Dear Burma Friends,

Dr. Cynthia Maung, Nobel Peace Prize nominee, also known as
the "MotherTeresa of Burma" because of her devotion to the displaced people from Burma is planning to come to the Bay Area to receive an award from the Dalai Lama on the 6th of November. A few events you can attend from 4th to 7th Nov 2005.

Source: BADA


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A brief biography of Dr. Cynthia Maung
which is going to be published in Unsung Heroes of Compassion book:
Healing Displaced Souls Cynthia Maung was born into a Karen family on December 6, 1959 in Rangoon.She grew up in a woven bamboo house on a dirt lane on the outskirts of the Burmese city Moulemein with her parents and six siblings. Reflecting on her childhood, Cynthia says, "We were not a wealthy family, but we loved and cared for one another greatly." An urgent need for adequate local healthcare, along with her father's desire for her to become a doctor later led Cynthia to her career in medicine.

In 1988, the Burmese military seized power and chaos spread
throughout the country, soon reaching even the small Karen village where Cynthia worked in a private clinic. She fled across the border into Thailand,walking the jungle by night and sleeping in fields by day. Cynthia's eventual destination was Mae Sot, where she established a rudimentary medical clinic to care for refugees. Equipped with donated medicines from foreign relief workers, and instruments she sterilized in a rice cooker, Cynthia transformed a dilapidated barn into a comprehensive health clinic providing free treatment for the sick and wounded fleeing Burma's oppressive regime.

As doctor and founder of the Mae Tao clinic on the Thai-Burma
border, Dr. Cynthia Maung treats thousands of Burmese refugees a year. "In our country, over one million people are displaced internally, and approximately two million people are relocated into neighboring countries," says Cynthia. "For more than forty years, Burma has been controlled by a military regime, which has isolated it and almost totally disrupted civil society." Yet 'Dr. Cynthia', as she is fondly called by her patients, has seized this moment in time to rise above the conflict - to not only treat displaced souls, but to heal them.

The clinic retains its makeshift feel, but has expanded to
offer a wide range of health services, including inpatient and
outpatient medicine, trauma care, blood transfusions, reproductive, pediatric and eye care, and prosthetics for landmine survivors. Each year, Cynthia and her staff train a new class of medics to treat patients throughout the border region. Today, health professionals from all over the world come to Mae Sot to volunteer their time and energy.

"When I first arrived in Thailand I thought I'd be here for
only three months or so," says Cynthia. "Then I thought I would go back in three years. Then five years. I always thought the political situation in Burma would improve."

Life along the border remains difficult. In 2004 alone,
Cynthia's clinic cared for more than one hundred thousand patients and delivered 1,602 babies. "In my experience, the number of injuries from domestic violence are equal to the number of injuries from war," says Cynthia. In response, she fosters programs for women and youth to redress the corrosive social consequences of refugee life. As Cynthia says, "You can't improve the health of the people without improving their community."

Cynthia has received many accolades for her clinic's
humanitarian work, including the prestigious Magsaysay Award for
Community Leadership, the Van Hueven Goedhart Award from the Netherlands, and the Jonathon Mann Health & Human Rights award. She also received the American Women's Medical Association President's Recognition award, a special award from the Foundations for Human Rights, and the John Humphries Freedom
Award from Canada. In 2004 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Often referred to as the 'Mother Theresa of Burma', Cynthia
lives at the clinic in Mae Sot with her husband and three children.

Cordially,
Wynn Lei Lei Nyane

********************************************
Director of Development
Foundation for the People of Burma
One Market, Spear Tower, 30th Fl.
San Francisco, CA 94105
Phone: 415-978-3017
Fax: 415-978-3014
 

Irrawaddy
INTERVIEW WITH DR. CYNTHIA MAUNG

   Click More in Burmese.

Medic in Exile 

By JEFFREY KLUGER, BRYAN WALSH / MAE SOT

Posted Monday, Oct. 31, 2005
It's hard to feel good about a person described as an absconder, an insurgent and an opium-smuggling terrorist--unless the group doing the name calling is the military junta that runs Burma (Myanmar) and the person being defamed is Dr. Cynthia Maung. Since 1988, Maung has been building and running a thriving medical clinic on the treacherous Thailand-Burma border, providing badly needed health care for 70,000 people a year and facing down one of the most oppressive dictatorships in the world to do it.
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The volunteers, known as backpack medics, face arrest if caught, and Maung knows that if she steps back over the border, the junta will pounce. So for now, she stays at Mae Tao, providing medical care for a nation of the displaced and hoping to return to the land of her birth. "We're building a community," she says, "so we can rebuild Burma one day."

From the Nov. 07, 2005 issue of TIME magazine  [Click More @ Time Magazine 2005]

YAHOO Cythia Maung Stories

The End....