From Ashes to Sunshine
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“Look at my eye. Trust me! You can pass this!”
Nay Chi Linn brings a positive, steady assurance to her challenging work with severely injured patients receiving care at the Sunshine Care Center (SCC). Located on the Thai side of the border, the SCC, which she founded, focuses on daily care, physiotherapy, rehabilitation, and emotional support. Nay Chi Linn embodies a kind of “tough love” approach that calls patients back to themselves after catastrophic injuries and long, demoralizing recoveries. She treats the wounded in her care as if they were family, a stance patients echo by calling her mom or big sister, and she stays present through the hard stretches of recovery until they can stand again.
Nay Chi Linn was raised in Yangon in an “ordinary” family, and went to university there studying law; at around 20 years of age, she moved to Chiang Mai intending to continue her education. While there, she met an ethnic Karen who invited her to visit his family living in a refugee camp on the border. This was a revelation— she acknowledges having been “brainwashed” against the country’s ethnic communities by state propaganda growing up, but her lived experience now put a lie to all that. That man became her husband. They lived in the camp for two years, during which time she had child, and worked for a while with an NGO there as an assistant education manager.
Around 2016, Nay Chi Linn wanted to return to Myanmar, but her father-in-law— a KNU leader who understood the Burmese military all too well— warned her to wait for the next election and not to trust the generals. They eventually agreed she could move back only if she stayed close to the border; she returned around 2019, settling with her husband and children in a town near the Thai frontier.
When the 2021 coup erupted, she was still inside Myanmar. She began quietly supporting the civil disobedience movement— sending small funds and sponsoring English-language protest signs— until word came that authorities had traced one of her bank transfers and begun investigating her. With the border to Mae Sot effectively closed under COVID controls, she could not flee to Thailand; instead, within a day she relocated to the family’s small house in Lay Kay Kaw, a nearby KNU-administered model town that felt comparatively safe.
On December 15th, 2021, the Burmese military bombarded Lay Kay Kaw. She remembers clutching her children as explosions hit the town, the terror of not knowing if they would make it out alive. With dozens of others, she fled across the river into Thailand. Villagers helped them across, while international agencies scrambled to provide water, food, and emergency medical care. In those first days on the Thai side, she did what she had always done— found food for hungry children, searched for medicine for the injured, and translated for those who could not communicate with Thai doctors.
What started as desperate, ad hoc acts of survival gradually became something larger. More and more people turned to her, and she found herself creating routines, organizing volunteers, coordinating with Thai authorities and ethnic armed groups. Out of that chaos emerged the Sunshine Care Center, which today provides physiotherapy, rehabilitation, and long-term care for hundreds of resistance fighters and civilians. She says she never planned it, that it was born out of necessity, but it is now one of the only sanctuaries of recovery along the border.
Nay Chi Linn explains how the SCC operates. When someone is injured, her team first confirms the situation and safety, often through local contacts and messaging groups her husband coordinates. If the case is critical, they obtain a verification letter from a local authority, then alert Thai border counterparts and hospital staff. When Thai ambulances cannot reach the frontline because the area is too close to active fighting, her team organizes its own emergency transport to move patients across to hospital care. After admission, SCC notifies the International Committee of the Red Cross, which helps bear the high medical costs many cases require.
Once the hospital phase ends and formal follow-ups are finished, patients come to the SCC for rehabilitation, daily care, and reintegration planning. It classifies cases into a three-tier/ABC system: Grade A patients are medically cleared to go where they wish; Grade B patients can move around but with restrictions; Grade C patients must remain close to a hospital or comparable support. SCC informs the family or, in the case of soldiers, the unit leader, of a patient’s status and coordinates cross-border movements with Thai authorities so that the transfer stays aboveboard. Nay Chi Linn says that many recovered Grade C patients become volunteers; SCC has built kitchen, medical, logistics, and small admin teams around this mix of staff and former patients.
SCC’s is a demanding ecosystem of care, and she emphasizes how much of it rests on routine, discipline, and morale. The busy, involved day starts early and ends late: medical teams check lists and send those with appointments to hospitals; logistics drives runs back and forth all day; evenings bring pickups and resets for the next day. Within those routines, the work itself is often improvisational and pressured. She lists a litany of compounding issues, such as chronic pain that outlasts prescriptions, kidney issues that surface years later from long-term medication use, transport gaps, budget shortfalls and many more.
Nay Chi Linn’s own role is part organizer, part fundraiser, part problem-solver—she laughs as she describes how she runs around town, buying food at the market on Fridays, sourcing medications here, negotiating the Red Cross bureaucracy there. She also tries to line up mental-health support with a local clinic, acknowledging limits to what she personally can counsel while recognizing that many patients carry trauma alongside their physical injuries. She measures progress in specific, tangible wins: a leg saved because she paid for a private MRI when the public queue was too slow; a patient who learned to stand despite it all; a day’s appointments met; a week of balanced meals delivered on schedule.
Modeling a distinctive style of emotional leadership, Nay Chi Linn is steady and uncompromising yet empathetic, what she calls the “energy of mom.” She admits that, initially, many patients resent her approach because pain makes them irritable, frightened, and sometimes combative— but she does not let that affect her as she tends to those who have lost limbs, speech, or livelihoods and now confront months of pain and uncertainty. When medicines can’t fully control pain, she demands that patients meet her eye and trust that they can endure the next hour and the next after that. She encourages them to appreciate what they still have, not only what they have lost; she tells someone who lost a leg that he still has another leg and two hands, and another who lost multiple limbs that he is “still alive.” To set the right tone, she tells visitors not to cry in front of patients… and she doesn’t, either. “I have no time to cry!” she exclaims about her workday. Still, she admits that she sometimes breaks down in private afterwards.
Most importantly, Nay Chi Linn motivates those in her care to keep going in spite of their circumstances, communicating easily digestible ways how a patient can feel worthy again and regain agency. So for example, she’ll discourage an under-recovered patient from rushing back to the front and instead redirect them to a role they can safely perform; she’ll tell a patient who seems overwhelmed by their condition that the country is built on small family units, so even in their injured state, they can do their part simply by participating in their care for the sake of their family. Her realism is what makes her encouragement credible. If they demand sympathy, she gives them responsibility instead: “Wake up! You just lost one leg. You still have another leg and two hands!” Over time, she says any resentment a patient may have felt initially fades; bonds form, and intimate relationships are created. But she says it is more duty and responsibility than “love,” because that keeps everyone focused on what must happen next to heal.
Nay Chi Linn explains that SCC’s regimen of care emphasizes nutrition and hygiene. She explains that protein, eggs, and carefully prepared meals help patients tolerate strong medications, maintain muscle, and stabilize for rehab. SCC’s monthly nutrition cost alone is roughly 150,000 baht—about US$5,000. They are able to cover about 40% of that cost, she says, thanks in part to the kitchen and warehouse teams that manage bulk supplies efficiently. The rest is found through fundraising, ad hoc donations, etc.
While nutrition and hygiene are essential factors in SCC's care, she says that working outside the bureaucracy can sometimes be the decisive factor in recovery. Nay Chi Linn recalls the case of a man whose leg could only be saved if action was taken immediately, faster than the government hospital’s appointment system would allow. SCC took the bull by the horns, mobilizing resources and care outside official channels to ensure timely treatment. The story underscores both the center’s responsiveness and the urgent gaps in the state’s medical system.
In sum, the philosophy that drives Nay Chi Linn and the Sunshine Care Center is disarmingly simple: promising not certainty, but accompaniment and commitment. When patients spiral into despair and claim they have no one and no hope left, she contradicts them with the most basic fact she can offer. “I am always with you. That’s all I can say.”