Word: chaung
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...last thing on Min Soe's mind was casting a vote. Cyclone Nargis had just razed his house and ravaged the rice paddies that were to provide half of his yearly income. Nearly all the other wooden shacks in his village of Too Chaung had also been annihilated by the storm. Then, on May 10, representatives from Burma's repressive military junta descended on the village. Were they coming to bring badly needed food, water and building materials to the people of Too Chaung? Hardly. Instead, the government men forced villagers to participate in a constitutional referendum that critics have...
Apparently, the country's top brass disagreed. Although certain districts ravaged by the storm had their polls postponed until May 24, Too Chaung was declared one of the cyclone-struck regions that had already "returned to normalcy," as the government-run newspaper, The New Light of Myanmar, put it. That would be news to Too Chaung's residents, who were still tying together bamboo poles and palm fronds to build crude temporary shelters the day of the referendum. Villagers who voted in a nearby school filed out quietly afterward, hardly looking pleased about participating in what the junta has touted...
...Saturday, I went back to the village of Too Chaung to see whether a referendum was really being held. It was, but when I pulled up at the polling station, a clutch of government officials demanded to know what I was doing there. They ordered me to give my name, nationality and passport number. The information was carefully recorded by six different officials in six different notebooks. Reports will surely be filed, perhaps six separate times. And as the information works its way up the chain of command, the people of the Irrawaddy Delta will still be waiting...
...picked up kindling scraps, he barely glanced at a pair of bloated bodies splayed on the riverbank. Death is so pervasive in the delta now, what are two more corpses? Like hundreds of villages across the delta, almost all the bamboo shacks in Mya Hen's hamlet of Phya Chaung, near the town of Bogalay, collapsed under the force of a massive tidal surge triggered by the storm. No one is sure of the death toll, but if other nearby villages are any indication, at least half of the residents perished. "I was lucky to have survived," Mya Hen says...
...Japs threatened northwest Burma early in 1944, Williams was told to lead his 45 elephants out any way he could. His story of how he coaxed them, their riders, and a small army of hungry refugees over more than 100 miles of plains and mountain wilderness between Kan-chaung, Burma and Silchar, India will remind readers, as it does Elephant Bill himself, of Hannibal's crossing of the Alps. But Williams keeps his voice at a modest pitch even when reciting this journey's most spectacular feat, i.e., leading his charges across a 3-ft.-wide ledge hundreds...