Vatican newspaper highlights Scottish aid worker’s efforts in Myanmar

October 20, 2026

In a front-page article in its October 19 edition, the Vatican newspaper highlighted the work of Meredith Bunn, a Scottish aid worker who was abducted by soldiers in war-torn Myanmar.

Bunn, now free, told L’Osservatore Romano that “the reality on the ground right now is substantially worse than many people outside the country can grasp. Essentially, there isn’t a single place that hasn’t been affected” by the civil war.”

“The population is living amid conflict, massive waves of displaced people, a total lack of hospitals, malnutrition, rising disease, shattered livelihoods, severed trade routes, inflation, burned-down villages, and the constant threat of airstrikes and unexploded ordnance,” she continued. “A person from Myanmar can vanish into a detention center, and no one, outside of their own family, might ever know what happened to them. They could be tortured, forcibly conscripted, killed, or simply made to disappear.”

Bunn, whose organization (Skills for Humanity) clears mines and provides other aid, added:

People should not be expected to remain resilient indefinitely in the face of dictatorship, hunger, displacement, bombings, and the loss of their own future. Constantly praising people for their resilience risks becoming a way of normalizing everything they are forced to endure.

 

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Further information:

• Rischiare la vita per aiutare gli altri tra villaggi bombardati e civili uccisi (L'Osservatore Romano, 10/19/26)