Bangkok Post – Shaping futures

There was an empty medicine cabinet, no doctor or nurse, no medical instruments or pharmacy, no water or electricity. Medical treatment simply the delivery of oxygen through a tube, since the patient had no money.

“I felt that poverty could take our lives,” said Duean Khanitikitikun, a nurse at Phaholpolpayuhasena Hospital in Kanchanaburi.

“Money is critical to our lives, in terms of education and survival. Often, I felt that money could buy life for a person. But because he or she did not have money, death was certain. That’s why I set my heart on becoming a nurse, and on going back home to help the people of my village.”

Now 27, Duean remembers seeing destitution as a child while living with her grandmother in Mook Kanieng, a village in the Mon State in Myanmar close to the border with Thailand. By the age of about seven, she was living with her parents on the Thai…