Jessica Hallam introduces 5 new faces in Ottawa, starting with a man who fled his home, but can’t escape tortured memories

Every time Kyaw Moe gets his hair cut, he warns the stylist about the scar on his head. It’s a little bit above his left ear, about the size of a loonie, where no hair grows.

It’s just one of the many marks the 33-year-old Ottawa resident is left with from the torture he endured while incarcerated in his homeland of Burma, now Myanmar.

“More than 14 years after, whenever I talk about the feeling of prison, I still get chills and nervous,” says Moe. “They used electric shock, they beat me with a bayonet … it causes swelling and infections. You live with the scars your whole life.”

Of the 18 years Moe lived in Burma, he spent two terms in prison — a total of nine months — for distributing newsletters as part of a student movement in the late 1980s.

“We students only knew a little bit about democracy — we were living in an isolated country,” says Moe. “We demanded the military government change to a multi-party system.”

FORMED UNION

Moe and other students from his college formed a union, which was illegal, and started holding demonstrations while secretly publishing and distributing the newsletters.

His activism led him to work on the campaign for the National League of Democracy, an opposition party recognized as a competitor in the national election of 1990.

When the party won, instead of rising to power, many of its members were arrested, or fled the country. Moe escaped to India, with 14 others.

There, he studied mass media, and found a job at a radio station in Norway. After four years, he came to Canada as a refugee and later graduated from the media and communications program at Algonquin College. He now works as a counsellor at the Catholic Immigration Centre.

“We provide help to make it easier for them to get jobs, integrate into Canadian society,” says Moe.

He doesn’t think that’s enough.

“Because (the Burmese population) is small and new, we don’t have any social organizations,” he says. “Me and my colleagues set up the Burmese Community Service of Ottawa, an organization (that provides) supplemental services.”

Since 2004, he’s taught Burmese language classes on the weekends.

Even though he now resides in a much safer country, Moe’s activism has not ceased.

FAMILY TIES DESTROYED

He works with other lobbyists to pressure the Canadian government to increase humanitarian aid to Myanmar.

Unfortunately for Moe, this active, political drive has destroyed many ties with his family. Making contact with anyone in his hometown is dangerous, he says.

“Whenever I do political activity, they put pressure on my family,” he says. “That’s why I can’t openly communicate with them.”