroyed Thailand’s ancient capital and stole its prized white elephants 200 years earlier. These memories rankled in Thailand, but had been largely forgotten in Burma. Now the Burmese air force, chasing Burmese rebels, had bombed Thai border villages and feelings ran high.
At a meeting with the Thai prime minister, Daw Nyein Tha emptied the three ivory elephants into his palm. ‘These little elephants have been away from Thailand for such a long time,’ she said. ‘They were so homesick, they have got very thin.’ The Prime Minister laughed, and the story went out on the radio. Later the Burmese Prime Minister apologized to the people of Thailand on Burma’s behalf and backed this up with financial compensation.
Daw Nyein Tha spent most of the last years of her life in Britain and Switzerland, unable to return to Myanmar, then under military dictatorship. She taught those who worked with her in the Asian kitchen at Caux some simple principles, as Marjory Procter writes in her biography The World My Country: ‘It was the people for whom you cooked that mattered…. Why you were cooking was more important than what you were cooking.’ Asked by an Italian journalist what someone like her was doing cooking, Daw Nyein Tha replied, ‘I am not cooking. I am obeying God.’
