Insight Myanmar26 Sep 2023

Resisting Until Victory

Episode #191: Myra Dahgaypaw was born in a camp for internally displaced persons in Karen State. Yet there was no safety there. From infancy, she had to flee with her family to escape violence, facing gunfire, airstrikes, and landmines. No matter where they stopped, the Burmese military found them and forced them to flee again. Myra wondered why this was happening to her and her family, and began to see the Bamar people as monsters.

Her parents died before she was a teenager, and she was raised by extended family in a Thai refugee camp, where safety was still elusive due to cross-border attacks launched by the military-aligned Democratic Karen Buddhist Army. But Myra's thirst for education pushed her to learn English, leading to work as a librarian in Thailand.

Her work eventually got her a ticket out of the camps to Washington, DC, where she works with the US Campaign for Burma, whose focus is uniting the diaspora and rallying both government and grassroots support. She highlights the urgent life-or-death situation in Burma and urges international intervention.

“No matter what we say here, no matter what we advocate for, we can still go back to bed at night and sleep peacefully. I know people in Burma are not having this luxury. Next time they're killed, they're beheaded, they're put in jail… just because they are fighting for freedom, they are fighting for their rights and the rights of the people, the civilians of Burma.”

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(619)

Straight Outta Yangon

Episode #604: “I chose hip hop.” Born in Yangon in 1979 to parents who were nationally known singers, Anegga grew up in a household where art was both celebrated and watched. His father had helped int...

10 Sep 2h 34min

The Sum of Small Cuts

Episode #603: Saw Poe Wah assists the Karen Refugee Committee (KRC) and speaks from a life shaped by the Thai–Myanmar border camps where he studied, lived, and later worked with community-based organi...

8 Sep 59min

Bearing Down on Practice

Episode #602: “The things that I was devoted to for liberation became the weapons that were used to harm me. The community that was a refuge became the thing that exiled me.” Amma Thanasanti, a medita...

7 Sep 2h 9min

An Unfound Door and All the Forgotten Faces

Episode #601: Chalida Tajaroensuk, chairperson and founder of the Thailand-based People Empowerment Foundation, argues that responses to Myanmar’s post-coup crisis must be grounded in the experiences ...

4 Sep 1h 27min

The People’s Credentials

Episode #600: “I won’t be disappointing the people.” Before Kyaw Moe Tun took the UN General Assembly floor on February 26, 2021, that was as much as he had disclosed about the position he intended to...

3 Sep 2h 12min

The Cure Within

Episode #599: “I've been blessed to be on a spiritual journey for well over the last 50 years,” says psychiatrist Raman Khosla, reflecting on the lifelong search that eventually led him to S.N. Goenka...

1 Sep 1h 34min

Price of Raw Power

Episode #598: Rare earth mining has drawn Kachin State into a global struggle over minerals essential to electronics, green technologies, automobiles, and defense, while communities near the mines bea...

31 Aug 1h 35min

No Direction Home

Episode #597: Victor Chan’s life began not with a spiritual calling but with motion. Born in Hong Kong and trained in physics, he left without a fixed destination and spent the early 1970s moving acro...

28 Aug 1h 39min