One evening a friend took me to meet Chit Swe, who had just returned from traveling with a group of fellow businessmen to the southern stretches of the delta. Even before the storm, the lower regions of the delta were accessible only by boat, as no road network had ever been built there. Hardly any news had been heard from those areas, and it was believed that villages there must have taken the brunt of the storm. The businessmen had companies in the delta—fishing operations and rice-trading firms—and they had left the city soon after the storm, heading out to the villages in a large boat loaded with rice, drinking water, and tarpaulin sheets that could be used for shelter. Though the prime minister had warned members of the business community who were organizing similar donations that cameras were prohibited in the delta, Chit Swe had taken a camcorder.
To see the footage, we went to Chit Swe’s house—a mansion with a sweeping teakwood staircase leading up from a high-ceilinged entrance hall. It was by far the grandest home I had ever visited in Burma, and it made me think that these men must be working closely with the regime to secure such profits. Regardless of their connections, they had gone against the prime minister’s orders to collect evidence of conditions in the delta that they now wanted to show to foreigners. We gathered around a flat-screen television. It was late at night, and Chit Swe—a bulky, overweight man whose chubby fingers were being strangled by golden, gem-studded rings—had cracked open a bottle of Johnnie Walker whiskey that he drank on the rocks as we watched the grim journey the businessmen had made to the delta.
Taken about a week after the cyclone struck, the images were staggeringly bleak. Most houses in the delta are built out of bamboo or wood and have palm-thatch roofs—in the event of a cyclone as powerful as Nargis, they are no better than origami huts folded out of paper. The first villages the businessmen arrived in had been completely demolished. Even the few concrete buildings in each village—often small monasteries or schools—had been reduced to heaps of rubble. Blank-faced survivors wandered aimlessly amid the wreckage, occasionally bending over to pick up a soggy scrap of cloth or a bamboo pole that might be useful for rigging up a shelter.
In one village along the Pyan Mae Law River, the businessmen came across a small gathering of people who had made a lopsided tent out of a ragged piece of tarpaulin and some planks. Chit Swe said somberly that at least 80 percent of the people living in the village were now dead or missing. The flooded paddy fields surrounding the makeshift shelter were littered with corpses of people and farm animals. Those who had survived had done so mostly by holding on to trees and managing to stay above the storm surge. One survivor commented that the dead were lucky compared to the living, who now found themselves trapped in a place that looked and felt like hell itself.
Chit Swe explained that they had to ration their supplies so that they could cover more ground and assess conditions in a number of villages. As they traveled farther south, the situation grew progressively worse. It was the ill-fated villages closer to the coast and those located along the banks of large rivers that appeared to have suffered the most. Wherever the boat docked, subdued groups of men would approach the vessel and quietly off-load whatever supplies the businessmen had to offer. In these areas, where the storm surge had been especially violent, there were often few women and children to be seen, because they hadn’t had the physical strength needed to hold on for the duration of the storm. When the boat left, the same men would stand in a row on the riverbank. They did not wave or smile or talk. They just stood there, silhouetted against the washed-out, monsoon sky and watched the boat sail away.
At the final village the businessmen went to before they ran out of supplies, they met a monk who showed them where the monastery had once stood. Though it had been made of concrete, only the foundations remained. The monk pointed to a large tree that was still standing and explained how thirty people had been saved by the tree as they clung to it while the water swirled around them. He directed the camera to a life-sized Buddha statue that was miraculously untouched by the storm. With its gentle half smile, the Buddha image looked incongruously serene and placid.
The camera panned out from the statue to take in a diabolical view of countless human corpses and the carcasses of farm animals that had swollen to twice their usual size. The monk said that the dead were not people from his village but had been washed up by the storm surge. Exposed to the elements for many long days, they had become unidentifiable and almost inhuman-looking. In Buddhist communities, the dead would customarily be cremated, but the land was saturated from the storm and the constant drizzle that followed it, and villagers had no wood or matches to construct funeral pyres. So the bodies remained, lying on the land and floating in the waterways.
The monk raised his arm and pointed into the gloom, across the flat, broken land. He indicated villages that were located farther south, and his voice seemed devoid of all emotion as he said, “Down there, it is even worse.”
The footage Chit Swe showed us from one short journey along a single river in the Irrawaddy Delta represented only a tiny fraction of the overall picture. There are innumerable waterways in the delta, and the cyclone-affected parts amounted to just over 9,000 square miles, a land-mass over twice the size of Lebanon, that was home to more than seven million people. The townships around Rangoon were also known to be in bad condition, as people there live in flimsy slum housing on low-lying land that is vulnerable to heavy winds and flooding. The same scenes we saw at Chit Swe’s house could have been replayed over and over again just beyond the edges of Rangoon and out across the vast expanse of the delta.
During their journey, Chit Swe and his colleagues did not see any other assistance being delivered. There were no soldiers or Navy boats on the water and no aid workers in the villages. Many villagers said that the help the businessmen gave them was the first they had received.
The businessmen wanted to continue to help but were unsure what was needed, and the conversation in the room turned to a discussion of what they could do next. Someone in the room suggested that their footage of the delta should be taken to the U.S. embassy, as it was hard-to-get evidence of actual conditions after the storm that should be shown outside the country. Chit Swe quickly dismissed the idea; the film contained images of the businessmen delivering aid, and they did not want it to be seen beyond their own circle of trusted viewers. They wanted to help, but they didn’t want to anger the authorities. In this uncertain climate it was not yet clear whether donating aid and recording suffering caused by a natural disaster would be perceived by the military junta as a crime.
DESPITE THE POSSIBLE DANGERS
, everyone I knew was doing something to help. With little visible government support and restricted assistance from abroad, private citizens were stepping into the breech. Throughout the city groups of Rangoon residents banded together to collect money and deliver much-needed supplies to the delta and the outlying areas around Rangoon. Relief missions were being coordinated by traders, doctors, schoolteachers, students, writers, actors, musicians, and just about anyone who had even the slightest means. Like many celebrities, the popular comedian and former political prisoner Zargana was organizing a team of volunteers to move lifesaving supplies to people in the delta. Leading monks and abbots, such as the revered Sitagu Sayadaw, activated their countrywide donor networks to support monasteries that were sheltering survivors. The expatriate community was also pitching in, with gutsy embassy wives whose spouses worked at foreign embassies making use of the diplomatic license plates on their cars to storm through checkpoints carrying food and medicine.
A couple of days after I arrived in Burma, I went to deliver some cash I had brought for a friend who ran a private school in Rangoon. All classes had been put on hold as the school’s teenage students were helping to coordinate their own small-scale emergency response. The school grounds had become the headquarters for the operation. Sacks of lentils, rice, and potatoes were piled up around the yard. Mud-splattered trucks were parked in the gateway. Students were sorting frantically through boxes of medicine and counting out sheets of tarpaulin. A map indicating the path of the cyclone had been pinned to a wall and next to it was a whiteboard charting the daily movements of relief teams being sent to the outskirts of Rangoon.
On the morning I was there, a group of emergency experts had just arrived from Israel. The four-man team had traveled on tourist visas, as they would not have been allowed to enter the country in an official capacity as aid workers. Its members were well versed in the skills needed after a natural disaster, and the team leader had a PhD in disaster management. Trained to perform search-and-rescue missions and provide medical care in the field, these men had dealt with catastrophes across the globe in places as far afield as Turkey, Chad, and El Salvador. Here in Burma, however, they were rendered almost useless; their access to the disaster zone was blocked by military checkpoints, and they could not even publicly declare that they were there to try to help. If they wanted to contribute their expertise, they had to do so in a low-key, semisecretive way.
To this end, the emergency team had come to the school as advisers, to brief the students on techniques that might be useful in the field. The team members sat on a low stage at the front of the school hall and talked to a crowd of around thirty people. It was Disaster Response 101, aimed at creating instant relief workers out of inexperienced but eager Burmese volunteers. The audience listened attentively, but the room was rustling with barely contained impatience. The speakers had to talk above a continuous percussion of tapping feet and muffled conversations.
The leader of the emergency team began by asking for information from anyone who had been to the cyclone-affected areas. “Give me only descriptions, no emotions,” he said. “Please try to separate your emotions.”
Most of the descriptions came from the edges of Rangoon, where sprawling shantytowns were hit hard by the cyclone. In these areas, thousands of people whose homes had been destroyed by the wind and floods had sought shelter in local monasteries, but the monasteries were filled to the bursting point, and there was no more space for people to sleep. Some monasteries had been stocked with food in preparation for Buddhist Lent, when resident monks remain inside the compound for three months during the rainy season, but within just a few days, these supplies had been depleted. The monasteries had run out of resources; they were feeding the hungry masses with watered-down rice gruel. In some areas, local authorities were trying to provide assistance but were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of need. A young medical student described how some seven hundred people were camped in and around a single-story school building that had only four bathrooms.
The reports were often confused and sometimes conflicting. One person described conditions in one neighborhood as under control; minutes later another person describing the same area said that the situation was deteriorating by the hour. The emergency specialists suggested that people take photographs wherever they went and mark down the time, date, and location so that they could monitor whether conditions were getting better or worse. The team leader had a reassuringly calm manner and offered up plenty of easy-to-follow practical advice. Most heads in the room were bowed over notebooks as people scribbled down his five-point checklist for assessing a disaster. He explained that the quality and quantity of the following necessities (listed in order of importance) were essential to survival:
1. Drinking water
2. Food
3. Shelter
4. Sanitation
5. Medicine and medical treatment
It sounded quite simple, but it was critical knowledge for first-time aid workers volunteering in extreme circumstances and it illustrated just how inexperienced they were in dealing with an emergency situation. I jotted it all down, just in case:
• If there is no clean drinking water, carry purifying tablets or, in a worst-case scenario, use drops of iodine (five drops per quart).
• People will also need something to hold the water—make sure to have a good supply of jerricans.
• Remember that any kind of relief supplied should be complete. There is no point in giving rice if people don’t have a pot to cook it in. There is no point in giving pots if they don’t have matches to light a fire. Matches or a lighter are useless if people don’t have access to tinder.
The morning was wearing on and the hall began to heat up. A strong smell of onions permeated the room, coming from the sacks of produce that had been stacked against the walls. The audience became ever more restless; the foot tapping had increased, and every so often someone pushed back his chair and crept out into the yard, lured by the noise of activity outside as trucks were packed with commodities and students were chosen to accompany the vehicles. By the time the emergency team broached the topic of sanitation, the crowd had dwindled to about ten people, and the noise outside had reached a distracting crescendo of urgent voices and revving truck engines.
As the audience dispersed, the Israeli team talked to individuals who approached them with specific questions. The doctor offered to look at photographs of wounds and advise young medical students present on how to treat them and what medicines would be useful to carry. I picked up snippets from disparate conversations taking place around the yard; topics under discussion included the disposal of dead bodies using lime powder, the cooking time required for lentils, and how to diagnose the first symptoms of gangrene.
I chatted with a member of the emergency team who was morosely chain-smoking cigarettes. He explained that he was accomplished in search and rescue and could save people’s lives under the water, high on mountaintops, or wherever they might be in danger. Stuck here in Rangoon far from the scene of the emergency, he was not getting his adrenaline fix.