How's this for an intimidating experience? You're about to address a 200-strong meeting of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in Geneva. Your topic is the long-standing campaign of terror by Burma's military regime against unarmed civilians in Shan state, the childhood home you fled. Your audience includes members of that same military regime. Also, you're 17 years old.

"My voice was shaking," says Charm Tong, now 24, and already a seasoned and celebrated campaigner for Shan state's embattled people. "But I thought, 'You have to do this. You don't get so many opportunities to tell the world.'" So she made an impassioned speech—the presence of Burmese officials only emboldening her. "They were forced to listen to what I had to say," she says. Three years later, aged 20, Charm Tong set up a unique school for young Shan in northern Thailand, which is now training a new generation of human rights activists. She is also a founding member of the widely respected Shan Women's Action Network (SWAN), whose meticulous reports have documented the rape of hundreds of women and girls by Burmese soldiers.

Charm Tong's political education started early. She was born in Burma's central Shan state, home to the country's biggest ethnic minority, and where killings and mass relocations of civilians were—and still are—shockingly common. Charm Tong was about six when her parents sent her to a Catholic orphanage on the Thai-Burma border, where she was brought up with 30 other children by a Shan nun. She saw her parents once a year. "I cried a lot," she remembers. "I was young and didn't understand why my parents had sent me away. Now I appreciate it. They thought I'd be safe and get an education."

She was a voracious learner. Charm Tong rose just after dawn for English lessons, attended Thai high school during the day, and took Chinese classes in the evenings. Weekends were reserved for studying her mother tongue, Shan. She was also schooled in the suffering of refugees who poured across the nearby border into Thailand to escape persecution or poverty. Unlike Burma's other ethnic minorities, the Shan have no refugee status in Thailand, and therefore no official protection or support. Many risk arrest and ill–treatment as illegal manual laborers, while women are often trafficked into the sex industry.

At age 16, Charm Tong began working with human rights groups, interviewing sex workers, illegal migrants, HIV patients and rape victims. The following year, she spoke in Geneva on their behalf—and still speaks, in four languages, with the poise and confidence of a mature woman.

In 2001 she set up the School for Shan State Nationalities Youth. Mostly funded by private donations, the school is located in a modest rented house in northern Thailand. Not only Shan students attend, but also Burma's other ethnic minorities, such as the Palaung, Akha and Pa-O. Due to the Shan's shadowy legal status, the school's exact location is secret. The young students, who sleep on the floor in spartan dorms, cannot leave the grounds unescorted during their nine–month term. "They're all under house arrest," jokes Charm Tong. Each year more than 150 young people apply; the school can accommodate only 24.

Survival comes first for many Shan, says Charm Tong, learning only a distant second. Even outside the conflict zones, Burma's education system is a shambles; untutored, even the brightest youths end up in menial jobs. "I was very lucky to get nine years' education," says Charm Tong, whose school is an attempt to rescue some of Burma's so–called "lost generation." Students study English and computing, and receive training in human rights action, such as how to collect testimonies and write reports, from Charm Tong and other local activists. Most of the school's 90 or so graduates now work for youth or women's organizations as teachers, human rights defenders, health workers and community radio broadcasters. "The idea is that they use their education to promote other people's rights," says Charm Tong.

When not at the school, Charm Tong lends her energy to SWAN, a small but vocal women's group whose "License To Rape" report enraged the junta. "Rape is still widespread and very systematic," says Charm Tong, who co–authored the report. "It's used to terrorize communities." Burma's generals, who dismissed the report as "fabrications," regard SWAN as an enemy of the state. Charm Tong is unfazed. "The generals are the enemy of the people," she shrugs.

So who are her own heroes? Her father, who died last year, was a commander with the Shan State Army, an insurgent group still battling Burmese government troops. Her heroine is "Teacher Mary," the Catholic nun who raised and educated her, and who gave her the strength and self–esteem she now imparts to her own students. Charm Tong is like "a candle in the darkness," says May, 19, a girl from Burma's northerly Kachin state. "She never behaves like she's superior or better. She is like our sister, and the school is our family."

Charm Tong at the school that she founded in northern Thailand for displaced Shan students