Myanmar Victims Flock to a Refugee Doctor

The Associated Press ^ | February 27, 2006 | DENIS D. GRAY

[ZayYa]

MAE SOT, Thailand -- She is branded an enemy by Myanmar's military rulers, but to the thousands who flock to her clinic _ many of them victims of the country's harsh regime _ Dr. Cynthia Maung is the gentle healer in a world of torched villages, squalid refugee camps and sweatshops.

After she fled her homeland, the soft-spoken doctor known simply as Dr. Cynthia set up her clinic in a barn, sterilizing syringes in a rice cooker. Eighteen years later, it's a medical center that treats more than 50,000 of her desperate countrymen each year.

From her clinic in this Thai border town, the doctor sends her "backpack medics" into Myanmar to treat communities either neglected by the government or savaged by its military in a conflict that has spawned some 1 million internal refugees.

[zek157]

She should be a Nobel Prize contender.

[nuconvert]

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