A Land Of War -- A Journey Of The Heart -- The Haunting Spirit Of Two Little Girls Pulls A Writer Back To War-Torn Burma

They come whenever they want, the little girls of Chogali village.

I can be driving on I-5. Or in the checkout line at Albertson's. Or waiting for my modem to collect my e-mail. Suddenly I am back in the village, in the jungle, in Burma, at dusk.

Monkeys chatter. Smoke rises from cooking fires. Wind stirs the leaves.

Two little girls - shirts tattered, hair wispy, skin golden - skip by, their toes barely stirring the dust. Two pixies holding sprays of pink orchids.

The bold one, shoulder thrust forward like a runway model, smiles triumphantly and waves her flowers in her fist like a torch. Her shy friend clutches a trio of blossoms, petals touching her chin.

The orchid girls want me to take their picture. They want me to play. They flutter and twitter and spin.

Then they are gone.

I HAD VISITED Chogali village so often, in stray moments, it sometimes seemed I never left. In reality, almost a year had passed since my husband and I volunteered in medical clinics along the Thai-Burma border.

We took many snapshots, but I didn't need them to travel back - down the rutted elephant trail, across the steppingstones in the stream, past the black pig in the bamboo pen, along the path lined with white star flowers that smell like magic.

This is how I liked to remember Chogali, as a place of little girls and orchids, of peace and hope.

Actually, Chogali was - and is - in the middle of a war.

On one side is a military dictatorship that in the past 35 years has killed, tortured and displaced millions. On the other are ethnic tribes who want autonomy and dissidents who want democracy.

The military is winning. Burma's people have lost just about everything that makes life decent. And every year, things get worse.

In this country of chaos, Chogali was an oasis. The village was nurtured by a remarkable woman known along the border as "Dr. Cynthia." She ran a clinic there, took in orphans and trained medics to care for hill-tribe people who had no other access to modern health care.

That such a gentle community could exist in the middle of war became my antidote to the world's horrors.

After we came home to Seattle last summer, I kept returning, in my mind, to Chogali. To escape from the blur of news of war, of genocide, of rape, of hunger and hate . . . .

I'd hear a snippet, read a headline, then drift away to be with the little orchid girls, mixing mud and rain in coconut shells - playing pretend within a game of pretend.

Then Chogali fell.

The message came over the Internet one morning last February, a few sips into my first cup of tea:

"Burmese Relief Center - Japan has just received information SLORC (the Burmese military) occupied Chogali yesterday morning."

As I read it, the little girls appeared again, shoulders hunched, scared. I wandered around the newsroom, unsure if I could finish writing an article on mutual funds.

Suddenly, I was back in Chogali. This time, I was surrounded by artillery, exploding bamboo, snakes wriggling in the heat, ash settling on empty huts. At least I hoped they were empty. I hoped the village people had all escaped, scattered into the jungle. I recalled a human-rights documentary in which a former Burmese soldier, in tears, admitted raping village girls.

I thought I saw the little orchid girls hiding in a grove of banana fronds. I felt relieved they were malnourished, too light to crunch the bamboo leaves underfoot.

I hoped they were together. I hoped the soldiers would not find them. I wondered if they were cold.

I wondered what I could do.

I turned to the only thing I know how to do: I dug out my passport and went back to the Thai-Burma border, this time as a reporter.

I realized the war in Burma might seem as distant to most readers in Seattle as it once did to me - just another of the many confounding "ethnic conflicts" smoldering around the globe as the century closes. ia, Rwanda, Chechnya, Congo, Cambodia - news we struggle to understand, news we struggle to ignore.

The problem isn't that we don't care. The problem is we're rarely given the chance.

Most of our news about war is dominated by quotes from pundits, debate about economic sanctions, dispatches on the latest counteroffensive. But war is not only about weaponry and economics and aging generals grasping for more power. War is about little girls playing in a village.

I returned to the Thai-Burma border as a journalist, but I wanted to write a story of the heart.

I longed to find those two little orchid girls. They were real. They haunted me. I needed to know what war had done to them, what it was doing to me, what it can do to us all.

Secretly, I hoped I might save them.

WE HAD FIRST HEARD about Cynthia Maung at a party on a rainy Seattle night in fall 1995. A public-radio reporter had told us about a young Burmese doctor, herself a refugee, who ran clinics on the Thai-Burma border.

Mother Teresa to Burmese refugees . . . in her 30s . . . fled Burma after the 1988 military crackdown . . . main clinic in Thailand . . . several thatched-hut clinics in rebel-controlled Burma. . . .

Everybody calls her, simply, Dr. Cynthia.

My husband, Tao, had finished his pediatric residency - four years of life as a tired blur - and we wanted to have an adventure, do something hands-on. In March 1996, we landed at Dr. Cynthia's main clinic in Mae Sot, Thailand, a dusty town about a 20-minute jog from the Burma border. For the next three months, Tao would see patients and teach pediatrics, while I would peel mountains of garlic, lead a dawn aerobics class and type Dr. Cynthia's field reports and grant applications.

The tin-roof clinic sits on the edge of parched rice paddies in Thailand's hottest province. The air smelled of blood and iodine, sewage and steaming rice. Everywhere, there were fuzzy chicks, suckling kittens, nursing moms. The place oozed with fertility. This was not what I had expected.

I had imagined, before we arrived, that we would see battle wounds like in "M # A # S # H," when the theme music plays and the choppers swoop down and the medics crouch low under rotor blades, carrying moaning men on stretchers. I had expected cowboy surgeons extracting shrapnel, nurses holding gauze over land-mine stumps, legions of muddy army boots. This was war, wasn't it?

In the slow heat of the first morning, I kept waiting for the arrival of bloody soldiers but kept seeing more and more women. Pregnant women. Women shivering with malaria. Women coughing from tuberculosis. Women bent over from diarrhea. Factory girls with ugly rashes on their legs and gashes on their hands. Emaciated ladies with glazed yellow eyes.

Every so often, a rickety blue pickup loaded with garlic and bananas skittered off the road where the pavement crumbled into dirt. Out jumped children, their scrawny brown legs covered with mosquito bites. Then a small parade of tired women unfolded from the back of the truck and shuffled into the clinic, leaving flip-flops at the door. By noon, the concrete stoop was covered with flip-flops, mismatched, dusty, smudged under the toes. No army boots.

Finally, I realized, this was it. This was war: waged by men, dumped in the laps of women.

"I didn't have much idea about war before I came here," Dr. Cynthia told me, "but everywhere I see the men go off to fight or get captured, and the women and children suffer most."

Dr. Cynthia has done much to reduce that suffering. In addition to the main clinic at Mae Sot, she ran a half-dozen smaller field clinics in jungle villages across the border in Burma - including Chogali.

When we visited last year, Chogali had 29 babies, 56 other children, 148 adults, 60 bamboo houses, five elephants, one microscope, no electricity and no cars.

Gurgling blue PVC pipes Dr. Cynthia had installed to divert clean water from upstream meant the women didn't have to spend three hours a day hauling water in oil cans while the men were gone.

The teak-leaf nursery school she had built fed the children one good meal a day, monitored their vision and growth, screened for worms, immunized.

The latex squat latrines she had installed helped dry up dysentery and cholera. The training she gave midwives meant fewer mothers and babies died from infection. Her clinic treated malaria and malnutrition and snake bites.

The little orchid girls had seemed safe, playing with tiny white blossoms.

I do not mean to romanticize what was, essentially, a harsh subsistence. I just want you to know what was lost.

THIS SPRING, when I loosed the Velcro straps of my Teva sandals and stepped into Dr. Cynthia's clinic in Mae Sot after 10 months away, it seemed nothing had changed. Same concrete stoop covered with flip-flops. Same ceiling fan, still broken. Same growl of trucks sputtering toward the border.

Dr. Cynthia looked tired, but still much younger than her 37 years - not thin, not pudgy, but soft, with large kind eyes, a broad face, hands that shape the air when she talks. She wore her hair the same way, natural curls falling out of her braid in loose corkscrews resembling the beautiful loops in Burmese script.

She exuded a quiet strength and serenity, but I could tell the war was wearing her down. Last year, she had tucked blossoms into her braid every morning. This year, she did not.

So much had happened.

West across the border into Burma, the thatched-hut field clinics - including Chogali - had been trashed. Soldiers had ripped apart meticulously penciled patient charts, mashed records into the mud.

Chogali, the village of little girls and orchids, had become a command post for the Burmese army.

It was a matter of retaliation. In January, leaders of the Karen tribe, the largest and most powerful of Burma's ethnic minorities - and the tribe to which Dr. Cynthia belongs - publicly vowed they'd never give in to the junta. In February, the Burmese military invaded Chogali and other Karen villages.

All the medics from these jungle clinics, our friends, had escaped over the border into Thailand, just hours ahead of enemy mortars. They brought with them to Mae Sot more than a dozen village children, mostly orphans. When we arrived, the children were in the rice fields, singing Beatles tunes, drawing pictures and learning English in a makeshift school Dr. Cynthia set up under a shade of woven leaves.

The orchid girls, Shu Wah and Oh Mu, were not among them.

I pulled out their snapshot. The medics peered at it, shook their heads, spoke among themselves in Burmese. Whatever they were saying didn't sound promising.

A skinny guy I didn't recognize pointed to the picture. "I know them," he said. "I saw them two weeks ago in Noh Poe." Noh Poe, about a 12-hour walk from Chogali, was a new refugee camp that had been hastily set up on the Thai side of the border in February after thousands of villagers fled attacks by the Burmese army.

"These girls?" I asked. "What were they doing?"

"They were happy, playing," he said. He wouldn't look at me. He tied and re-tied the long green longyi that wrapped around his waist and hung to his ankles.

"And they're fine? Healthy?"

"Yes. Playing. I saw them playing."

I should have felt elated, but didn't. Maybe it was jet lag. Maybe it was the thought of the little orchid girls and cholera in the same refugee camp. Maybe it was apprehension about a trip to Noh Poe.

Noh Poe sprawls on the other end of a rutted jungle road that bumps along the undulating ridges separating Burma from Thailand. I had traveled the route last year, crammed into the back of an open-bed Toyota pickup with diaperless babies, clucking chickens, rubber plants, cast-iron sewing machines and Karen grandmas smoking cheroots. The all-night journey was long and uncomfortable, and the road was risky because of occasional snipers, corrupt border guards and drunk truckers hauling black-market teak.

Photographer Tom Reese was game to go to Noh Poe, though I wondered what I was getting us into. How would we possibly locate two little girls in a refugee camp of 11,000? And what would we do if we found them?

I sought out a friend for advice. I found her in an upstairs corner of the clinic, poring over a Karen history book while everyone else watched a kung-fu movie on television.

Paw Ruth Say had been senior medic in Chogali. She had carried me last year when I sprained my ankle in the jungle. We had stayed up late together, watching candles flicker, listening to the ratchety drone of insects. We had gossiped about men and love and our mothers.

So she could not lie to me, as I suspected the other medics had.

"The girls," she said, studying my snapshot. "The girls are still in the village."

THEY WERE TRAPPED in Chogali. Traveling to Noh Poe would be pointless.

We were stuck, yet my mind was still restless, searching.

The scenarios were endless, each worse than the next, but I scrolled through them anyway under the delusion that what I worry about won't happen since I always tend to worry about the wrong things.

The girls could starve. After the Burmese soldiers captured Chogali, they confiscated villagers' rice and sold it back at exorbitant rates.

The girls could be used as human mine sweeps, in front of Burmese soldiers, to trigger the traps laid by Karen guerrillas.

The girls could be kidnapped and sold into prostitution. Thai brothels would pay a premium, more than the usual $40, because customers believe young rural girls are less likely to carry the AIDS virus.

The girls could die from malaria. It would not take much: a single bite from an infected female Anopheles mosquito, the type most active in this area. The mosquito breeds in stagnant water and rice fields and prefers to suck blood between dusk and dawn. Its saliva leaves behind parasites that migrate to the liver, where they invade red blood cells and multiply until the cells explode.

Under a microscope, the deadliest type of malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, looks like tiny grains of sand floating on the surface of a small pond. The grains of sand are the parasite; the pond is the blood cell. The more you look at the pond, the more sand you see. Magnified a thousand times, an exploded blood cell looks like a million specks of dust.

I once spent an afternoon talking about malaria with a Karen man who is a fisheries expert, air-conditioner repairman, springboard diver and explosives technician. Since he had lived with so much danger, blowing up enemy bridges and helicopters, I thought he would shrug off malaria as a sort of macho man's flu. He did not.

Malaria starts with aches and tremors, he said, especially at the elbows and knees. Then comes a big thirst and wracking hot and cold shivers. Even two or three blankets can't warm you. Later, the left side of your torso gets so heavy you can't stand straight. Your liver swells. Even if it's summer in the jungle, your teeth chatter, your body trembles, you collapse on a bed of teak leaves. Your friends press against you to stop the shaking, they try to warm you with high-calorie dog meat. They worry you will have seizures, fall into a coma and die. But there is little they can do if they do not have the right medicine.

To choose the right medicine, a medic needs to know which malaria parasite the mosquito carried. Mosquitoes have been around 40 times longer than humans, and in the past 20 years the parasites they carry have become resistant to drug after drug. To identify which parasite, to choose the correct drug, a medic must have a microscope.

Last year in Chogali, the only microscope within a six-hour walk had presided over Dr. Cynthia's field clinic, on a laminated vinyl table. It was an angular hunk of black and beige metal that reflected sunshine off a small mirror to magnify the malaria parasite to 1,000 times its actual size. It saved many lives.

When my friend Paw Ruth Say fled the village, she took that microscope. She was afraid the Burmese soldiers would smash it. She was afraid to let the enemy have it. She was afraid she'd need it later. She was just afraid.

When Dr. Cynthia heard the Burmese military's No. 2 general would fly into Chogali by helicopter, she said, "We want to tell the general: Please bring one microscope. If there is not a microscope or enough medicine, even the soldiers will die."

Perhaps, Dr. Cynthia suggested, the people of Chogali would become angry if the soldiers didn't maintain the village's medical care, nursery school and water system. "Now, they know what they need," she said. "Before, they didn't."

Dr. Cynthia's war is a struggle to preserve community. A village falls. Families collapse. Everybody depends on everybody else, or everything breaks apart.

You can't improve the health of the people without improving their community, she says. If the people aren't educated, if they don't have jobs, if they're depressed, they won't be able to care for themselves or their children. They will starve, get sick, have accidents. Their daughters will enter brothels and their sons will join the army. They will have no choice.

Someone asked Dr. Cynthia how she felt knowing Chogali had been captured.

"What does it feel like to be a human being?" she replied.

CYNTHIA MAUNG had not meant to get involved in war. In 1988, she was a village doctor in a private clinic far from the action, and like young doctors all over the world, she was busy earning money to pay off her debts. She knew little about democracy, politics or human rights.

Her homeland had big problems, but what could she do?

Men had fought to control Burma for more than 1,000 years. First were tribes from India and China, Tibet and Siam. Then came European missionaries, the British, the Japanese and the British again, this time promising independence.

On the eve of independence in 1947, hired guns assassinated Burma's elected leaders, including national hero Gen. Aung San. Burma slid into economic and political depression punctuated by ethnic rebellions and capped by a 1962 coup d'etat.

Gen. Ne Win, leader of the coup, isolated and bankrupted Burma. His government banned virtually all foreign contact, randomly eliminated bank notes, arrested and tortured thousands. Burma became one of the world's poorest nations - a top heroin exporter, yet unable to feed its own people.

In 1988, frustration boiled over. Tens of thousands of civilians demonstrated; soldiers shot at them, killing more than 2,000. Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of martyred hero Aung San, exhorted crowds to have courage, to believe in a society free from want and fear. Her party won 80 percent of the vote in a 1990 election. The state ignored the people and placed her under house arrest.

Students' speeches about freedom and forced labor drifted through the open windows of Dr. Cynthia's clinic, but she barely paid attention. Tuberculosis was spreading through the village; her patients had no money for the expensive medicine. Her mother was dying of liver failure.

"We follow the flow, the stream, just thinking about tomorrow," she recalled. "What do I need, how can I get the money. Not much time for thinking of other people."

Then, suddenly, in the middle of the rainy season, the whole country became too quiet. Buses stopped running. Village leaders disappeared. In the open-air marketplace, between mango stands and fish stalls, there were whispered rumors about spies, arrests, hiding. People said unarmed shopkeepers, students, monks, doctors, nurses and workers had been gunned down, suffocated in the backs of trucks.

Dr. Cynthia went next door to talk with the students. That night, she packed a few blouses, anti-malarial drugs and a thin medical reference book with a snapshot of her sister tucked in its pages. She left with the students at 4 in the morning, trudging quietly through the jungle at night and sleeping in muddy rice fields by day. It took a week to reach Thailand.

"I didn't have much idea what was happening," she recalls. "I just came here accidentally." She expected to return to Burma in three months.

Nine years later, she is still on the border, fighting the war with simple weapons: soap and toilets, antibiotics and education, microscopes and blankets, a strong mind, a gentle touch, a certain sense of hope.

Most war doctors bandage wounds. Dr. Cynthia treats war's chronic ills - poverty, disease, hunger, displacement. She works at developing communities, not just relieving pain. She worries her people have forgotten what it is like to not fight, what it means to build a society instead of destroy it.

This is why Chogali was so important, even though it was just a dot on a hand-drawn map: The village of little girls and orchids was a community Dr. Cynthia had helped to heal.

But for the Burmese military, Chogali was a strategic target, a chance to humiliate the Karen rebels, another patch of ground needed to secure the 1,000-mile border.

For me, the village had been proof that good could survive in this world, despite all the bad.

And it was home to the two little orchid girls. I did not want them to disappear into history. I did not want to lose them to war.

"The revolution is necessary," Dr. Cynthia once told me. "But the war is crazy."

THE WAR HAD COME to Chogali on Feb. 11.

Paw Ruth Say told me how the orchid girls' village had fallen to the military, known to the people as SLORC, for the State Law and Order Restoration Council.

Around 2 in the afternoon, a muddy truck had roared into Chogali from the next village. "SLORC is very close!" a Karen army captain had shouted. "You must go away!"

When the attack came, the village was in confusion - mothers calling for children, babies crying, pigs squealing, chickens squawking, cows and an elephant milling around. It was the season for farmers to slash and burn the jungle. The sky was white, ash floating in the air, bamboo exploding like artillery, and now real gunshots, too.

At the thatched-hut nursery school, the little orchid girls sat next to each other, singing along to a cassette of the Alphabet Song, singing so loud their teacher at first didn't hear the section leader shouting.

"SLORC alarm!" he warned, thumping up the bamboo ladder, shaking the school on stilts. "Burmese soldiers are coming now!"

"The enemy is coming!" the nursery-school teacher told her 14 students. "Run home to your parents! Take your bags

The orchid girls grabbed each other's hands. The shy one, Oh Mu, was crying, too scared to move. Her bold friend, Shu Wah, dragged her down the school's bamboo ladder.

This is how it always was with those two, their teacher explained to me after she fled to Mae Sot. "They always stuck together," she said. "They know each other's heart."

Shu Wah's parents were well-to-do farmers and part-owners of an elephant. Though Shu Wah was only 6, a year younger than Oh Mu, she was the leader, almost always happy, smoothing the dirt to draw pictures with sticks, dancing flower dances while the boys clapped and drummed on rocks.

Oh Mu was poor and often sad. Her mother had bled to death during childbirth. Oh Mu's father abandoned his baby daughter to marry another woman, so the girl was raised by her grandmother. Village children often taunted Oh Mu because she had no parents and started school a year late.

Oh Mu would run to Shu Wah for comfort. They would blow up balloons and act out little plays. They would pluck orchids dangling from trees and stick them in glass bottles. They loved singing, "One, two, buckle my shoe," even though they had never seen shoes with buckles.

They fled Chogali on foot, the orchid girls, the nursery-school teacher and their families, stumbling along a farming path that wound deep into the jungle. After three hours, it was dark. They stopped near a stream, shared some rice, hid in a thicket, covering themselves with bamboo leaves.

Shu Wah and Oh Mu slept on the same mat, next to their teacher and her baby. It was the first time either girl had left the village.

"I want to go back to Chogali," the teacher heard Oh Mu whisper to Shu Wah. "I want to go home."

"We can't," Shu Wah told her. "The Burmese soldiers will stay now in our village."

"We have no rice! How can we eat in the jungle?"

"Do you want to die?" Shu Wah asked. Then the teacher could hear no more because her baby was crying.

The next morning, when the teacher awoke, she saw the girls together, sitting on their mat, stuffing their clothes into woven bags. It was a bright day, monkeys shouting, stream gurgling, birds chirping. The teacher realized her family must flee to Thailand. If Burmese soldiers caught them, they'd be treated more harshly than simple farmers because she worked for Dr. Cynthia. The families of the orchid girls decided to stay in the Burmese jungle because that was the only life they had ever known.

As the teacher stepped onto the path that led away from Chogali, she saw the girls one last time, by the stream, brushing their teeth with salt on their fingers.

She later heard that their families had returned to Chogali; Burmese army commanders threatened to burn villagers' homes and land and livestock if they didn't. Shu Wah and Oh Mu are probably playing together in the village, their teacher told me.

She added: "But really I do not know. I could not say about the future."

NO ONE COULD SAY about the future, but I rephrased the questions anyway, groping for answers I knew weren't there.

I nagged Paw Ruth Say as she fixed a lunch of rice and fermented soy beans for orphan schoolboys. We sat on a bamboo bench, and I forced her to walk me through, one more time, everything she knew.

Thousands of Burmese soldiers had swarmed along the elephant paths and trampled the plumeria bushes while they were seizing the border. The army had set up a base camp in Chogali because the water system and latrines made jungle living easier. Most of the top brass had moved into the nursery school; a few lived in the clinic. The military had burned down a dozen houses and destroyed the beautiful bamboo hut where I had lived last year with the medics and the orphans.

Maybe the troops won't like rainy season in the village, Paw Ruth Say said. It's too muddy for trucks; elephants and feet are the only ways to get around. There are so many mosquitoes, nobody escapes malaria. Maybe the soldiers will leave the village, and if they do, Paw Ruth Say declared, she would go back, bring a microscope, staff the clinic, and would I come visit her in Chogali?

Yes, I promised.

Maybe the Burmese army won't be so bad, she said. They are usually polite and friendly at first. Then forced labor. Then sometimes they rape the women. But maybe they'd stay polite this time. Shu Wah and Oh Mu would be fine.

But she knew, and I knew, that this probably was not true. So we sat there for a while, surrounded by the incredible greenness of grass, listening to the wind rustle the long, flat blades. The afternoon heat rose, and the children's voices faded, and the flies buzzed around in crazy patterns. It was time to go, but we didn't move. We sat there watching the high sun parch the fields. We sat there because there was nothing else we could do.

WHAT WAS ORIGINALLY the worst option now seemed like the best. I wanted to imagine the little orchid girls in a refugee camp, as the skinny medic in the green longyi first suggested.

We took a 20-minute ride to Huay Kaloke camp, which we had visited last year. Huay Kaloke is far from Chogali, and deep down I knew the girls would not be there. Still, it was something to do, someplace to look.

Last year, Huay Kaloke had been muddy and crowded. In the narrow lanes between bamboo huts, toddlers with swollen tummies and stick legs had splashed in filthy puddles. Yet the camp had exuded a sense of neighborhood - moms gossiping in the bustling medical clinic, students rehearsing for an assembly, grandmas weaving bright cloth, children jumping rope with looped-together rubber bands.

This time, when the Thai guard waved us through the red-and-white barricade, I did not recognize the place.

What stretched before us now was a hollow landscape of ash and dust, scraps of tin, charred stumps, rusted wire, rotted cloth, withered leaves, frayed plastic, broken pottery and shards of glass.

We found Than Hlaing, a medic trained by Dr. Cynthia, who had become a friend on my earlier trip. There were supposed to be other organizations staffing this camp of 7,000 refugees, but on the three days we visited Huay Kaloke, Than Hlaing was the only medic there.

He had been there Jan. 8, when Huay Kaloke was attacked.

At 10:30 p.m., hundreds of soldiers had sneaked down from the looming Burma hills onto Thai soil and into the camp, eyes reddened by whiskey, soot blackening their faces, rifles slung over their shoulders, walkie-talkies in hand.

"OK, fire! Start making fire!" the command crackled over their radios. The guerrillas poured diesel fuel on the leaf roofs and flicked their plastic cigarette lighters. In seconds, flames roared.

Shots burst through air, red streaked across the moonless sky. Children danced and clapped. They had never seen such fire before.

Than Hlaing grabbed his stethoscope and some medicine and ran toward the hospital. Five automatic rifles stopped him.

"Where are you going? Who are you? A medic? Do you have drugs?"

"Yes, yes, medic." Than Hlaing emptied his pockets: blood-pressure pills in blister packs, bandages, stethoscope, a string of Buddhist prayer beads.

"Buddhist? Come with us."

"No problem," Than Hlaing said, eyeing their guns. He made up a lie, so he could escape. "But that house on fire - my baby is in that house! I must go get my baby. I'll be right back!"

He ran, then circled back. In a dark field, he bandaged burns and treated old men gasping.

The soldiers abandoned the burning camp that night, but Than Hlaing remained.

"I like to help my people," Than Hlaing explained.

His older brother is a Burmese soldier. This isn't unusual. The military exacts payment from each family; if they have no rice or money, they give a son. The army promises food and clothes and school. The son will learn to kill.

How do parents decide? Which son will be a medic? Which son will be a soldier? Healer? Killer? Enemy? Brother?

Four months after the fire, Than Hlaing still cares, virtually solo, for 7,000 people who don't have toilets, clean water or enough food. He navigates the camp's broken glass and collapsed irrigation ditches in mud-caked sneakers, carrying a green canvas bag with a red cross.

He walks from shanty to shanty, feeling foreheads, draining abscesses, wiping noses, cleaning sores, giving out toothbrushes and baby blankets and donated clothes. Parasites, conjunctivitis, rash - every child has at least a little something gone wrong.

He checks on the mom who was in labor on Fire Night, as it's now called, flailing in the shadows of flames while her two children screamed because their house was burning down. The baby boy is healthy, 4 months old, scalloped ears, suckling under his mom's thin blue undershirt, his fingers slightly curled on her knee. No name yet, given the circumstances.

Then we come to a newborn swaddled in white muslin. The baby in the shroud. The infant is frail, wizened, smaller than my notebook, lighter than Tom's camera, so weak he cannot suck.

"This baby will die. Serious malnutrition," Than Hlaing says, using his shadow to shield the infant's face from the sun. The baby drags his left eyelid open and struggles to smile on one side of his face. The furrows deepen around his dry mouth. It is unbearable, really, watching this doomed child smile.

For a long time, I thought the saddest scenes were those of total devastation. I now understand that flickers of spirit are what rip the soul most.

All around, all the time in Huay Kaloke, we hear the constant pounding of people rebuilding their homes, digging post holes with tin cans, lashing together green bamboo that is too skinny, too soft, too young to last long in a place attackers have threatened they'll burn again.

We walk past scattered plumes of smoke rising from hundreds of cooking fires, and we spot a little girl washing her baby brother in an aluminum rice pot. They are beautiful in the heavy glow of supper hour, gold sun clinging to wet skin. The girl dips her small hands into the pot, forming a cup. She lets the water slither down her brother's shoulders, rubs her fingers alg his toasty back, feels it glisten. Then comes something for which I am completely unprepared, something that shakes me.

The children's mother looks up from where she squats stirring fish paste, and asks, Please, won't you join us for dinner?

I am overwhelmed by her kindness. I am afraid to accept even one grain of rice from a family that has so little. I am appalled at my hunger to absorb her spirit, ashamed I'll take more than I can ever give back. I am angry we can only do so much, and that what we can do is not nearly enough for all these families cooking supper and all the babies about to die.

So I point to the sun, which has dropped below the looming hills of Burma, and I gesture with my hands as if I am driving away, because everyone knows foreigners are not allowed in the camp at night. The night is far too dangerous.

ON THE BORDER, there are times when it seems like nothing can be done; the war will never end; the orchid girls have disappeared forever. In these dark moments, it is a comfort to know Dr. Cynthia.

She somehow rises above the violence and misery and hopelessness around her, carrying on with her work, doing what the rest of us cannot. Day after day, she helps people.

The only physical clue to the power and complexity of her life is her purse. I rarely saw her without the squat, serious-looking leather bag. Once I asked her what was in it, and she gleefully dumped out the contents: snapshots of her two children, a stapler, scrawled notes, checks from foreign donors, grant proposals, keys, patients' HIV lab results, hair elastics, a pink ice-cream spoon, Thai money, a black address book.

During my first visit to Mae Sot, when I had taught aerobics out by the rice fields, Dr. Cynthia would set the purse on a pile of tires before dancing through the half-hour routine in her flip-flops and whirling longyi. After class, while I rewound the cassette, she'd leave me to watch her purse and stroll around the patch of dirt behind the clinic, picking up bits of garbage while the sky lightened to a dull white above the mossy mountains fronting Burma.

It seemed she was thinking about something far away, and I was always struck by the gravity and enormity and sheer number of things she handled the rest of the day:

Was the Burmese military bluffing in threatening the border villages? Should she wait to send a mobile medical team into the region? What if the monsoon arrived before the medics could dig a new septic tank for the latrines? How to convince malnourished women more babies would survive if they waited a few years between births? How to find time for her own husband and two young children?

Her short walk without the purse lasted less than 10 minutes. It seemed to be the only time she had to herself the whole day. Then she'd shoulder her purse and walk back toward the clinic, where patients squatted on the worn concrete, waiting.

So many people depend on Dr. Cynthia. What if anything should happen to her?

There was an anonymous letter found in the clinic's toilet room that had demanded 900,000 baht, threatened to harm "the doctor's" family. Dr. Cynthia had tried to laugh it off: "Which doctor?" A powerful Thai monk had quietly warned Dr. Cynthia to be careful of kidnapping. Punk monks had skidded their truck into the dirt yard, barged into the clinic, interrogated medics, abruptly left. Were they spies? Were those guns tucked under their orange robes?

A grenade had exploded in Mae Sot while we were there. There were rumors that because of the grenade, local Thai officials would force the Burmese refugees back across the border.

Dr. Cynthia has no patience with rumors or suspicion or fear. They are the regime's most powerful weapons. They turn people against each other, erode the community, destroy the heart.

I AM RUNNING OUT of places to search for the little orchid girls - in real life, in my mind, in memory, in the future.

We can't go to Chogali; it is simply too dangerous. So we fly to what seems to be the only place left: Rangoon, the capital of Burma, the seat of military power. If we can't find the orchid girls, at least we might gain some insight into the regime that controls their fate.

We arrive in Rangoon shortly after a bomb has killed the daughter of a top general. It is a few days before the start of Water Festival, the biggest Buddhist holiday in Burma and the only time when the army allows crowds to gather.

This year, because of earlier riots and student demonstrations that shut down the universities, the government has set up a Water Festival Disciplinary Committee, whose charge, apparently, is to cancel most festivities and unroll miles of barbed wire at traffic kiosks, temples, atop the wall surrounding our hotel.

On the streets, people's eyes shift constantly, looking at us, looking away, looking at the overpasses and rooftops from which soldiers have fired upon crowds in the past. In the tea shops, where students were once eager to talk with Westerners, young Burmese men huddle nervously on low stools and stare at their saucers when we approach.

Mister J. Donut, a pink ice-cream parlor, features strange warning signs: red slashes across pictures of cameras and video recorders. Taxi drivers tersely refuse to take us anywhere near the house where Aung San Suu Kyi, now a Nobel Peace Prize winner, still lives under virtual house arrest.

In front of the government tourist office, soldiers grip their automatic rifles in firing position.

As we trudge through the heat, visiting temples and noodle shops and the city's vast bazaar, we are followed by various men. Some are touts, eager to earn a few kyats showing us the town. A few beckon us into crumbling stairwells and the back seats of taxis, urging us to exchange foreign currency at black-market rates. The most ominous guy, wearing dark glasses and a black T-shirt that reads "Bang Boy," trails us for hours, staring, saying nothing. It is like being in a bad movie, but it is real.

We visit Rangoon's most glorious gilded temple, Shwedagon Pagoda, at sunrise on a Saturday. A crowd forms around well-dressed women pouring water over a white stone Buddha. Suddenly, there are helmeted soldiers with automatic rifles all around, one so close I can see the texture of different metals in his gun and the glint of dawn light on his thumbnail, which is trembling.

At other times, in other countries in Asia, I have been among the potentially volatile mix of armed soldiers and civilians. This is different. Never before have I sensed that anyone might shoot.

This climate - uncertainty, humidity, suspicion and fear - is exhausting. So, at the end of every day, we retreat to the hotel pool.

Before coming to Rangoon, I had been puzzled by the pool scenes included in recent articles about war in hot places. The big swim, I quickly realize, is the contemporary equivalent of Somerset Maugham drinking gin on the rattan verandas of grand old colonial hotels. The pool is an escape from the heat and the dust and the weird. Swimming is soothing and predictable. You push the water one way, you skim across the pool in the opposite direction.

Except. All my concerns float to the surface: I worry about Dr. Cynthia. I worry about the orchid girls. I worry about all the horrible things human beings do to each other and how easy it is to be indifferent, to turn away.

An evening breeze fans the garden around the pool, and above chlorine fumes, I smell the clear sweet fragrance of white star flowers, the same kind that grow on the bushes in Chogali. It is dusk now, suppertime. The pool has wrinkled my skin. The air is gritty, traffic honks, construction cranes slash the sky. Even in the heat, Rangoon makes me shiver. It has none of the warmth of Huay Kaloke refugee camp. Just the shadows of empty chairs.

EPILOGUE

IT HAS BEEN MANY WEEKS since we returned to Seattle.

We brought home dysentery, and I was grateful for Western medicine's arsenal: three doctors, two specialists, two nurses, beeping monitors, intravenous antibiotics, four liters of Ringer's lactate, a hospital bed with white sheets, seven sets of heated flannel blankets, blood draws, stool samples, urine analysis, X-rays standing up and lying down.

If only Chogali had one microscope! Would anybody there now know how to use it?

Dr. Cynthia would not daydream like this, dwell on things she could not control. She would laugh and keep on treating malaria, sending medics into the jungle, writing grant proposals, starting nursery schools, delivering babies. Dr. Cynthia does so much. She gives me direction in a world that spins off balance: Do what you can do; somehow deal with the rest.

Sometime soon, I must leave Chogali where it is, in occupied territory, a place I cannot go. I am here, I have a job to do, stuff to figure out. This is my week to mow the lawn.

Still, I can't help wondering about the little orchid girls, what they're doing, whether it's raining, whether they have malaria, whether they'll survive. It is dusk, and I see shy Oh Mu huddled against the trunk of a coconut palm, by herself. She is crying.

I could not save those girls; I could not even get back to the village.

What I cling to, the last real thing I know, is that Shu Wah and Oh Mu were together at the stream, brushing their teeth with salt on their fingers. They were together. This is most important. I hope they always know each other's heart.

Every day I think of them. I do not know if this makes much difference.