Shah Paung says she was five years old when Burmese troops first attacked her home. "I remember my brothers were playing volleyball in front of the house... I felt the ground shake.” That was in 1989. For the next ten years, Paung's ethnic Karen village came under repeated attack as the military junta carried out a brutal offensive against the people of eastern Burma.

Ten years later, carrying only their clothes and some rice, Paung's family fled to Thailand. For three days, they trekked through the jungle, hiding from Burmese soldiers and eventually stopping in a refugee camp.

In the face of a brutal military regimes, Shah Paung remembers feeling completely helpless. "I had been angry, I had thought about joining the armed struggle," she says. "But that was before I realised the best way to help my people was reporting their truth."

Pen over sword

Paung now works as a reporter for Irrawaddy, a magazine based in northern Thailand, and a leading source of news about Burma (the country's official name is now Myanmar). "I have no village now; it's all gone," she says. "All I can do is try to help those still suffering inside by writing."

She gets reports on her isolated homeland through a network of secret informants communicating largely via mobile phone. Sometimes her reporting also takes her across the border, where she meets with Karen people on the frontlines: resistance fighters, medics and human rights workers. She says it's difficult to leave them and return to Thailand, but she says she’d be no help to her people on the battlefield.

Paung spoke no English when she arrived at the Noe Poe refugee camp as a 17-year-old. But as soon as English lessons began at the camp, Paung signed up and after two months, landed a job as a secretary for the camp's committee on women. A year later she was hired by the Karen Women's Organization, an advocacy group based in Thailand.

Helping to run training and support programmes for Karen women in refugee camps in Thailand and Myanmar, Shah Paung strengthened her English and basic computer skills. She started teaching women in the camps about basic women's rights, in an effort to overcome the widespread young marriages and high rates of domestic violence.

Writing calls

When Shah Paung published a magazine about the training programme, she knew she had found a way to support the Karen people. "I used to think, 'what can one girl do against the military?'" she says. "But after putting out the magazine, I knew I had found a better way to fight the regime." She then landed an internship at Irrawaddy. 

The magazine was founded in 1992 by Burmese exiles living in Thailand. With funding from Western donors such as the Open Society Institute, it reports in English and Burmese for the international community and people still living in Myanmar.

Paung says she’s careful to protect her sources because Burmese supplying information to people outside the country can be sent to prison. When she covers the widespread sexual violence in Burma and in the refugee camps, she’s also conscientious about concealing the identity of the women with whom she talks.

Paung’s careful to protect her own identity too. She asked not to have a photograph of her run with this story; she wants to remain free to carry the story of her country's struggle to the wider world.

From Anna Sussman/Women's Feature Service