There are days when you simply have to STOP and take a minute to marvel, to dance around the room with excitement or, failing that 😆, to take a considered moment to name and honour some of the amazing women who have changed you - and the world - beyond words.
International Women's Day - it's a day about empowerment, strength, resilience, sisterhood and incredible diversity. Today I want to honour 2 amazing Asian women: one whom I knew well and admired beyond words for her simple example and the other, also known personally and greatly admired, who contributes daily to the advancement of literally thousands of women.
Khun Yai
The old lady in the picture above is the Great Grandmother of my half-Thai daughter (also pictured). And yes, that's a much pinker, naïve version of myself 😂 - then a brand new mom at age 41. Khun Yai in Thai means respected grandmother. This particular day we visited her in Sukothai, central Thailand, we think she was about 95 and is pictured tying the ceremonial blessing bands on my little girl. Nobody really knew her exact age and it's possible she didn't either. She was still actively farming her land at this time, and living alone. She happily used a squat toilet and while she didn't quite scurry, she was quite able to climb the ladder to her traditional elevated teak and bamboo home, a few kilometers out of the village.
She had borne 8 children, buried some of them, been a farmer all of the life and never had the privilege of an education. What did I admire so much? She was content with what she had and who she was. Deeply content. I remember looking around her very humble self-built home and asking her what she needed. And she said she had an abundant garden and clothes enough, but that maybe a bottle of fish sauce would be useful. 😍 Life had been hard for her, but she retained a calm equilibrium and was not embittered in the slightest. She savoured her independence. But, more than that, when she was in her mid-80s, she took in a young grandson who'd been abandoned and raised him as best she could, sharing all that she had.
Khun Yai moved me, inspired me and is a tough act to follow. She passed peacefully at the age of approximately 98.
Dr Cynthia Maung
Founder and Director of the Mae Tao Clinic along the Thai-Burmese border, Dr Cynthia has worked tirelessly for over 30 years to provide health care for indigenous and refugee women fleeing the Burmese civil war, which has festered for more than 70 years. Her clinic is renowned for its work in maternal and child health, for its provision of care for malaria and mosquito borne disease (which kills so many here), for being THE place to bring landmine-bombing-gunshot victims, and for her open-hearted approach to people irrespective of race, citizenship or ethnicity.
She was born into an ethnic Karen family in Rangoon in 1959, she grew up in Moulmein with her parents and 6 siblings, attended high school and studied medicine in Burma. The violent student uprisings of 1988 pushed her, and so many others, to the relative safety of the Thai border around Mae Sot. Few women have come from such a beginning place of disadvantage and not only remained humble and committed, but impacted the lives of so many.
In February 1989, she was offered a dilapidated building with bare dirt floors on the outskirts of Mae Sot. Here, Dr. Cynthia went to work. Her makeshift clinic had few supplies and less money. She improvised by sterilizing her few precious instruments in a rice cooker and solicited medicine and food from Catholic relief workers working in the area. She and her companions lived simply and worked hard to treat the increasing number of patients coming to the clinic with malaria, respiratory disease and diarrhea as well as gunshot wounds and landmine injuries. Malaria cases are still one of the most common diseases treated by the Mae Tao Clinic. Source
Over 95,000 patients a year are treated in her still-relatively-humble clinic, and over 2000 babies are born there each year, in safety and with a better chance of health and survival.
Dr Cynthia received Southeast Asia’s Ramon Magsaysay Award for community leadership and she was listed as one of 2003 Time Magazine’s Asian Heroes. Altogether she has received six international awards for her work. In 1999, she was the first recipient of the Jonathan Mann Award, sponsored by Swiss and US health organizations. She has been nominated for the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative, which will be announced on Aril 24th 2002 in Yerevan, Armenia.
She is also a mother of two.
Here's to Strong Women: May we not only know them and admire the from afar, but may we shout their achievements from the rooftops!
Happy International Women's Day.
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