7. Finally visited the delta region affected by cyclone nargis

Ten months ago the delta region of Myanmar experienced a cyclone which killed in one storm surge wave about 130,000 people. At that time I decided I would like to help and would come to burma to donate money to the cause of reconstruction in the delta.

I have lived for more than 15 years in Myanmar and have been fed and clothed and supported as a monk here for 13 years of that time. I thought this would be a good time to try to repay the debt of gratitude I have to the people of Myanmar for their never ending generosity and kindness that they have always extended to me.

So with such good intentions and knowing that I would find some way to help I came here and set about making contact with the people I knew to get permission to visit the affected areas in the delta. It has now been 4 months since I arrived and I have finally achieved the goal I set out to achieve. Boy it feels good to finally be able to say that I made it there.

I have just spent the last 5 days in a small part of the delta around the town of Mawlamyine Kyun. I stayed at a buddhist school orphanage there and went by boat with a senior monk there to several nearby villages to see the progress of charitable works in the area. Whilst there I was able to visit other monks I knew in town and also interview many of the villagers in that area affected by the cyclone.

So what is there to report? If you gave money to the relief funds and even if you didnt you govt. did then it has saved people brought to their knees by disaster from a further calamity. Without the local and international aid effort which has relieved these people from incredible hardship it is hard to imagine how they would have survived.

If you are a farmer in the delta you live in a small bamboo hut with a thatched roof with your family. You have 6 acres of land to farm and grow rice. You borrow money to grow a crop and when the crop is harvested you pay back the debt. You live from crop to crop from day to day.You have no savings. On your land you can harvest twice a year with a summer crop and another crop in the rainy season. Then as you are harvesting the summer crop a cyclone hits. At 5.00pm before nightfall the wind and rain picks up and it just keeps getting stronger and stronger. By midnight the roofs of 90% of the houses in the village have been ripped off by the winds. Something you have never seen in your life before. Trees are crashing down things are flying through the air. The rivers all around you mudflat in the delta are rising and the water is coming up through the floor boards of your house. It is pitch black. The rain is pelting down on you.  If you are living close to the coast your house is about to be hit by a 12 ft wave of water that will wash you bamboo house away and you with it. ... The area I visited was further inland they did not die, but the storm damage left them all with no crop, no seed for the next crop, no roof on their house. The water damage left them with hardly any food. What do you do? You all run to the local monastery for help. This is what they described to me. Usually 3 or 4 villages of about 200 to 400 houses will support one buddhist monastery which acts also as the local school and community centre.

When you get to the monastery it has had the iron roof half blow away too. The top of the pagoda is snapped off and there are trees toppled everywhere too. All you can do is sit and wait....The initial few days no one could move anywhere because of the flood waters. Everyone took shelther in the monastery and waited.  No help came. No one knew if it ever would. A lot of the big boats which are the lifeline of the deltas canals and rivers were sunk in the storm. If you lived lower in the delta you tried to move away from the coast. As you did you had to steer your boat through the debris in the river and also through a river full of dead bodies of water buffalo and humans.

Many people arrived in Mawlaymine Kyun and took refuge in the monasteries there. Up to 1000 people lived in the monastery where I stayed. People started shipping in rice and food from Yangon, people from all over myanmar started sending aid. Slowly over the weeks and months things returned to some form of normality. WIth local international help of food and seed etc. The farmers have been able to put in crops in the least affected areas and have started to rebuild their livelihoods.

I have arrived 10 months later and people are pretty happy. This is not an emergency anymore, but a slow process of recovering a subsistance farming community. The new patches of corrugated iron roofing on the roofs of every building show the repair work that has been done everywhere.

Will put up some photos in the next post coming soon....