Interviews with Cynthia Maung

Actually, the back pack [health worker] team area, our operation area, we don’t have electricity. So recently we can set up solar power in some clinic so we can [be] able to use microscope for malaria. And some clinic, they can start using computer. So, but until now, usually in the back pack area, people are still under, like, under threats of displacement, so you can’t really have big infrastructure or technology.

So, like, water sanitation supply, we had to work like a very simple way using the bamboo. But [we are] able to conduct some obstetric emergency or vaccination program because of the solar power. So the technology we use had to be very appropriate in this environment.

Cynthia Maung is a refugee from Burma who established a world-renowned clinic near the Thai-Burma border for her fellow refugees, as well as for internally displaced persons within Burma.

Dr. Cynthia, as she is known, was born into an ethnic Karen family in Rangoon in 1959. After finishing medical school, she moved to a village in Karen State where she served as a doctor for poor people of several ethnic groups. When the military seized power in 1988 and began cracking down on pro-democracy activists, she was among thousands who fled to the jungle. Like many of the others, she eventually made it across the Thai-Burma border.

At first, Dr. Cynthia worked at a small hospital in Thailand treating those who were fleeing the fighting inside Burma. In 1989, after consulting with residents of refugee camps along the border about the medical needs of refugees and internally displaced persons , she established her clinic in a dilapidated building with bare dirt floors on the outskirts of Mae Sot. Her makeshift clinic had few supplies and almost no money, but she improvised by sterilizing her few instruments in a rice cooker and soliciting medicine and food from Catholic relief workers. Today, Dr. Cynthia’s clinic treats more than 75,000 patients each year.