A Doctor Without Borders
Coming Soon…
“We feel like we are not a useless person. You know, even [if] we have to flee our country and come to other country, we are still a valued person.”
In this episode, Dr. K speaks about purpose and belonging, and about the stark realities of war-zone care. A general practitioner of Rohingya ethnicity who supports Myanmar’s resistance from the Thai border, Dr. K routinely travels to conflict areas to train medics and run ad-hoc clinics. He frames his work as both medical and moral: he treats wounded fighters and sick civilians. Perhaps even more significantly, he also now proudly wears his Rohingya identity, no longer feeling the need to hide it like he did in Myanmar.
Dr. K recalls that his family left Rakhine State for Yangon when he was three years old. But because Rohingya were legally barred from leaving Rakhine, his family used an underground route— boats, mountain paths, motorbikes— to evade checkpoints on the way. This is one of the harsh realities for the Rohingya living in Myanmar, a persecution which continues to this day.
Growing up in Yangon, Dr. K got high grades at school, and he parlayed that into admission to medical school in 2013. He explains, however, that another social barrier for the Rohingya was that final acceptance to school hinged on documents the Rohingya were systematically denied—a birth certificate, vaccination records, and “family certificate.” He recounts how his family was able to secure a national ID and family certificate through informal payments, which concealed his Rohinya identity; as for the birth certificate, he says he was “lucky” that the admissions office did not insist seeing this.
Upon graduation, he threw himself into his work. He was a medical officer in a private hospital during the day, and ran his own clinic at night… seven days a week at first! His patients came from “mixed” backgrounds, a point that contrasts with the exclusion he had navigated to become a doctor at all.
After the 2021 coup, Dr. K kept a low profile; he did not register his clinic with the Ministry of Health, and so was able to quietly support the resistance with medicine and logistics. He opened a small pharmacy in 2023 to expand his practice. But his life changed in February 2024, while boarding a flight at the Yangon airport. Immigration software somehow flagged him as a CDM (civil disobedience) doctor. He describes a day of detention, exhaustive questioning and searches of his phone and car. Though released for lack of direct links to the resistance, he says officials referred his case to the local military authorities, who then visited his home and “forced me to sign that I will join the military government service.”
Fearing arbitrary confiscation of the assets he had been able to build up over nearly a decade of hard work, he made the difficult decision to abandon everything and to leave the country. So in March of 2024, he hired a driver who knew how to evade the checkpoints, and traveled with his wife and child to the Thai border, crossing through the river rather than the official bridge where they would have been stopped and detained. A brother-in-law met them in Mae Sot, and helped them get settled even without the proper documents. It was hard starting a new life there, especially when the depression set in. There were months without income, then a part-time job, and a small money-exchange side gig. He still received some lingering revenue from his Yangon pharmacy, which some relatives had moved into a garage space for safety and to enable it to continue to operate with low overhead.
Eventually, his focus shifted to volunteering his medical expertise. From Mae Sot, he linked up with colleagues who were operating there, as well as in combat areas inside Myanmar, and began shuttling back and forth across the border to train medics and run temporary clinics. He describes a sobering picture of these makeshift clinics: bamboo walls, leaf roofs, and a flow of injuries and preventable illnesses, such as the ubiquitous malaria, along with gastritis and urinary stones from bad water and austere diets of hard rice and meat and fruit that were not fresh.
Dr. K is frank about his fear at the front: the thud and crack of guns, but, above all, aircraft. Over time, he says, though he has grown more used to the sounds, he has not become any less fearful. Even in the relative safety of Thailand, he says, the sound of aircraft can still trigger the fear response. “We all have an automatic response on the aircraft.” He is open about the psychological impact: In the field, there is no time to feel because the crush of need overrides emotion; back across the border, though, the feelings surge—sadness, a wish to be alone, the weight of what he has seen. He grabs what solitude he can after his family goes to sleep, watching a movie, listening to songs, or reading. At the same time, he speaks about the dignity and courage he observes of very young soldiers in the resistance, which helps his put his own fear in perspective: they are willingly putting their lives on the line! “We get our courage by seeing very young soldiers in the revolutionary arm,” he says. “We have a lot of fear about the war things, because we are not very useful about that. But when you see that kind of soldier. There's no fear, because they are really young, and they are not using their knowledge, they are not using their strength, they are using their life." Since he has been living in Thailand, embracing his identity as a Rohingya has become an important aspect of Dr. K’s journey. He finds that Bamar members of the resistance in Mae Sot are more open-minded about this; he says he feels “zero” fear in speaking openly. “I don’t need to hide anything of my background, my personality!” he exclaims. The need to reclaim his identity is rooted in the social, ethnic, cultural and religious discrimination he experienced under the junta, and now the value others see in his contributions. A colleague (Dr. Sunshine) who happened to be present in the room during the conversation steps in to describe a resistance space where Muslims, LGBTQ people, women, and others work openly, without the hiding that once defined so many lives. As Dr. K says, “I am 100% human, because I don't need to hide anything of my background, my personality.” Dr. K hopes that this more inclusive spirit characterizes his children’s future: schools where identities are open and respected, friendships across communities, opportunities unfettered by ethnicity or faith. he speaks as a parent who has thought hard about the future. He wants a “balanced” life for his children— without discrimination— and believes that if the military remains in power, “there is no safe place for my kids.”