EOMAIA

“Backpack midwives” in their 20s venture into Myanmar’s war zones and ethnic minority areas where healthcare has collapsed, risking their lives to deliver babies. Their training school is in Thailand. Stripped of dreams by the 2021 coup, women unable to graduate high school chose this path to save mothers and children, gathering at a Thai border town in March 2026 for a year of rigorous training while living together.

Starting with medical lectures, they face fierce clinical training at a hospital from July, directly delivering babies and confronting difficult births and miscarriages. Alongside these harsh days, they hold reflection meetings nightly at the dormitory, laugh over trivial things, bicker but encourage each other, video-call boyfriends, and sometimes wet pillows from homesickness.

In January 2027, their innocence gone, the 25 women return to their war-torn homelands. A birth of a woman evacuated to the jungle from airstrikes. Moving at night when bombings are few, they prepare using only headlamps. As dawn brightens and a newborn’s cry echoes through the misty forest, we remember that every human, transcending enemy or ally, had a mother who risked her life to give birth to us, and the world is still worth believing in.