Here are a few stories and observations from my most recent trip to Myanmar. I’m Katie, a new intern at GlobalGiving. I moved with my family from Los Angeles to Myanmar in 2003 and I’ve spent every summer and winter vacation back home since. This last visit, instead of karaoke(ing) with friends or sitting around at tea shops, I got a chance to help out with the cyclone relief efforts in some of the hardest hit areas of the delta.

Many of the accounts are the same: the water level rose at about four in the afternoon, the tides churning like an underwater earthquake. Then, darkness comes without even the light of the moon, bringing with it engulfing waves up to ten feet. Villagers in the delta flee to the sturdiest places they can find - the wooden house of a village leader, a monastery, or a tall dike in the rice patty fields. But for so many, they stand no chance. It is the perfect storm.

I’m not sure when or where it will all hit me. I am currently sitting on the eighteen hour flight back to the states after spending two and a half intensive weeks in Myanmar. I can’t even begin to process everything I’ve seen after cyclone Nargis devastated the country less than a month ago. More than the sight of dead bodies, flattened villages or destroyed crops, the stories I’ve heard have put a move on my heart so great, I found myself spending many interviews trying to hold back unearned tears as I listened to people speak so matter-of-factly about the realities of their extreme hardship.

I’ll never forget that trip to Pyat Pong, a village region deep in the Irrawaddy Delta. Corpses of men, women and children lie face down in the flooded rice fields or floating in the muddy waters of the river, still uncollected. “I was the only one in my family to survive” U Soe Myint, a 32 year old man from a nearby village, told me, as he sat hunched over on a log. “That night, the wind knocked over a tree outside my house and the trunk fell on my back” he continued with deadened emotion. As he slowly lifted the back of his tattered shirt, he said, “It’s broken now.”
“Are you in pain?” I immediately asked. He nodded.
“Have you seen a doctor?”
As his deep eyes looked up at me, I wished I hadn’t asked such a stupid question. It made me feel dizzy, the thought of this man sitting for a month with a broken back without any help.

Note: The names of villagers have been changed for their protection.

To be continued tomorrow.

Save to: