American author Melody Mociulski spent 13 years of her retirement working in Myanmar and Afghanistan providing prosthetics, microfinance, and education for young girls, a decision that can be traced backed to 1974, when she traveled through Myanmar for the first time.
Those experiences are behind her latest book “Intrepid Paths – Burma,” essentially a collection of short stories about women in Myanmar and the lives they lead as the country transitioned from a closed society to a limited form of democracy in 2010.
She also witnessed the coup d’etat in 2021, which ended Myanmar’s democratic progress and tipped the country back into a bloody civil war with Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing now at the helm amid a litany of well-documented atrocities.
Mociulski spoke with The Diplomat’s Luke Hunt about her role as the Southeast Asia Program Director for the NGO Clear Path International and how she founded another organization to improve the lives of women and girls in Burma through education and literacy.
She says Myanmar remains a society where the rules and norms of conduct are stacked heavily against girls, and empowering women through initiatives like microfinance is seen as a threat by the junta, “which just makes them angrier.”
In a final twist of fate, which led to the completion of “Intrepid Paths – Burma,” Mociulski talks about being falsely diagnosed with a terminal lung disease and having to reconcile her fate before finding out the doctors were wrong.