Outside the dusty Thai border town of Mae Sot, the Mae Tao Clinic is a hive of activity. Its compound bustles with a seemingly endless stream of patients. There are men and women dressed in the traditional Burmese longyi, monks in saffron robes, people with missing limbs, pregnant women and boisterous, snotty-nosed children.
Almost all are migrants or refugees from Myanmar's military regime. Mae Tao Clinic - or Dr Cynthia's Clinic, as it is widely known - marks its 20th anniversary today. Manned by about 500 staff, it now runs a range of facilities including operating theatres, a maternity unit and inpatient beds, along with services such as counselling for drug addicts and hospice care for Aids patients. There's even a workshop for making prosthetic limbs - about 85 per cent of them are for landmine victims.
It's a far cry from the makeshift set-up that Cynthia Maung used when she started the clinic in a dirt-floor building in 1989. Then fleeing a military crackdown herself, she had to scrounge for food and medicines from relief workers and sterilise basic equipment in a rice cooker.
'We never expected 20 years ago we would still be here, but you can see what's going on inside Burma,' says Dr Cynthia, now 49. 'Naturally, we want to go back to Burma, but wherever you live you have to build a peaceful environment.'
Born to a Karen family in Moulmein, she worked at a village clinic after completing medical training and witnessed first-hand the relationship between poverty and sickness. When the so-called 8888 uprising erupted - a demonstration by Yangon students on August 8, 1988, that spread throughout the country - she was among the hundreds of thousands of people who expressed their discontent with the military regime's oppression and economic failures. The protests were crushed in a bloody coup that left thousands dead and more in jail. In the aftermath, many activists went into hiding or fled across the border to Thailand.
Dr Cynthia decided to join them. With 14 colleagues, she trekked through the jungle for seven days, stopping at remote villages to treat sick people with their limited medical supplies, before arriving in Thailand. She expected to stay just three months. But with no sign of improvement in Myanmar, she continued her medical work near the border, and after a few months was offered a dilapidated house in Mae Sot to use as a temporary clinic.
