Interviews with Cynthia Maung

So I’m Dr. Cynthia Maung. I was born in Burma and I finished my study [of] medicine in Burma. And I came out from Burma during 1988 uprising, because during that period, I was working in one of the Karen village. So this [was] not far from the border. And so that time, I had been realizing that the healthcare services and education in the village or in the area where I worked is very poor. So during our studying I had been realizing that many people in Burma have very little access to healthcare service. And especially when I was working in the rural village that’s not far from the border area. So access to healthcare services and education is very limited, and people are always under oppression by the military: pay high tax and have to work as the porter or forced labor.

So it is a lot of pressure for the welfare to take care of their own family and their community. So I’m not really enjoying working as medical doctor because the medical work has become like a business, because people believe that if you have this much money you can go to the hospital or you can get service from the city. Or also the health profession itself has ruled that, oh, we have to earn that much money; if not, we cannot survive or we cannot provide enough support for our family. So I’m not really happy in this situation. And when 1988 uprising [occurred], I joined. And then when the military cracked down [on] the pro-democracy movement, I decided to come to the border. So during 1988 uprising, I joined democracy movement.

And also I feel that, when the military seize the power, I should come out from Burma because I feel that there are many pro-democracy movement, and the networking with the ethnic groups has been organizing on the border. So we feel that, on the border, there has been opportunity for the people inside Burma and the people in the ethnic area can have workplace and then have to build the network of advocacy and the political movement, as well as to build the country to be the peaceful and democratic society.

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.