Phyu Phyu Thin has headed the NLD’s AIDS programme since 2002, tapping into the party’s youth league and recruiting students and Buddhist monks as volunteers to help about 1,000 people with HIV from around the country.

When patients come to Yangon, she helps them find places to stay and tries to match them up with the few treatment services available, mainly at clinics run by international aid agencies.

She also organises home-based care for patients who need it, and has found private donors to pay for life-prolonging drugs for about 30 people.

Although she’s not a doctor herself, she talks about the people she helps as “her patients.” Eleven of them were so distraught by her arrest that they held a prayer vigil last month to call for her release, only to be detained themselves for four days.

Her patients range in age from two to almost 50. They are at different stages of illness, and many live in rural areas where even basic health services are limited.

“By the time many of them come to us, they already have AIDS-related illnesses,” Phyu Phyu Thin said.

Getting treatment to people in remote parts of the country is one of her most difficult challenges, a struggle shared by international agencies that are forced to work within strict limits imposed by the military government.


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