MYANMAR: Inside a bunker in Myanmar, 18-year-old Ma Phyo Phyo clips her hands together, murmuring appeals addressed to the divine—not for high scores or university admission, but for endurance and survival. It’s early morning, and like many other students in her resistance-held village, she prepares to descend into her school, which now lies buried beneath the earth.
Above ground, the threat is constant. Fighter jets slice through the sky without warning. Bombs fall indiscriminately. The simple act of going to school has become an act of rebellion.
A classroom beneath the earth
Phyo Phyo’s school isn’t like the ones she remembers before the 2021 military coup. There are no outdoor play areas, no huge blackboards, and no windows to usher in sunbeams. Instead, she and her classmates sit near each other in a covert dugout, the air thick and still, the walls a hushed reminder of the world crumbling above them.
“It’s dark and cramped,” she says softly. “But we feel safer here. We don’t have any other choice.”
The choice to build the school underground came after tragedy struck nearby. An airstrike had obliterated a school in a neighbouring village, killing at least 20 children and two teachers. Since then, many in the region have abandoned conventional structures altogether. Schools, homes, even clinics are now hidden beneath the soil.
Airstrikes from the sky, strength from within
The régime’s crusade of terror has strengthened. Between May and September of 2025 alone, over 1,000 airstrikes and drone assaults have been launched, killing more than 800 private citizens, according to Armed Conflict Location & Event Data. The employment of air power has become its most overwhelming armament—intended to inculcate distress, quell resistance and struggle, and obliterate any hints of normal existence.
But for learners like Phyo Phyo, studying and educating themselves in the midst of terror and hardships has become a noiseless form of dissent. Her favourite subject is Burmese literature. Each line of poetry, each story from a freer time, offers her a connection to a Myanmar she hopes will return.
“We’ve lost our happiness,” she admits. But they haven’t lost their hope.
Inside their underground classroom, a faded portrait of Aung San Suu Kyi hangs on the wall, a symbol of the democracy that was violently stolen. Phyo Phyo doesn’t speak of politics—she speaks of poems, of teachers, of dreams that feel distant but not impossible.
A generation growing up in fear
Across Myanmar’s conflict zones, survival has become a daily calculation. Farmers now work by moonlight, afraid that daylight will bring airstrikes. Children grow up learning not only math and language, but also how to read the skies, how to listen for drones, and how to run.
In rural Sagaing, a once-quiet farming region turned resistance stronghold, villagers use makeshift early warning systems: sirens, phone trees, and even coded announcements over cheap pink-and-gold microphones. They offer seconds of warning—just enough time to duck into bunkers, to pull loved ones close.
But no alarm can silence the fear.
Resistance written in chalk
Despite everything, the resistance continues—not just in battlefields, but in classrooms, in the voices of teachers who risk their lives to show up, the books passed from one hand to another, in the eyes of students like Phyo Phyo, who opts to learn even as bombs drop one after the other.
As the armed forces prepare for fake elections and continue their ruthless drive to regain territory, people in the resistance movement continue to stay defiant. They have no air defences, but they have a will that refuses to break.
“We study because we believe there will be a future,” Phyo Phyo says. “If we give up now, we lose everything.”
A future buried, but not gone
The war in Myanmar shows no signs of ending. Civilians remain caught between the sky and the soil, between dictatorship and freedom. But amidst the rubble, the lifeforce of a generation refuses to be quenched.
Underground, in the dimly lit makeshift schoolroom, Phyo Phyo sharpens her pencil. Above her, the sound of planes thundered. She pauses. Waits. Breathes.
Then, slowly, she begins to write.
