Everything Is Broken (30 page)

The noise didn’t stop until people noticed that Nwe Nwe was crying, and that her body was convulsing with uncontrollable sobs. One by one, the members of the strange orchestra fell silent.

 

 

 

IN A VILLAGE
south of Mawlamyainggyun, there was one villager who everyone missed. He was an older man, a carpenter known as Uncle Zin. His grown-up children had left the village to seek work elsewhere, and his wife had passed away some years before the cyclone. The villagers remembered him as a friendly, talkative man who loved a good joke and was also an excellent carpenter. Uncle Zin could take a few discarded planks and transform them into a smart knee-high table for schoolchildren to use while doing their homework. He could fix doors that wouldn’t shut properly and smooth down splintered floorboards. Often he’d do the smaller jobs for free (not counting the bowls of fish curry and endless cups of tea that housewives were coaxed into serving up for him), and he was a popular man in the village.

Uncle Zin had had the foresight to keep a flashlight with him during the cyclone. He had probably tied it to his wrist when he realized the storm was getting stronger; he was organized with things like that and had a knack for finding practical solutions even when resources were scarce. In the pitch black that followed the storm, Uncle Zin had been able to locate people with his flashlight. He had waded through the mud and clambered over felled trees looking for people from the village and checking that they were okay:

Uncle Zin managed to find many survivors from the village, even though the storm surge had flung them far and wide across the area. The villagers recalled feeling a great sense of relief to know that he had survived and would be around to help them as he always had been. But later, when the villagers began to compare their experiences of the storm, they realized that Uncle Zin had not stayed long with anyone and that no one had actually seen him—they had only heard his voice and sensed his presence in the darkness as he shone his flashlight into their faces. When people thought hard about what they remembered, they had to admit that there had been only a bright light and the comforting and familiar sound of Uncle Zin’s voice:

Even odder, no one remembered seeing him in the days that followed the cyclone. No one had seen him when survivors gathered together in the bleak dawn after the storm, and no one had seen him in the desperate days as they waited for help in the mud and rain. Many villagers eventually made it to Mawlamyainggyun, where people from their village were directed to a particular monastery. As the surviving villagers were reunited at the monastery, they began to remark on how strange it was that Uncle Zin hadn’t turned up yet.

It wasn’t until some days later that they learned that Uncle Zin was dead. One of the villagers had joined a volunteer team moving through the area to clear away bodies from village sites, and he discovered that Uncle Zin hadn’t survived the cyclone but had drowned in the storm surge—his body was found beached on a small sandbank about a mile and a half upstream from the village.

 

 

 

THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE
who lived in and around Pyinzalu had decided not to return to the area and were still residing in camps located outside of Laputta. The authorities had begun clearing out unofficial shelters at monasteries and schools, and closing down government camps from mid-May onward and, by June, only a few camps were left. These remaining camps near Laputta were providing shelter to over seven thousand people who were either unable or understandably unwilling to return to the nothingness that awaited them on the coast of the delta.

In a move that was somewhat out of character, the authorities did not force these people back to their villages as they had done everyone else. Instead, they decided to relocate the inhabitants to camps farther outside of Laputta. The decision was unpopular with camp dwellers; the new sites were seven and fourteen miles out of town respectively, and the distance along a road poorly served by public transport would make it difficult for them to pick up day labor in town. To beg for a stay of execution, five women threw themselves down in front of the car in which Prime Minister Thein Sein was traveling when he visited the camp. A man wrote a letter to Naypyidaw explaining how relocating the camp would make it impossible for those sheltering there to earn the funds they needed to rebuild their homes and lives. The women were removed, the letter writer was arrested, and, at the end of August, the camps were moved to their new locations safely out of sight and earshot of the main road.

While I was in Laputta I was able to visit the camps with aid workers who were distributing supplies. The huts were uniformly laid out and relatively spacious, with white tarpaulin walls and ceilings and floors made of split bamboo rods. The inhabitants I saw were mostly elderly people or children—too old or too young to face the hard labor of reconstructing life from scratch. In one hut I met a seventy-five-year-old widow and her adult daughter who was deaf and dumb. They were sharing the space with a couple they had not known before the storm. The couple was old too and, as the wife put it, had “only one good eye and two working ears” between them.

This motley household wanted to stay at the camp permanently and told me they could earn a living by hiring themselves out as laborers in the fields come harvesttime. I sincerely doubted whether any of them were capable of physical labor, but they had run out of other options. “If we go back to our village we have to start again,” yelled the old man with bad hearing. “Here, at least we have this shelter. We are old people. We don’t have the strength to begin everything over again. I pray they will just let us stay here.”

At the so-called Seven Mile Camp, closer to town, I met a group of fishermen from Pyinzalu sitting in a tea shop. It wasn’t really a tea shop in the normal sense, just a sheet draped across bamboo poles underneath which you could buy a cup of tepid and lumpy Coffee-Mix, a store-bought sachet of coffee containing sugar and dried milk. I bought a round for the fishermen and we sat in the shade and chatted. They couldn’t return yet, they said, because there would be no work for them in Pyinzalu. They were sea fishermen and needed big boats to go out to sea. With so many vessels sunk and fishermen killed, the fishing companies they used to work for had yet to resume operations. “Even if there was work, I don’t know if I would go back,” said one burly man with a permanent scowl etched across his features after so many years of squinting into the sun. “In my village, we had four hundred houses. There were only four left after Nargis. Every single fisherman who was out at sea at that time died.” He laid his large, calloused hand on his chest and concluded, “I feel as if my heart was broken by the cyclone.”

As we were talking, a cardboard box walked up to me and leaned against my leg. The box had two muddy little feet sticking out of the bottom and was labeled USA Refined Vegetable Oil, Vitamin A Fortified. When I tapped the box it started giggling. One of the fishermen laid claim to the contents, saying that his son liked to pretend he was invisible. Though it was a bit sad to see a child playing with the throw-away remnants of aid supplies that adults in the camp were becoming dependent on, we all laughed. I carried on tapping the box until it got bored and ran off, disappearing from view behind one of the long line of identical white huts.

The final trip I took out of Laputta was to Pyinzalu, where most of the camp inhabitants had originally come from and were still avoiding returning to. Because Pyinzalu was so close to where the cyclone made landfall, it had taken the full brunt of the storm, and the surrounding scenery looked as if it had been blasted by chemical defoliants. The ground was slick with white-gray mud and littered with pale logs that looked like dinosaur bones. The monsoon clouds had begun to dissipate and a harsh sun glared down on the roofless boat I was traveling in. The water was calm, like handblown glass, and a gently blurred mirror image of the land was cast onto the surface of the river. Every so often the unchanging reflection was momentarily distorted by a swirling eddy or hidden current.

As the boat neared Pyinzalu, we passed the salt fields the area was once famous for. Though there was absolutely no sign of any life, it was clear that some substantial industry had once been conducted there. Concrete poles protruding from the water were all that remained of the large steel jetties. The abandoned, unworked fields were encrusted with salt and gave the disconcerting impression that a touch of frost had settled upon the hot, sticky delta. The boatman told me that as many as thirty thousand salt workers had perished along this stretch—a tragedy impossible to prove or disprove, as many of the people who worked these fields were illegal seasonal migrants from elsewhere in Burma and were not registered with the local authorities.

Before Cyclone Nargis, Pyinzalu was a trading town, dealing in fish, salt, and other coastal produce. There were ten ferries a week direct to Rangoon. The town had a hospital, a school, and a police station and functioned as a hub for its far-flung corner of the delta. But the cyclone had demolished Pyinzalu, crushing all the buildings and killing a staggering 90 percent of the population.

The once busy pier was gone, and the boat I was traveling in with a team of Burmese aid workers docked against a row of salvaged planks that was loosely nailed together. The riverfront was lined with dead trees. Where there was once a row of well-stocked warehouses for storing produce, there was now only swampland. Still, there was more activity than I had seen in any of my other delta destinations. Companies owned by cronies of the regime had begun rebuilding work in Pyinzalu. There were also a hundred soldiers posted there, helping with reconstruction and, perhaps, ensuring that there were no disturbances of any kind. They were camped out in sagging and threadbare olive-green tents pitched along a raised dirt embankment that was once a road.

In the flooded field that was the center of town there was a brand-new one-story cement building with white walls and a sloping roof of green tiles. This well-constructed bungalow looked out of place on the muddy edges of the delta, and when I asked what it was, I learned why. The building had been built with the sole purpose of receiving high-ranking military visitors who had come to Pyinzalu in recent months. No longer in use, it was empty when I visited, and a forlorn wooden barricade indicated that it was off-limits. The shrubbery that had been planted along the walkway leading up to the entrance was wilted and dying. The building had the feel of a disused prop for the senior general’s first Delta Disaster Tour back in May.

A housing project was being built nearby (courtesy of Max Myanmar, a crony company and builder of one of Naypyidaw’s villa-complex hotels). There were rows of houses on stilts all exactly the same size and shape, with dark wood walls and tin roofs. The doorways and windows had been left empty, and people living in them had nailed up sheets of plastic or tarpaulin to stop the rain from coming in. I peeped inside a few houses and saw that none of them had any furniture, though there were towers of plastic buckets, folded blankets, and matching sets of aluminum kitchen equipment.

In one of the houses I met a fisherman and his wife who had lost all four of their children. “People here have changed,” he told me. “We are all different now. Look at my wife: She used to talk all day long and now she hardly says a word. And me, I used to eat for the whole of the town, but now my wife has to force me just to take a little rice in the morning and the evening.” He spoke of a sense of unreality that had settled upon the town: “Maybe I am dreaming this. Maybe I will wake up soon. Even people like you who come here and ask us what we need and write things down in your notebook . . . These people leave and I never see them again. I think sometimes that maybe they were never here and that I just imagined them.”

As we spoke, some villagers had gathered nearby. They began to interrupt the fishermen, telling me their own experiences of the cyclone. I wrote down all their stories, each one a wretched tale devoid of any hope. By the time the stories were told, I had a cramp in my hand and could barely write. I asked the villagers around me what they would do if another storm came. They all had different answers; some had identified a tall tree that was still standing that they would run to, others talked about trying to ride the storm out in a boat. An older woman who had not spoken before shushed everyone. She lowered the cheroot she was puffing on. “What does it matter?” she croaked, as the sweet-smelling smoke wafted out of her mouth. “You can bring us food and shelter if you want, but when the next storm comes, we’ll all be dead anyway!”

I had read an article in the
New Light of Myanmar
describing how Senior General Than Shwe had given “guidance” on disaster preparedness measures some months ago, but I had not yet seen any evidence of his methods being put into practice. In the photograph that accompanied the article, Than Shwe was pictured seated on an ornate couch with a small banquet of food laid out on the coffee table at his knees. He held in his hands a map of the delta and was using his finger to draw lines—perhaps randomly—across the area. A bevy of two- and three-star generals was crouched around him, notebooks in hand, avidly following his finger and awaiting their instructions.

Than Shwe’s take on disaster preparedness consisted of a road network linking towns and villages across the delta. He mapped out over 186 miles of new road that would connect even the most waterlogged parts of the delta to the rest of the country by land routes. In keeping with the senior general’s guidance, the road system was to be elevated so that it would not be vulnerable to flooding or high waves. He also wanted man-made hillocks in each town and village that were higher than the highest point of the storm surge during Nargis.