Healthcare for 2000 Rural Villagers in Myanmar

WE are working hard to support Burmese people during the silent (for the international media) but deadly civil war. Myanmar is a country with landscapes of haunting beauty, especially in the south where there are islands covered in lush vegetation where the population lives with ancient rhythms. But conflict and economic crisis have no natural boundaries, as we saw during the last Mobile Clinic on Makyone Galet Island.

Among the 76 patients visited in one day came D, a 53-year-old woman who has been suffering from stomach pains for months. The woman was holding the hand of an eight-year-old girl, her daughter whom she adopted five years ago. "I have always desired to be a mother, it has been my dream since I got married at the age of 17. But children never came, until I heard about C. She had been brought to the temple because her family had to flee the country. We have been inseparable ever since'.

"C. suffers seeing me in pain, she worries that I can't take care of her because I'm struggling to work. But with the current crisis, I can't afford to travel by boat to the hospital and besides, the cost of medicine has quadrupled, I don't know how to manage."
D. was examined by our medical team who found that she had severe gastroenteritis and was prescribed free medicine to recover. In remote places without access to medical care, it is often the simplest and most easily curable diseases that are fatal. At a time when the Burmese population is constantly threatened by the ongoing conflict, the Mobile Clinic is the only way in which rural communities can have access to medical care.