So initially our clinic — like in 1989, the local church, the Catholic Church, they support us. Like when we need to refer patient to the hospital, they go and pay the bill and then they deliver food. Not like financial support, usually delivering supply and aids. And most of the assistance comes as, like, delivering the supply, or people go and pay directly to the hospital to pay the bill for the hospital. But in 1994, the first time, Canadian International Development Agency [CIDA] through Burma Relief Center in Chiang Mai, so we receive the grant from the government in 1994. So since 1994 until now, so we get funding from the Canadian government, so that every five years we have grant.
Currently we have government funding, like USA, Canadian CIDA, Norwegian Church Aid, through Norwegian Church Aid and through Help Without Frontiers. So we get funding from different government funding. And we also have, like, community fundraising events happen in different countries, like in Japan or Australia or America; so we have our friends and colleagues who used to volunteer at Mae Tao Clinic. So they form, like, a Mae Tao Clinic family to fundraising, and they also send donation to us.
And some, we also trying to advocate for receiving donation in kind, because [of] our funding situation. Because every year, the number of cases increase and the number of services need to be adjusted, and then the problem even not better. So more people access health services and more children need education. And not only for Mae Tao Clinic, no, because there are many other community based organizations working with children or healthcare programs. So for doing advocacy work together we try to do fundraising for the different communities.
So for us, we think that if we can get, like, donation in kind, like rice or medical instruments, equipments, or maybe student stationery, so we need this a lot. So if there is some company or, like, private donor that can donate regularly, it is very helpful for us. For example, last year we want our children to be vaccinated by Hepatitis B vaccine, because in Thailand or in Burma or Asia country, the Hepatitis B prevalence is high. So we have six to eight percent. So we want to provide a universal vaccination for Hepatitis B for all newborn children who were born at clinic. In Thailand this had been national protocol for many years, but we cannot able to establish because we don’t have enough funding. But finally, we [were] able to get donation from one big company, so they will agree to donate us regularly for three years.
So it is a big help for us. That’s why fundraising is not only from the direct funding, also we try to advocate for donation in kind and helping us to assist with, like, supporting funding for international volunteers. So currently, also, we have international volunteers working with us. So some organization, they specifically focus on supporting international volunteer support. So different way of funding come to us, like university or government funding or donation from company.
Cynthia Maung is a refugee from Burma who established a world-renowned clinic near the Thai-Burma border for her fellow refugees, as well as for internally displaced persons within Burma.
Dr. Cynthia, as she is known, was born into an ethnic Karen family in Rangoon in 1959. After finishing medical school, she moved to a village in Karen State where she served as a doctor for poor people of several ethnic groups. When the military seized power in 1988 and began cracking down on pro-democracy activists, she was among thousands who fled to the jungle. Like many of the others, she eventually made it across the Thai-Burma border.
At first, Dr. Cynthia worked at a small hospital in Thailand treating those who were fleeing the fighting inside Burma. In 1989, after consulting with residents of refugee camps along the border about the medical needs of refugees and internally displaced persons , she established her clinic in a dilapidated building with bare dirt floors on the outskirts of Mae Sot. Her makeshift clinic had few supplies and almost no money, but she improvised by sterilizing her few instruments in a rice cooker and soliciting medicine and food from Catholic relief workers. Today, Dr. Cynthia’s clinic treats more than 75,000 patients each year.
Burma, a Southeast Asian country with about 57 million people, is ruled by a military regime that seized power in 1962. Although the reformist National League for Democracy (NLD) won overwhelmingly in a 1990 election, the country’s military rulers ignored the results and arrested NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 “for her nonviolent struggle for democracy and human rights.” The military government held a referendum on a new constitution in 2008 and a parliamentary election in 2010, neither of which was regarded by international observers as free or fair, and both of which resulted in overwhelming majorities for pro-government positions and candidates. The military regime has committed widespread and systematic human rights violations, including extrajudicial killing, torture, rape, and denial of freedom of expression, association, assembly, and religion.
Throughout its existence, the regime has been at war with a number of Burma’s ethnic minority groups. Ethnic minority voters overwhelmingly supported the NLD in the 1990 election, and after the suppression of the democracy movement several of these groups continued or resumed armed resistance to the de facto government. Although the government signed cease-fire agreements with several of these groups ostensibly granting them autonomy within their respective regions, the Burmese military has used a range of brutal techniques, including the killing of civilians, forced labor, rape, and the destruction of homes, crops, and villages, in cease-fire zones as well as in areas where there is still armed resistance.
In 2007, as on several previous occasions, there were mass demonstrations throughout the country demanding freedom and democracy. The 2007 demonstrations were led by Buddhist monks and eventually became known as the “Saffron Revolution” after the color of the monks’ robes. The armed forces brutally suppressed these demonstrations—estimates of the number of protestors killed range from 31 to several thousand—and intensified popular dissatisfaction with the government by the killing, beating, and public humiliation of monks.
The nominally civilian government resulting from the 2010 election has been widely regarded as a façade for continuing military rule. However, in October 2011, the government released 206 of Burma’s estimated 2,000 prisoners of conscience. The next month, the government announced that it would soon release all remaining political prisoners. The NLD, which had declined to participate in the 2010 election, registered to participate in the next election and announced that Aung San Suu Kyi would be among the NLD candidates.
Although the military regime announced in 1989 that it had changed the English name of the country from Burma to “Myanmar,” the United States government and other international supporters of democracy in Burma have generally continued to call the country Burma because this is the name preferred by Aung San Suu Kyi and other democracy advocates who won the 1990 election.
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