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| PHOTOGRAPHED BY HELEN KUDRICH |
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Dr. Cynthia Maung
Healer of broken souls
Dr. Cynthia Maung, the 43-year-old founder of Mae Tao clinic in the Thai border town of Mae Sot, is an absconder, an insurgent and an opium-smuggling terrorist. Any attempt to deny this is as futile as covering the rotting carcass of an elephant with a goat hide.
That, at any rate, is the opinion of Burma's ruling military junta, as published on its reliably absurd and malicious website. The generals have every reason to despise "Dr. Cynthia," as her patients call her. In 1989, equipped with medicines scrounged from foreign relief workers and instruments she had sterilized in a rice cooker, she transformed a dilapidated barn in Mae Sot into a clinic to provide free treatment for the sick and wounded fleeing Burma's oppressive regime. Today, thanks to her preternatural drive and optimism, up to 200 patients—mostly migrant workers and refugees from across the border—pass through her clinic every day. Its five doctors and 120 other medical staff treat everything from diarrhea to gunshot wounds, all for a patient registration fee of just 25¢. Maung has won a slew of international prizes, most recently a Ramon Magsaysay Award for community leadership, and remains among her own people the likeliest candidate for sainthood after the leader of Burma's pro-democracy movement herself, Aung San Suu Kyi. If you were a Burmese general, you'd hate Maung, too.
"When I first arrived in Thailand I thought I'd be here for only three months or so," recalls Maung, a handsome, soft-spoken woman who emanates serenity even in less-than-serene circumstances—in this case, with dozens of infants howling from immunization jabs in her clinic's child-health center. "Then I thought I would go back in three years. Then five years. I always thought the political situation in Burma would improve." Instead, it got worse, creating an ever-growing caseload for Maung and her staff. While the clinic hasn't lost its makeshift feel—the beds in its 49-bed inpatient ward are wooden trestles covered with floor linoleum—it has expanded to include a trauma department, blood and eye labs, and a prosthetics department for land-mine victims. The clinic also serves as a training center for the famous "backpack medics"—teams of doctors who make perilous treks deep into the Burmese jungle to treat people with no access to medicine. The physicians occasionally have to resort to jungle amputations to save lives.
Maung understands what it's like to be a refugee—she's one, too. Born into a Karen family in Rangoon, her work as a young doctor at a tiny rural clinic in Karen state enabled her to witness firsthand the poverty and disease endemic under Burmese military rule. She was among the euphoric millions who joined nationwide antigovernment protests in 1988—and, a few months later, one of thousands who fled over the border into Thailand to escape a savage crackdown. Traveling at night to evade army hit squads, Maung and 14 colleagues trekked through the jungle for seven days, stopping only to treat the sick and injured they came across with the few supplies they had carried. Although she has now lived in exile in Thailand for 15 years, Maung has no official papers and is effectively stateless. The clinic is her country now. Private and unassuming, she lives in a modest house at its gates, along with her husband and three children, the last a baby girl adopted after being abandoned by her mother at the clinic.
Maung places enormous faith in her medical staff despite their lack of formal training, and they return this faith with fierce loyalty. "For Dr. Cynthia, nothing is impossible," says Tara Sullivan, an American reproductive-health expert who has worked alongside her for two years. "She has a great sense of humor and a great sense of purpose." Clinic administrator Rae Svarnas says, "She's an incredibly hard worker. She never asks anyone to do something she wouldn't. And in two years I've never seen her angry. Never." With her medical qualifications and experience, Maung could easily claim asylum in a third country. Has she ever been tempted? "Work abroad?" she asks, as if I've just suggested we tango through the inpatient ward. "I've never thought about it. The West has enough doctors." Which is a relief to hear, because as tens of thousands of her patients would attest, impoverished and benighted Burma needs all the doctors it can get—and all the heroes, too.
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