Or maybe sleepy. After medical school, Dr. Cynthia trained at several hospitals in and around Rangoon, including North Okkalapa General Hospital, a peeling blue building we visited this spring. In the long wards patients rested on flaking iron cots among the steady drip drip of I.V. bags and that familiar hospital smell of blood and iodine. The hospital sits in a working-class neighborhood of small dusty shops with low benches out front. The roadside is cluttered with carburetors, tri-shaws and grimy soda bottles.
Women walk slowly in the heat, holding black umbrellas.
Normally, North Okkalapa is a sleepy neighborhood. Chaos spread across the country, even reaching the small Karen village where Dr. Cynthia worked in a private clinic. She fled across the border into Thailand, walking through the jungle at night and sleeping in fields by day. She wound up in Mae Sot and lived in Huay Kaloke refugee camp. With help from foreign relief workers and Karen leaders, Dr. Cynthia started a makeshift medical clinic to care for refugees recovering from war wounds and malaria.