Word: pyapon
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Dates: during 2008-2008
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...Kalaylay," said the boatman Myint Swe, pointing to something floating in the Pyapon River amid drowned and rotting buffaloes. "Kalaylay," he said, pointing to another. And another. Kalaylay is a Burmese word for "infant," and he was pointing to their tiny corpses...
...spotted at least two dozen bodies of men, women and children during the short voyage from the battered delta town of Pyapon to Myint Swe's village of Myinkakon, where last weekend Cylone Nargis claimed a hundred lives and flattened most houses. Today, six days later, government aid has finally reached the village: officials gave each household about two kilos of rice - barely enough to feed a family for a day. Nearby villages have received nothing...
...junta claims otherwise. State-controlled media show high-ranking soldiers in uniform overseeing the timely delivery of relief supplies to a grateful people. But a tour of the cyclone-ravaged communities along the Pyapon River reveals the military's efforts to be criminally inadequate. Deprived of food, water, shelter and medical supplies, and stalked by disease, those who survived the cyclone might yet perish in its aftermath. A natural disaster has come and gone. A new, man-made one has already begun...
...cyclone raged for 12 hours, recalls boatman Myint Swe, and for three days afterwards the Pyapon River was clogged with bodies. Like hundreds of other delta villages, Myinkakon had few sturdy buildings to shelter in and no higher ground to flee to. And anyway, says Myint Swe, there was no way to outrun the storm surge, a wall of fast-moving water taller than the tallest man, which raced out of the darkness without warning and swept away tens of thousands of lives across the low-lying region...
...banks of the Pyapon River, survivors of Cyclone Nargis now lash together lengths of bamboo to make primitive shelters for families the junta is too incompetent or uncaring to help. Against the odds, without any domestic or foreign aid, new homes are rising on the sodden and shredded remains...