Interviews with Cynthia Maung

Inside Burma the back pack health worker team, we [are] now specifically documenting on the rape cases. But the back pack health worker team and the woman’s organization together, we have regular information sharing. So the documentation is mostly done by the woman’s group. But the back pack health worker team, the documentation we do is more on the impact of human rights violation like forced labor, forced relocation, food destruction, and some military, like, threats and torture. So the impact of human rights violation on health. So we work together on that as an advocacy for human rights violation inside Burma.

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.