PERSONALITY OF THE MONTH

Dr Cynthia Maung

Dr. Cynthia Maung, the 44-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. That, at any rate, is the opinion of Burma�s ruling military junta. In 1989, equipped with medicines obtained illicitly from foreign relief workers and with a few medical instruments, 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, up to 200 patients�mostly migrant workers and refugees from across the border�pass through her clinic every day. There are about 5 doctors and 120 staff who treat everything.

The political situation in Burma got worse, creating an ever-growing caseload for Maung and her staff. The clinic also serves as a training center for the famous teams of doctors who make perilous trips deep into the Burmese jungle to treat people with no access to medicine.

Maung understands what it�s like to be a refugee. She witnessed firsthand the poverty and disease under Burmese military rule. And she was among the euphoric millions who joined nation-wide anti-government protests in 1988�and, a few months later, one of thousands who fled over the border into Thailand. 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 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, and they return this faith with fierce loyalty. She has a great sense of humour and a great sense of purpose. She is an incredibly hardworker. She never asks anyone to do something she wouldn�t.