Word: river
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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There are tens of thousands more in need in even more remote parts of the district, but the few foreign agencies in town are struggling to help them. "We don't have the means," says Sosa Calo. "To reach affected areas we have to use the river. And most of the boats in the area were destroyed by the cyclone." One area in Laputta district called Pyin Sa Lu was hit badly by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which destroyed houses and almost certainly lives (the junta released no data), then struck again by Cyclone Nargis. This time, more than...
...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...
...especially with post-cyclone prices rising. They have a store of unhusked rice, which is damp and inedible, and many people now survive on coconuts blown down from the trees. Clean water is also scarce. Their well is now polluted with sea-water, so villagers take water from the river and boil it, or collect the rain flowing from the monastery's shattered tin roofs...
Villagers will retrieve a corpse from the river if it is recognized as a family member or a neighbor. The bodies of ten babies, all from Myinkakon, washed up in the days following the cyclone and were buried at a nearby cemetery. Unidentified or unidentifiable corpses drift along the river or snag in vegetation along its banks. "Nobody is collecting them," says Myint Swe. "They're just floating around." There is a rumor, repeated by Myint Swe, that soldiers are not burying the dead, but tossing them back in the river. Just a few feet from these corpses there...
...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...