Everything Is Broken (23 page)

In the days immediately after the cyclone, the surviving villagers had been picked up by rescue boats sent by private citizens and the authorities in the town of Bogale. Though Bogale was also badly hit by the cyclone, the storm surge had not been so high and the sturdier cement structures had been able to weather the storm. At Bogale, the villagers were able to gather together in a monastery where monks had erected large tents to shelter them and thousands of other villagers. People traveled down from Rangoon to bring them food and blankets. They drank water from plastic bottles supplied by the Red Cross and other charitable organizations they had never heard of before. Some townspeople gave them secondhand clothes to wear. A doctor and two nurses came to check on them, stitching up wounds and tending to broken limbs.

But then, after two weeks, the township authorities came to the monastery and told them they had to return home. Before leaving Bogale, each person received one
tamein
or
longyi
, a sizable tarpaulin sheet, a thirteen-pound sack of uncooked rice, a packet of biscuits, four portions of dried noodles, and one bottle of drinking water. Together with their supplies, they were loaded onto a boat and taken back to their village. Or, to be more accurate, they were taken back to the land on which the village had once stood.

As I followed the villagers farther along the dirt track, I looked inland and saw that there were no other signs of habitation around Pyay Chaung. Fields and swamps stretched out, endless and flat, toward a rain-smudged horizon. I was struck by how isolated the village was, here in the center of the Irrawaddy Delta. Even before the cyclone, Pyay Chaung did not have a telephone line or any electricity. Just as the rest of the world had not known what was happening in the delta during and after the storm, so people in villages like this had little idea what was going on beyond the limited part of the delta they could see before them.

I asked the assembled villagers if they had heard about the U.S., French, and British navy ships that had been moored offshore, waiting to deliver aid and provide assistance in the aftermath of the cyclone. Some of the villagers looked confused. “Wasn’t that just a rumor?” one man asked.

“No, no,” said another, “I heard through the radio that the ships were there, but the government would not let them land on Burmese shores.”

There was a harsh laugh from the back of the crowd and someone said, “What the government wants and what the people want are often quite different!”

“So it
was
true?” a woman standing close to me asked incredulously. “The ships were really there . . . ?”

Since those fraught days in May, an unofficial détente had been declared between the aid community and the regime, and the ability of aid agencies to help cyclone survivors had been greatly increased. Building upon efforts made in those first few weeks, aid agencies were able to provide more systematic deliveries of food, shelter material, water purification equipment, and other supplies necessary for the rebuilding of homes and villages. Goods from outside the country, as well as those sourced in Burma, were being funneled through Rangoon and delivered to hubs set up by United Nations agencies and NGOs at the bigger delta towns of Pyapon, Bogale, Mawlamyainggyun, and Laputta. From these towns, supplies were being sorted and transported onward, farther into the delta.

The tide had begun to turn in the first week of June, around the time that the UN World Food Programme was finally granted permission to bring helicopters into Burma. Helicopters are usually deployed in the first few days after a natural disaster, when they can deliver immediate lifesaving supplies and conduct search-and-rescue missions in areas that are difficult or impossible to reach by land or water. It was four long weeks after the cyclone before the regime allowed the helicopters to enter Burmese airspace. Even then, permission was granted begrudgingly and with caveats; each helicopter was only allowed to be operational for three days, after which time it would have to leave the country. Daily flight plans had to be submitted and agreed to in advance, and the helicopters had to return to Rangoon each night—an order that resulted in wasting costly fuel that could have been better used flying sorties to the villages where help was still urgently needed. Eventually, though, the authorities seemed to relent to the presence of the helicopters, as the three-day restriction was lifted and the fleet of helicopters was able to remain in-country ferrying aid workers and material throughout the delta.

Aid was finally getting through to those who needed it, and NGO situation reports and press releases published three months after the cyclone recorded the results. The World Food Programme had dispatched over 25,600 metric tons of food to be distributed through local and international NGOs to almost 733,500 people. World Vision wrote that it had established its largest ever number of children’s programs in a single country and had, among other activities, set up 84 “child-friendly spaces,” which were equipped with toys and learning material for 10,000 children in Rangoon and the delta. Supplies sent by Caritas to the delta included 8,500 mosquito nets and tens of thousands of pots, pans, plates, and cups. CARE distributions included 4,000 yards of plastic sheeting and 20 metric tons of rice seed.

The increased ability of aid organizations to ramp up their emergency response was partly attributable to a diplomatic mechanism set up by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) during a meeting held a couple of weeks after the cyclone. According to an ASEAN press release, the mechanism would “facilitate trust, confidence and cooperation”; it would also provide a less threatening and face-saving way forward for the Burmese government. The result was the Tripartite Core Group (TCG), which consisted of three representatives each from ASEAN, the United Nations, and the Burmese government. Based in Rangoon, the TCG held weekly meetings and acted as a sort of humanitarian broker for negotiations between the Burmese regime and the rest of the world.

One of the TCG-negotiated efforts was the Post-Nargis Joint Assessment, or PONJA, a survey of the cyclone-affected area conducted by 250 enumerators recruited from among all parties involved—ASEAN, the UN, NGOs, and the government. The PONJA collated data from a sampling of 291 villages spread out evenly in the cyclone’s path and was the first effort to compile comprehensive data on what had happened in the delta since Cyclone Nargis.

I happened to be in Rangoon in late July, when the survey was released, and went to the ceremony launching the completed PONJA report at one of the city’s plush business hotels. It was a relatively grand affair attended by foreign ambassadors and the heads of UN agencies and aid organizations. A simultaneous launch was also held at the ASEAN ministerial meeting that was taking place in Singapore. The Burmese government was represented by the deputy minister of foreign affairs, Kyaw Thu, who called it “an auspicious and milestone event.” Camera flashes went off across the hall as the deputy minister spoke, and the ceremony had a strangely celebratory air, as if he were opening a new school or launching a ship rather than releasing a document detailing the losses and damage caused by a natural disaster.

For all the hype and publicity, the PONJA report was an unsatisfying document to read. The section describing “The Immediate Response” skips neatly over the month of May and focuses on June, blithely ignoring the initial weeks after the cyclone. The text was airbrushed substantially with sentences like “[T]he armed forces provided services that assisted the government, the private sector, civil society organizations, local community and international aid workers for more effective and timely delivery of aid supplies and services to the victims of the cyclone.” Such descriptions were, to say the least, a euphemistic interpretation of events.

Despite mumbled criticisms, however, aid workers I spoke to in Rangoon said the PONJA was a useful tool for convening with the various ministries. It meant that they didn’t have to deal with the government’s usual denials (
yes, we have no disasters today
), and they had a working document everyone could refer to that stated, yes, there is a problem, and, yes, we need to prioritize, say, the treatment and distribution of clean and drinkable water.

It still was not easy for foreign aid workers to get into Burma and work in the delta, but it had, at least, become possible. The first hurdle was simply getting into the country. Though many more visas were being granted (by early August, the UN reported 358 of its staff had received visas), not everyone was allowed in. Outside Burma I had joined in countless conversations about how to secure a Burmese visa. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the process, and the information we exchanged was often contradictory:

Some aid workers thought it might be easier to apply for tourist visas and enter the country unofficially, but it was a hit-or-miss tactic. One aid worker who tried that method had her passport returned with a Post-it note stuck above a Pakistan entry stamp dated 2005, the time of the Kashmir earthquake. The word “earthquake” had been written on the note, and it must have been assumed by eagle-eyed embassy staff that the timing of her visit to Pakistan was no mere coincidence.

Once in the country, the next hurdle was gaining access to the delta. Special travel permits had to be requested from the TCG and whichever government ministry the aid agency was affiliated with. I was able to obtain travel permission since I had been hired to compile reports on conditions in the delta for international aid agencies, and they applied on my behalf. When I went to the delta, I still had to return to Rangoon to request additional permission letters for each township I visited. My arrival and departure needed to be signed off on by the township authorities, and though I was able to travel to the villages by day, I had to return each evening and spend the night in the town where I was registered.

The bureaucracy involved was maddening, but I was finally able to meet people who had lived through Cyclone Nargis; though they had been at the epicenter of recent events, their voices had remained mostly unheard. In between compiling the specific information I needed for the aid agency reports, I spoke to as many people as I could wherever I went.

I had to leave Pyay Chaung, the village I was visiting, by late afternoon so as to get back to Bogale before nightfall, but the headman wanted to introduce me to the local noodle vendor before I left. Mya Win was in his late forties and used to have a family business making the popular noodle soup
monhinga
to sell to villagers. He had lost his entire family during Cyclone Nargis, his wife and four children ranging in age from fourteen to twenty-two.

So that we could chat away from the crowd, Mya Win invited me into the hut he had built after the cyclone. It was a small structure, the size of a child’s playhouse, with just enough space for one man to lie down on the floor and a roof so low that I had to stoop to climb inside. The rickety shelter was made from donated tarpaulin and mismatched planks Mya Win had retrieved from the storm debris.

As we sat squeezed inside the cramped hut, Mya Win talked about what happened to him and his family when the cyclone passed over the village. His face had a naturally stern expression that made him look as if he was concentrating especially hard to remember something, and he spoke in an unhurried monotone. When the river began to overflow its banks, Mya Win moved his family to his brother’s larger house, where he thought they would be safe. About thirty people had gathered in the house, and they sat together, chanting Buddhist prayers and praying for protection as the wind grew louder and the water rose up through the floorboards. The water rose so rapidly that before they could decide what to do they were standing in a waist-deep flood inside the house. Adults hoisted small children onto their shoulders and women clutched at their billowing
tamein
. Then, without warning, the roof flew off the house and the whole structure collapsed.

“It was like an explosion,” said Mya Win. “People were thrown everywhere—into the water and into the air . . . I fell in the water and tried to swim, but it wasn’t possible, because the waves were too rough. I grabbed at a floating piece of wood—it had come, I think, from the buffalo shed near my brother’s house. I called out to people, to my family, but I couldn’t hear anything above the noise of the storm . . . After that, I never saw anyone from my family again.”

I had thought Mya Win would carry on speaking, but he ended his story there. One of the villagers standing at the entrance of his hut filled in the rest on his behalf, explaining how the storm surge had carried Mya Win far away from the village and how he had walked back the next day to find that there was nothing left of his family or his home.

Mya Win reached into a corner of the hut where a sleeping mat was rolled up and extracted a photograph that had been tucked inside a folded blanket. It was a picture of his wife that he had come across while helping fellow villagers clear corpses from the fields. He never found the bodies of his wife and children, and this was all he had left to remember his family by. He handed it over to me. The photograph was the size of a postage stamp and must once have been attached to an ID card—it was a small miracle that Mya Win had been able to find such a tiny picture amid the vastness of the demolition that had taken place around him. A water stain had spread across his wife’s broad cheekbones and the black-and-white image was already beginning to fade.

When I handed the picture back to Mya Win, I stupidly asked him how he felt after losing everything. He looked at me blankly, unable to answer, and I realized what a clumsy and pointless question it was. Ashamed of myself, I rushed to fill the dreadful silence with other more practical questions: “How will you make a living now?” I asked. Mya Win answered that he couldn’t go back to selling
monhinga
, as it was a family business and he no longer had any family to help him. There was a small plot of land belonging to his in-laws, and they had spoken about helping him start a plantation, perhaps some areca palm trees, the seeds of which can be sold to betel nut vendors—the market for betel nut was always steady, especially in the delta where so many people still liked to chew betel for its mild narcotic effect. But as Mya Win spoke it was clear that he wasn’t that interested in farming, or areca palms, or the economics of betel. I couldn’t begin to conceive of what it must be like to summon the strength needed to start life all over again.