Episode #607: “I could not stay under a military rule that’s been killing thousands of people,” Maple says. “I cannot just sit and watch.”

When Myanmar’s military seized power in February 2021, Maple was a scholarship student in South Korea studying Business Management and Entrepreneurship, already thinking about how she might one day redirect her education toward reforming the system she had grown up in. School, as she experienced it, had been shaped by hierarchy and competition rather than curiosity. Students were ranked into sections, with privileges reserved for the highest group. “The top students were in section A,” she recalls, describing how access to resources like the computer room followed those divisions. By fifth grade, monthly “talent” badges were awarded to the top ten students and publicly removed from anyone who fell behind. “It’s not about learning,” she says. “It’s all about memorizing everything and just taking the exams in the best way possible.”

Maple’s political awareness formed early. At eight years old, during the 2007 monk-led protests, she marched with her family and later watched video footage of crackdowns at home. “I saw the bodies and everything,” she remembers. By the time the coup trapped her in Myanmar during a visit from her Korean university during the pandemic, she initially believed international pressure might reverse it, studying United Nations statements closely before realizing those words offered no protection.

Maple began fundraising for the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, offering scholarship consultations to students who could show donation receipts. The post spread; her bank account was frozen; soldiers arrived with a warrant under Section 505A. She spent eleven months in hiding while continuing her Korean coursework online, the isolation eroding her health and pushing her toward suicide until a drawing from her younger sister interrupted that spiral. After a failed attempt to cross into Thailand and a deportation, Maple eventually made it back across the border.

In Mae Sot, she now works with displaced students navigating the legal and financial barriers that stand between them and formal education. Here she is continuing her life’s work that started many years ago, yet under very different conditions. Myanmar students, she insists, are “smart, outstanding, and hardworking,” and resilient beyond their years. What they lack is not determination but access. “If you just give them a chance,” she promises, “they would do whatever it takes.”