The 2002 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership

CITATION for Cynthia Maung

Ramon Magsaysay Award Presentation Ceremonies
Manila, Philippines

Like many Thai towns along the Thailand-Burma border these days, Mae Sot is a sanctuary for Burmese refugees in flight from upheaval and civil war at home. There, tens of thousands of Karens and other Burmese minorities subsist on the rough fringes of the Thai economy and await a brighter future. Their thoughts are often of their villages across the border where, for years now, the Burmese Army has waged a violent campaign to bring the region's people into the firm embrace of the Burmese military state. This brutal war goes on and on. In Mae Sot, Cynthia Maung, a doctor, has been treating its victims for fourteen years.

Born to a Karen family in Moulmein in 1959, Cynthia Maung studied medicine at the University of Rangoon. She was practicing in a Karen village near her hometown when, in 1988, Burma's military junta launched its bloody crackdown against democracy advocates. Packing a few clothes and a medical reference book, she fled with some students to Mae Sot, Thailand, where she joined other exiles. Trauma and illness were rampant among the refugees. In a dilapidated building with bare dirt floors, Dr. Cynthia went to work.

Her makeshift clinic had hardly any supplies at all. She improvised by sterilizing a few precious instruments in a kitchen rice cooker and by soliciting medicines and food from Catholic relief workers and nearby refugee camps. As she and her companions lived from hand to mouth and shared in all the work, Dr. Cynthia treated the local scourges of malaria, respiratory disease, and diarrhea as well as shrapnel and gunshot wounds and injuries from land mines. To keep up, she trained health workers to assist in the clinic and to serve as "backpack medics" across the border. By 1996, she was supporting six thatch-and-tin clinics in the Karen-controlled war zone. Here her medics treated common illnesses, set broken bones, and performed simple frontline surgery. They also trained midwives, installed sanitary toilets, and brought lessons of hygiene, nutrition, and reproductive health to villagers-all this until the villages were overrun by the Burmese Army, uprooting thousands and raising the flood of refugees to Thailand.

Dr. Cynthia expanded her clinic to meet the need. She attracted volunteer doctors, nurses, and medical interns from abroad and tirelessly solicited help from relief agencies and NGOs. They responded and, year by year, the clinic grew.

Today, staffed by five doctors and dozens of health workers and trainees, Dr. Cynthia's clinic provides free comprehensive health services to thirty thousand people a year. Last year, 563 babies were born there and 700 patients received new eyeglasses. The clinic operates its own laboratory and prosthetics workshop and receives support from some international organizations. Meanwhile, sixty teams of Dr. Cynthia's backpack medics continue to assist displaced villagers across the border and to support two field clinics in the war zone.

Life along the border is hard in many ways. At Dr. Cynthia's clinic, injuries from domestic violence are equal to injuries from war. This is why, aside from treating patients, she fosters women's organizations, youth programs, and other efforts to redress the corrosive social consequences of refugee life.

Dr. Cynthia lives above her clinic in Mae Sot with her husband and two children. She dreams of going home to Burma. The World Health Organization has said that Burma's health care system is one of the worst in the world. Dr. Cynthia would like to change that. In Mae Sot, she says, "We have already started."

In electing Cynthia Maung to receive the 2002 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes her humane and fearless response to the urgent medical needs of thousands of refugees and displaced persons along the Thailand-Burma border.