Cynthia Maung was born December 6, 1959, and grew up in a woven bamboo house
on a narrow dirt lane in the outskirts of the Burmese city of
Moulmein. She was the fourth of eight children in a Karen family.
The oldest child, a boy, died from infection after a traditional
village midwife cut his umbilical cord with a bamboo sliver. Dr.
Cynthia's mother insisted on hospital deliveries for the following
four girls and three boys. Oddly, young Cynthia and her sisters
most longed for their older brother when they wanted to go to
the movies. It was not proper for girls to go to the cinema unaccompanied,
and their father, a health assistant, was often in rural villages
delivering medicine; their mother, busy with their three little
brothers.
I tried to find out whether it was the bamboo sliver or her mother
or her father's rural work or what it was that inspired young
Cynthia to be the visionary humanitarian she is today. But the
conversation would always squirm away and Dr. Cynthia would end
up laughing about Burma's lame romance movies and how, after school,
she and her sisters would fritter away time carrying water from
the deep brick well and splashing each other at the cistern and
rereading old magazines until the kerosene burned low and they
were too sleepy to study.
At the end of high school, young Cynthia took a national exam
along with tens of thousands of other students. Only 20 percent
passed. The top 500 scorers went to medical school.
"I not much study and could still get high marks," she sheepishly
explained. What were you ranked? I asked. She laughed. "Over 400,
450, something like that."
Burma began unraveling while Dr. Cynthia was in medical school.
Classes were moved away from the University of Rangoon, canceled,
moved back. On campus there were whispers about corruption and
change. A few professors urged students to examine their patients'
lives, the suffering of the people, and ask themselves, Why?
Dr. Cynthia can't quite remember those lectures. Perhaps she skipped
them. Politics was dangerous. She was more interested in gossiping
with her girlfriends under the trees and sneaking away to the
movies. "Even attend the class, did not always listen," she laughed.
"Just copy down what the teacher write. Or maybe sleepy."
After medical school, Dr. Cynthia trained at several hospitals
in and around Rangoon, including North Okkalapa General Hospital,
a peeling blue building we visited this spring. In the long wards
patients rested on flaking iron cots among the steady drip drip
of I.V. bags and that familiar hospital smell of blood and iodine.
The hospital sits in a working-class neighborhood of small dusty
shops with low benches out front. The roadside is cluttered with
carburetors, tri-shaws and grimy soda bottles. Women walk slowly
in the heat, holding black umbrellas.
Normally, North Okkalapa is a sleepy neighborhood. But in 1988,
a few years after Dr. Cynthia had finished her training, North
Okkalapa was where "soldiers knelt in formation and fired repeatedly
at demonstrators in response to an army captain's orders," according
to a U.S. State Department report. "The first deaths were five
or six teenage girls....(Throughout Rangoon) deaths probably numbered
over two thousand, but actual numbers can never be known."
Chaos spread across the country, even reaching the small Karen
village where Dr. Cynthia worked in a private clinic. She fled
across the border into Thailand, walking through the jungle at
night and sleeping in fields by day. She wound up in Mae Sot and
lived in Huay Kaloke refugee camp. With help from foreign relief
workers and Karen leaders, Dr. Cynthia started a makeshift medical
clinic to care for refugees recovering from war wounds and malaria.
She expected to return to Burma in three months.
Nine years later, Dr. Cynthia is still on the border. In that
time, she has gone from sterilizing medical instruments in an
aluminum rice cooker to running a clinic that treats 150 patients
a day, delivers 10 to 20 babies a month, trains 30 medics a year
and provides prenatal checkups, childhood immunizations and education
about nutrition, sanitation and family planning.
Dr. Cynthia and her medics venture where foreign workers are not
officially allowed _ inside Burma, into the steadily shrinking
swaths of jungle still under hill-tribe control. During the rainy
season, when mud and rivers isolated villagers from the rest of
the world, Dr. Cynthia sends teams of burly medics into the jungle
on foot carrying baskets of medicine slung across their foreheads.
Her medics teach traditional midwives sterile-birthing techniques
so they won't cut umbilical cords with bamboo slivers. Her field
clinics, before they were attacked, provided health care and community
services in tribal villages such as Chogali.
Among foreign doctors and relief workers, Dr. Cynthia has a larger-than-life
reputation as a doctor, diplomat, administrator, saint.
"She is known not but what she says but by what she does," says
Dr. John MacArthur, a primary health care supervisor for the International
Rescue Committee who has worked on the border since 1991.
"You never hear her boasting or trying to take credit for her
work. She's doing this for the people, the community. A lot of
people in this movement do things for reputation. Then other people
don't like them because it's obvious they're doing it for themselves.
I can honestly say, since I first met Dr. Cynthia, I've never
heard anybody speak poorly of her."
In a conflict where in-fighting, corruption and inefficiency abound,
Dr. Cynthia is trusted to use money wisely for humanitarian aid.
Her work is supported by private donors and foreign aid from the
U.S., France, Canada, Japan, Australia, Germany, England, Thailand
and Slovenia.
Many other Burmese doctors have resettled abroad, where life is
easier and safer. Not Dr. Cynthia.
"They will enjoy their life or not? I don't know. Maybe not,"
Dr. Cynthia says. "If you go and you leave, the first thing is
you cannot work for your people. Anyway, here, we enjoy what we
are doing."
Dr. Cynthia lives above the Mae Sot clinic in a small room she
shares with her husband, Kyaw Hein, and her two children, 5-year-old
Peace and three-year-old Crystal.
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