Everything Is Broken (29 page)

My passport and papers were handed from officer to officer, and each man took his time examining them in detail; looking at my passport photograph, looking at me, looking back at my photograph. They flicked slowly through the passport, turning over each page and examining old visas to other countries. For reasons I was unable to discern, one officer gazed intently at an entry stamp for Marseilles from a holiday I’d taken eight years ago. My permission letter, endorsed by the Ministry of Social Welfare, Relief, and Resettlement, was treated to the same fastidious attention before being handed back to me with a curt nod of dismissal. Only later did I realize that I had accidentally shown them a previously used and out-of-date permission letter. They clearly had not even bothered to read the details. The whole exercise had been for show, another kind of
haka
but performed in the seated position and designed to intimidate, or perhaps just to make it look like they were doing their jobs. Laputta was farther into the delta than Bogale, and the town had been harder hit by the cyclone. Along the waterfront I saw houses that had tilted dramatically to one side or collapsed almost intact into the mud, as if exhausted by the effort of remaining upright. Even six months on, storm debris was still strewn around the outskirts of town. I watched a young girl picking through rotten palm fronds and broken planks in an abandoned neighborhood. Balancing on fallen logs, she crossed the swamplike terrain like a tightrope walker. She didn’t seem to find anything—whatever was salvageable was no doubt picked up long ago—and after a while I got the sense that she was looking for something specific. I saw her conducting her careful search most days when I passed by, and once she looked up and caught my eye. Yellow circles of the tree bark used to make the cosmetic paste,
thanaka
, had been swirled all over her face, and she looked pale and ghostly amid the surrounding desolation.

The only accommodation I was able to find in Laputta was a grim shoebox of a room at a guesthouse situated above the town video parlor. Each night the generator-fueled entertainment featured back-to-back Chinese gangster movies. Falling asleep to the sounds of screams, crashes, and gunshots gave my dreams a violent edge, and I often awoke with a start, thinking that something awful had just happened. Whenever I opened the door in the hopes of catching a nonexistent breeze, Burmese men staying along the corridor would gather in the doorway and gaze unabashedly into my room. One of the guesthouse workers, a young boy no taller than my waist, would often come and rescue me in these situations. He was small but tough, and he strode down the corridor with the same swagger of the gangsters shooting one another to pieces on the television screen below, snapping his cleaning rag in the air and chasing off the unwanted sightseers.

His name, he told me, was Gam Ba Ri. It didn’t sound like a Burmese name, and it took me a while to work out that he had been nicknamed “Gambari” after the Nigerian UN negotiator to Burma because he had dark skin and similar wide-set eyes, which gave him a permanently startled expression. Gambari and I made small talk whenever we bumped into each other. When I asked how old he was, he looked flustered and held up six fingers before turning to another worker, who was napping on top of the check-in desk, and asking, “How old am I?” The drowsy reply came that Gambari was twelve, but he looked no more than eight, even taking into account the malnutrition that stunts the growth of so many children in Burma.

After a few days, Gambari took to lingering in my room in the evenings. He chatted aimlessly and played with the camera on my cell phone (though my phone didn’t work anywhere in Burma, I still carried it around out of habit). He would take pictures of me, or the ceiling fan that didn’t work, or my bag lying in a grubby corner, and marvel at the out-of-focus results. Gambari told me one night that his parents had been killed by Nargis. After their death, he and his older siblings had traveled to Laputta in search of work. Gambari had started off as a serving boy in a tea shop but later found a cleaning job at the guesthouse, which he preferred as the money was better (K6,000, or about US$6.00, a month) and the work was less hectic.

One day Gambari said, “Auntie, your Burmese isn’t up to much, is it? How come it’s no good?” Having grown up in the isolation of the village and not gone to school, he had little comprehension of other languages and that there were people in the world who might
not
speak Burmese or the more familiar languages of neighboring countries. I tried to teach him a bit of English—
Hello. How are you? What’s your name?—
but he always collapsed into a giggling fit when he tried to repeat the words, claiming they were the silliest sounds he’d ever heard.

According to official figures, 833 orphans or children separated from their parents had been registered since Cyclone Nargis. With so many people dead, some aid workers estimated that the true number must be a great deal higher. Either the orphans were not being registered properly or they were being absorbed back into their communities through relatives. There were rumors, too, of course. People said that some orphans were being taken to military camps, where they were forced to join the regime’s dreaded orphan brigade and be trained as ruthless fighters who had no families to worry about or to worry about them.

Many of the redemption tales I scribbled down in the village and at the tea shop had to do with mothers and the almost inhuman strength they had shown when it came to trying to protect their children during the storm. There was the story published in a Burmese weekly about a woman who had gone into labor just as the storm struck. She managed to last through the night holding on to a tree, but when she climbed down the next day, she felt her legs give way beneath her, and she ended up giving birth where she was, alone in the middle of a field strewn with corpses. Another woman gave birth during the cyclone while holding on to a tree in the storm surge. When the newborn was tugged away in the flood, he was still attached to his mother by the umbilical cord and she was able to pull him back.

One mother had no way to hold on to her seven-month-old baby when she climbed a tree to escape the rising waters, so she put his shirt between her teeth and bit down hard while clasping her arms around the tree. Once the storm had passed and she had climbed down to the ground, she was unable to open her mouth and release her child. Other survivors had to help her unclench her jaw and stem the flow of blood that poured out.

And then there was the popular tale of the baby found inside a pot. A toddler placed inside a pot had somehow floated through the waves unharmed. Later found bobbing calmly on the water, the baby was reunited with his parents. Such a miracle could not go unacknowledged, and the overjoyed parents renamed their baby O, or “pot” in Burmese.

Inevitably, for each story that had a happy ending, so many more ended painfully. In Laputta, I met a thirty-two-year-old woman from Pyinzalu who had not seen her husband and ten-year-old daughter since the cyclone but still held out hope. “I keep hoping that maybe they are still alive,” she said. “And that maybe they are looking for me, too.” The woman had heard rumors of cyclone survivors washing up on the shores of Bangladesh and had been told that a boatload would soon be returning to Burma. “Is it true? Have you heard this too?” she asked. If she hadn’t found her husband or daughter after six months of searching, it seemed unlikely she would find them now, but I didn’t have the heart to say anything. Before we parted ways, she asked me to write down her daughter’s name. With her house and everything she had owned taken by the storm, I realized it was all she had left. There were no possessions or photographs—just a name. She spelled it out with care and repeated it a couple of times to make sure I wrote it down correctly. I followed her directions and added the few extra details I knew:

 

 

Mi Mi Zaw, ten years old, still missing from Pyinzalu. October 2009.

 

 

 

WHENEVER THE WIND
whips up and a storm moves across the delta, survivors of Cyclone Nargis become nervous. People were sleeping badly at night. Children were woken up by nightmares, and many of those who were in school were unable to concentrate on their studies. Both children and adults carried with them a heavy listlessness that they couldn’t shake off. Some started crying at odd moments, like when they mistakenly handed over the wrong fare for a ferryboat or when they realized they had forgotten to bring the laundry in before the rain. People found themselves in the middle of heated arguments they didn’t mean to begin. Palm toddy, the local brew that stings the back of your throat but aids temporary memory loss, was selling well.

An aid worker who had been in Sri Lanka during the Indian Ocean tsunami pointed out that the traumatic effects of the cyclone were different from those caused by the tsunami. Though people suffered similarly sudden and devastating losses, the experience of the actual disaster was quite distinct. The tsunami lasted minutes; it was short, intense, and horrendously violent. People’s experience of Cyclone Nargis, by contrast, went on for hours—in some cases people were buffeted by the storm for up to twelve hours. And during those long hours so much happened. Mothers let go of their children, husbands were unable to protect their wives, aged parents were left in their homes to drown. One woman I spoke to told me how a crying toddler was swept into her arms while she was holding on to a tree during the storm surge. She let go with one hand so she could hold on to the baby, but she was rocked by a series of waves and the child was swept away again. She didn’t recognize the child and will never know whose it was, but the image of it floating into and out of her arms haunts her still.

Along with the immense and incalculable loss—of people, houses, whole villages—was the shame that descended the morning after the storm. As their clothing had been torn off by the tumultuous waters, many survivors ended up naked and had to scavenge for rags to cover themselves the following day. In the very conservative village society of Burma the sense of shame this caused is hard to forget. Almost everyone I spoke to mentioned the loss of their clothes. A tall, thin man told me he had ended up wearing a mud-soaked child’s dress wrapped around his waist. A young woman who had clung on to a tree for the duration of the storm refused to climb down when other survivors called to her because she no longer had any clothes on; she waited all day, until nightfall, and climbed down in the darkness.

The traditional methods people might have used to alleviate trauma and shame were in many cases no longer available. Buddhist monks and Christian pastors were among the dead, and monasteries and churches were damaged and destroyed. Mya Win, the man I met who had lost all his family and padlocked his hut of salvaged belongings, has nowhere to turn for help in his village; the monastery was washed away and the three monks in residence were killed. Villagers there had searched for the large Buddha statue they had all contributed to purchasing for the monastery, but it too was gone, buried somewhere beneath the mud.

Psychological trauma was erupting all over the delta in ghastly and unnerving ways. When one Burmese aid worker arrived at a village to oversee the monthly food distributions, a teenage girl ran up to her and threw her arms around her, declaring that she had known all along her sister was still alive. Villagers told the aid worker that the girl’s sister had died in Cyclone Nargis, and that they had tried to make her understand that fact, but she refused to believe them. When it came time for the aid worker to leave, the girl clung on to her. “How can you leave me?” she cried. “You’re my sister, and I have waited so long for you to come back.”

I met an eighteen-year-old in Ka Pyo who was the sole remaining member of his family. During the storm he, his four sisters, and their parents had all climbed into one tree. The water rose around them and the wind grew fierce; it stung their skin, lashing them with sand and grit. As the hours passed, they became weakened and, one by one, fell off the tree and were consumed by the waves. Unable to see where his family was, the father had shouted out their names in the darkness to check that everyone was still there, but the answering calls became fewer until, finally, only his son was responding to his hoarse cries. The two survived the storm, but a couple of days later, the father killed himself by banging his head repeatedly against a tree.

In a sense, Nargis was still raging through the delta; people were mentally trapped inside the cyclone. In Thama Thu, I had sat down with ten villagers in a ramshackle shop. The shop’s interior was suffused with a rosy glow from the red tarpaulin sheet that served as part of the roof. There wasn’t much for sale, just hand-sized portions of dried fish, chips inside small plastic bags stapled shut, and palm toddy sold in old beer bottles with wads of rolled-up newspaper used as stoppers.

The owner of the shop, Nwe Nwe, was in her twenties and had lost twenty-three relatives to Cyclone Nargis. During the storm most of her family had sought shelter in a rice warehouse on the riverside while she had run farther inland to the monastery. The warehouse had flooded and everyone inside it had drowned. Nwe Nwe said she had heard them hollering for help and banging on the roof of the warehouse before they died, but the villagers sitting around her said there was no way she could have heard anything above the noise of the storm.

“What did the cyclone sound like?” I asked.

A young boy eagerly recalled the bulletlike sounds he had heard when coconuts from the palm trees began falling into the floodwater.
“Pow! Pow!”
he said, putting his hands together in the shape of a gun and ducking into the trenches behind some rice sacks.
“Pow! Pow! Pow!”

A man began emulating the fierce winds with a deep
whoo-whooing
noise, but the woman next to him said the wind had made more of a screeching sound. It sounded, she said, like a pig being slaughtered. As the man continued with his deep bellowing, she launched into a series of high-pitched squeals. Another person started banging out a frantic and random beat on the mismatched wooden planks that made up the floor, and the whole structure began to shudder. Soon everyone had joined in, and the tarpaulin tent filled with an unbearable cacophony of clapping, shouting, and wailing.