While thousands of civilians flee Myanmar’s war, grandmother Ama and others stay behind, forming the invisible backbone of the anti-junta struggle.
By SALAI JOHNNY and LORCAN LOVETT | FRONTIER
In a wooden home turned makeshift chapel, Ama sits on a mat woven from recycled coffee sachets, listening intently to the resistance commander.
“Many fled,” says Olivia Thawng Luai of the Chin National Defence Force. “You stayed for our revolution. You’ve become our neighbours. This is our village.”
The 56-year-old grandmother nods, nestled among a dozen neighbours.
“You love our soldiers like they’re your children,” the commander says, her eyes finding Ama’s. “Scold them when needed.”
Four years into the post-coup civil war, with junta jets bombing churches across Christian-majority Chin State, ordinary homes like this have become safer sanctuaries for worship. In this village just outside Falam town, people pray for resistance forces to seize the Myanmar military’s last local stronghold there, and for the airstrikes to end.
Later, as dusk settles over the mountains, Ama walks the short path to her home, now a refuge for wounded fighters. Through the open door, young men can be seen resting on mats, one with a bandaged hand. Since the CNDF-led offensive began in November, her life has become enmeshed with the uprising against the junta. Villagers and fighters share meals and fears.
“I’ve seen some of the children staying with me lose their lives,” she said, adding, “It brings me joy to do something for them.”
Across Myanmar, countless others like Ama form the invisible backbone of the resistance – civilians who remain in war-torn villages despite raging conflict and aerial attacks. Amid the chaos, some transform into surrogate parents – sheltering, feeding and comforting young fighters, who once hid in their homes as peaceful demonstrators fleeing the crackdown that followed the 2021 military coup.
Why stay? Some protect family or ancestral homes, others lack funds to flee, while many are simply tired of running. Ama – whose real name Frontier has protected – said it’s about supporting her “children”, her name for the fighters. They call her “Ama” – literally “mother” in her mother tongue of Nepali. She embodies their cause: freeing ordinary people from military oppression.
Having endured decades of military rule, she is no passive observer. To stay was deliberate, the culmination of a lifetime of resilience. As a community pillar with Nepali Hindu heritage, she challenges the narrow tribal identities that undermine Chin unity.
“It’s not that I’m fearless about dying,” she said. “But death finds everyone eventually. When these young people offer their lives for our country, how could I do any less?”
The siege
The Chin resistance aims to push junta forces to the central drylands. But first, they must defeat the junta’s last Falam stronghold – a hilltop fortress overlooking the former state capital.
Though Chin fighters outnumber the remaining 120 or so regime soldiers, each advance triggers devastating airstrikes and artillery. The junta also sends airborne reinforcements, but CNDF commanders say these are often conscripts enlisted under the military service law, which the regime started enforcing in February last year. Under pressure, these unwilling soldiers often surrender or flee into the forests.
The siege has been deadly. At least four civilians were killed in junta aerial attacks late last year, and dozens of soldiers have died on both sides, said a resistance commander.
Airstrikes destroyed two local churches, in what CNDF commanders suspect was a junta ploy to turn locals against the resistance. In two months, bombs also struck 20 homes, one school and two clinics, according to Chin activists.
These threats lingered as Ama brewed fragrant Nepali tea for her “children”, her pink beanie crowning sun-spotted cheeks. While CNDF leaders have their own affectionate nickname for her – “commander” – her only military attire is a camo-print apron.
Successive governments have treated Ama as an outsider, but she has always called Falam home. Her grandfather left Nepal in the late 19th century to handle work horses for the British in colonial Burma. Nepalis arrived in waves – first as miners in the south, then as farmers and labourers in the Chin and Kachin hills, and most famously, as part of the feared Gurkha regiments in the British colonial army.
Her father joined these forces before Burma’s independence in 1948. Speaking Burmese with her hard-edged Chin accent, she recalled her parents chatting in Nepali at home while, beyond her doorstep, she used the Chin Falam dialect. Later she mastered Thai from being a migrant worker in Chiang Mai.
“Gurkha” – which became a blanket term for Burmese residents with Nepali roots – were denied official ethnic status under General Ne Win’s regime, which ruled from 1962 to 1988, despite their service to the early Burmese armed forces. Labelled as foreigners, Ama says non-national families like hers faced a crippling tax. Others with sizable businesses or properties saw them confiscated and nationalised. This was all part of Ne Win’s nationalist agenda that marginalised and dispossessed communities who had settled in the country during the colonial era, and who were accused of having a stranglehold over the economy.
Remembering how, aged seven, she watched in confusion as Nepali-Burmese families frantically packed to leave for India, she said, “It was shocking to see. Some even returned to Nepal.”
Though the Nepali community shrank, her family remained, rearing goats and cattle for butter, milk and yoghurt. Military impositions continued: she and others were forced to harvest their tea plantations for free, she said. “Every household had to provide labour. If you had no young people to send, the elderly had to work instead.”
Finding Jesus
As a child Ama would visit Falam’s Hindu shrine – a still-standing remnant of the once-vibrant Gurkha community.
“People always told me my religion wouldn’t take me to heaven,” she said, referring to her Hindu upbringing. “I used to hate Christians.”
Dawn meant chores before school – milking cows, collecting firewood – leaving her “too tired to learn”. Against her parents’ wishes, she abandoned education at 15 for the family business.
Within a few years, she married a Chin man and had four children in quick succession. But her husband’s alcoholism ended their marriage, and he broke from the family, leaving her a single mother at 24. Desperate for work to support her family, she left for Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, while her sister cared for her children in Falam.
“I couldn’t speak Thai at first,” she said, tears welling. “People looked down on me. I missed my children so much.”
Ama worked first as a housemaid, then in a noodle restaurant. Though she challenged her Chin Christian friends about God’s existence, despair eventually drew her to church. There, the community offered her what she’d lost – belonging. She was baptised as a Presbyterian.
“Had I stayed in Falam, I’d never have found Jesus,” she reflected. “At my lowest point, I found him.”
A second marriage, to a Thai man, brought another child but the new husband died from cancer five years later. After working at an Italian restaurant, she started her own roadside barbecue stall. Her oldest daughter eventually joined her in Thailand. Now two children live there, while three remain in Chin.
“I have seven grandchildren; only one girl,” she said. “Even my father had 11 brothers and no sisters. Must be genetic.”
In May 2006, she returned to Falam to care for her aging mother. Over the following 15 years, life settled into a routine – church, chores and collecting metal scraps and bottles to resell for income. Then came the military coup on February 1, 2021.
“I felt like crying the whole day. I’ve lived under Ne Win and Than Shwe; now it’s Min Aung Hlaing,” she said, naming Myanmar’s succession of military dictators, whose rule was fleetingly relieved by the decade of semi-civilian governance before the coup. “I know how terrible military rule is. We must eliminate dictatorship once and for all.”
“If the country was without military rule, I wouldn’t have needed to go abroad,” she said, reflecting on her own life struggles. “People wouldn’t have to suffer like this.”
With locals’ hunting traditions and deep knowledge of the rugged terrain, Chin has seen fierce resistance. The military has been pushed from rural areas as fighting nears the towns. But reprisals by the regime have been brutal, and many Chin villagers have fled to neighbouring India or hidden in forests.
Due to the constant risk of airstrikes and artillery barrages, Ama often retreats to the village head’s hand-dug shelter. Other challenges are more mundane but no less pressing: daily essentials have skyrocketed in price as the junta blockades resistance-held areas. Medicine is scarce, while vaccinations and education have stopped for many.
Yet she prays for Min Aung Hlaing. “I ask God to change him,” she said of the junta chief.
Taking turns with the village leader, she sweeps the local church’s grounds several mornings every week and prays alone.
“We don’t want it to be empty,” she said.
Promised land
Ama hasn’t kept cattle in years, and after the coup villagers largely sold their cows and left, causing dairy to vanish. She relies on money her daughter sends from Chiang Mai.
Her mother died in August last year, aged 95, and Ama has started to feel old herself. Since doctors removed pancreatic stones two years ago, her energy has waned. “I tire easily now,” she said.
One cold January evening as fighters pressed towards the military base in Falam, villagers braced for airstrikes. Some dragged bedding into a concrete underpass for shelter, while others whispered in their homes, ears tuned to the sky.
It came as a burst of thunder – not from above, but from Ama’s home. Recuperating fighters, drunk on local wine, had erupted into an argument. Ama scolded them sharply, restoring order, though it cost her half a day’s rest.
“When they make trouble, I tell them off,” she said. “They listen to me and want to stay here with me. I steady myself and give what I can.”
To Ama, the anti-junta struggle promises transformation, including equality for all communities regardless of ethnicity or religion. Yet, unity in the western mountains has so far been elusive.
Two resistance factions in the state have been at loggerheads for more than a year. Largely drawn from different Chin ethnic communities, the forces of the Chinland Council and the Chin Brotherhood have argued fiercely over the state’s political future, and have sometimes fought each other for territory. Across the border in late February, the chief minister of India’s Mizoram state brokered an agreement between the two factions to make peace and merge, but implementing it will be tough amid so much distrust.
Ama’s own story challenges these divisions. As someone of Nepali heritage who embodies Chin identity based on belonging rather than bloodlines, she challenges the ethno-nationalism that often divides Myanmar’s resistance.
Back at the makeshift chapel, Moses, an aptly named CNDF vice president, reads from a Falam-dialect Bible by torchlight, speaking of deliverance and patience.
“The Israelites’ journey from Egypt to Canaan should have taken 40 days,” he tells the villagers. “But it lasted 40 years. God delivered them. God will deliver us from this chaos too.”
The siege of Falam goes on. For Ama and her neighbours, staying put has become its own journey, sustained by faith in a promised land that awaits beyond the war.
