Things didn't go so well during the first 22 years. Due to seasonal water shortages in their village, Ni Kung, his wife and children, along with 14 other families, decided to relocate. So they moved from the mountains of Chin State in 1984 to a lower elevation in order to pioneer a new village, which they named Cang Ai. There they cleared land, built simple bamboo homes, planted small vegetable gardens, and raised a few chickens and pigs. The stream from which they watered their gardens was half a mile away, but it flowed year round. Still, life was not easy, and when I first visited Cang Ai in 2006, only seven families remained in the village.

To Burma's military leaders who have been trying to suppress Kachin State's independence movement for five decades, she is a woman who hardly exists, a mere speck of dust on their political chessboard. To soldiers in the Kachin Independence Army, she is just one of forty thousand frightened people who have recently fled from their villages to escape fresh fighting. To her husband, a pastor, she is the wife whom he has seen only twice in the past four months, as he, like most other Kachin men in the war zone, has remained behind to protect his crops. To the thirty women and children with whom she sleeps each night on the wooden floor of their common room at Jan Mai Refugee Camp, Htulum Sumlut is a godsend, a light in their darkness.