Burmese blaze

摘要

IT WOULD BE hours before Hla Hla Win felt any pain, which was just as well. It was the morning of March 27th and more than a thousand people, Ms Hla Hla Win among them, had gathered in Yangon to protest against the army's coup. When security forces began firing automatic weapons into the crowd, she fled the scene, but not quickly enough to avoid being shot in the hand. Her father, waiting nearby on his motorbike, drove her to the nearest clinic. But as they drew towards it, they saw it was surrounded by armed soldiers. Ms Hla Hla Win, a 17-year-old student whose name The Economist has changed for her safety, retreated home cradling her hand, which now resembled "a bag closed with a drawstring". She did not receive treatment until mid-afternoon, at a monastery where doctors loyal to the resistance had set up a mobile clinic. But lacking the proper equipment, they could not set the broken bone. When the pain finally set in, says her mother, she cried and cried. It was four days before she had an operation.