A Heart for Others

ELIZABETH THANG '18, business, always knew she would use her USI education to improve the lives of the people in her homeland— especially children and young adults. "I knew Myanmar needed me more than me staying in the United States after graduation, having a job and just living for myself," she says.

Elizabeth comes from a family tradition of caring for those who have no one else. Her maternal grandfather took in orphaned children, raising them alongside his own, and Elizabeth's mother grew up with a "heart for orphans." After her parents married, they opened an orphanage in 1995, taking care of 15 children in a bamboo hut. "Myanmar is one of the poorest countries in the world, there are so many kids on the streets and kids that are left by their parents," Elizabeth says.

Over the years, her parents' original orphanage, Love Children's Home (LCH), expanded to a main campus housing 100 orphans to include a network of 12 additional satellite shelters where another 400 children live. While Elizabeth and her sister grew up alongside the orphaned children, she did not expect to one day lead the LCH operation. However, when her father died of COVID in 2021, as the eldest daughter, Elizabeth stepped into his role as president. "Taking care of [all the] orphans is a full-time commitment. It feels like you work 24/7, because you live with them on the same campus," she says.

Together with her mother, sister and 10 employees, they make sure the children in the LCH network are cared for physically and mentally, as well as being educated. The latter being an additional endeavor Elizabeth undertook with her sister when they founded the Peter Thang Private High School, in memory of their father. The school is recognized by the Myanmar government's education sector and meets the educational standards necessary for students who do well on exams to apply to college. "The school holds more than 500 K-12 students," Elizabeth says. "A country like Myanmar has a really poor literacy rate and education is a must for every child to live a better life. No matter what background they have, our purpose is to provide them with better education to support their lives."

Elizabeth employs her business skills learned in USI's Romain College of Business to operate the school on a non-profit basis to enable the orphans from LCH to attend school for free, while the remaining non-orphaned students pay tuition, so quality teachers can be hired to provide quality education, she says.

To help defray the costs of LCH's operation, and to provide local Myanmar women with a livelihood, Elizabeth's parents established Love's Loom House in 2002. Today, 22 women (some of whom are widows) are employed and provided sustainable incomes through the blankets woven on 20 different looms and the hand-made items created at the Loom House. "All the profits from the blankets sales go back to support the orphanages with their daily expenses," Elizabeth says. The blankets are sold locally and online via a nonprofit in Evansville called Binding Thread.

Elizabeth's investment in Myanmar does not stop with her desire to shelter and educate orphaned children. A wife and mother of a young daughter, Elizabeth also owns and operates two cafes—Leaf Cafe and Plants, and Butiria—where she leans into the artistic skills enhanced by her USI minor in graphic design to create a "tiny, cozy location in downtown Yangon," filled with plants and flowers. The cafes employ around 16 people and sell coffee, juice, Burmese or Chinese food, plants and flowers.

Despite her extra-curricular business endeavors, Elizabeth's main mission is education. "For me, the main purpose of providing education is for children and young adults to be able to depend on themselves and seek new adventures through wisdom."