Previous | Next

Susu talks to Myint’s 12 year old son.
World Vision 2008 (Photo: Susu Thatun)

Burmese aid worker Susu Thatun joined the first international World Vision assessment team to travel into the Irrawaddy Delta. Here she shares some tragic stories of survival from one of the worst-hit villages they visited.

Aut Pyun Wa Village, Nga Pu Taw, was one of the worst hit villages in the Irrawaddy division. We visited this village as part of an assessment mission on the morning of May 31. Because of what I heard there, I wanted to document their stories, not just their statistics.

Of 605 people that lived in the village, 237 are now dead or unaccounted for, while 386 survived. There are around 20 orphans, mainly 5 to 6 year olds, whose parents were swept away by the strong currents. According to the survivors, most of the people who died were women and children, including many pregnant women who were near their full term.

They pointed to flattened land that had once been their village. Nothing indicated this. Not a single hut or building was in sight except for some 5 tents that they had received as shelter from aid agencies.

The villagers were determined to make sure their visitors understood that they had been a village of some stature and sophistication. They insisted on taking us to a location five minutes away by boat to show the remains of the village pagoda that had been their pride, plus the pitiful remains of a monastery which had been the hub of the local community.

Some 60 villagers have come back, mostly able-bodied men and women including some children, to rebuild their village with the help of a well-known and respected monastery in the northern city of Mandalay, under the auspices of its head monk.

The remaining survivors are taking refuge in nearby villages that have not been as badly hit.

Upon our arrival at the village, the village elder and a group of his men, some women and children came to meet us. We apologized for interrupting them. Though it was early in the morning, most of them had been working - some pumping out salt water from the fields and from what had been their water pond, some chopping up bamboo to rebuild their homes, some digging, and some just sitting and staring beyond the river.

Women were finishing up with cooking a large pot of rice, their sole meal. Their "kitchen utensils" were rudimentary, one pot without a cover and another with a lid that was too large. They had salvaged these pots from the field and the river.

They told their story of May 2 as a community. U Hla Win, the 60 year old village elder, said it was an experience that neither he nor any of the villagers had ever encountered in their lives. The winds began blowing very strongly after midday then picked up speed at a pace they could never prepare for, whipping up huge waves.

Initially as they realized their flimsy thatched huts were shaking and collapsing, they ran to the monastery to take refuge, the most sturdy building in the village. However, as it was towards the southern part of the village and closer to the river, it received the first impact of the cyclone. Running in the opposite direction, the rapidity and ferocity of the wind and waves proved too strong for almost every family. Many saw their closest relatives dragged away by the waves.

One man had put his pregnant wife and his brother on his fishing boat to push them to safety only to see the boat smash against a tree, split into two and see them sink in the waves a few seconds later. He held back his tears as he recalled the story and looked beyond the river blinking away his tears. His heart was clearly broken. I looked away and gave him the space he needed to grieve.

Another group told us they had clung to whatever they could, dazed, until the winds and waves calmed around 7am the next day. "Forgive us for these crude details," they said, before going on to tell us that by the morning they had no clothes left on their bodies. They walked around naked, forgetting even to feel ashamed or embarrassed, as the agony of what they had endured overwhelmed them.

The frantic search for loved ones began around that time, with many trying to revive those they found dead, unwilling to accept they were lost forever.

A few hours later, cold, hunger and the physical pain of injuries had set in. Many suffered from cramps and hypothermia, some dying in the arms of their families even though the water had subsided. Many survivors set out to walk to the next village because they knew it had a hospital, picking up rags and palm leaves as they went to use as clothing. Some admitted to taking rags from the bodies of the dead to cover themselves.

Some of the injured did not complete this journey, dying along the way, while others died after reaching the hospital. It too had been hit and there was no medicine to treat their conditions.

The villagers pointed to a strip of land far away where together they had buried the dead they could find. Others sobbed because they still had not found their loved ones. Inconsolable with pain and guilt, they still wore the tragedy of the cyclone like scars on their faces.

A courageous woman tries to hold on

I sat with a group by the shade of a tent. We opened some candy I had brought. Then a woman began to sob, huge uncontrollable sobs. We held her and tried to comfort her. After a while she became calm and began to explain what had happened.

She said the candy reminded her of the three children she had lost. Every time she went into the next village to do her shopping her children would ask her to get snacks and upon her return, they would run to her yelling "Mommy, mommy, did you get us snacks?" Now she had snacks but her babies were no more.

She looked to her remaining child, the eldest, a 12 year old, also sobbing as he watched his mother struggle with her own pain.

The woman's name was Myint Myint Aye, 33 and a mother of 4. She lost 3 of her children, aged ten, nine, and her one-year-old baby. She buried her face in her hands and told of how as one big wave hit her she dropped her baby from her arms.

"It took just a split second," she said. "I tried immediately to search in the waters around me but my baby was gone."

Myint Myint said she didn't mean to drop her baby. She wanted to reassure me as well as herself. She struggled with feelings of guilt that she remained alive after her baby slipped from her arms. I told her we understood and that no one could have done any more than what she already did.

"My son and I looked endlessly for hours for my children," she said.

Myint Myint avoided the use of the word "bodies", seeming to hold onto the tiny hope that they were alive. The little boy nodded in agreement and said they couldn't find them. She looked away. She continued the story of how she was rescued.

"The waves pushed me up onto a coconut tree and I held onto the tree for hours until around 2 or 3 am the next morning until a big boat ran aground near me and a torch light shone where I was. I cried out for help."

She was then helped down and given some clothes and food and stayed in the boat until the cyclone died down. She said if the people on the boat hadn't rescued her, she would not have survived at all. "I couldn't have held on to that tree much longer."

Ma Kalama loses 6 members of her family

Another woman, called Ma Kalama, a 40 year old woman who lost two daughters, three grand-children and her daughter-in-law, tells of the harrowing stories of screams of her children and others above the noise of the winds as they were swept away by the waves.

"My other children and husband survived because they were away in another village. I wished I'd let my other children and grand children accompany my husband - they had all wanted to go." She sobbed with the guilt at the decision she'd made to keep them in the village.

The other villagers and myself tried to console her that there was no way she could have known but she didn't seem convinced. "My life is meaningless and nothing would ever be the same," she cried.

My heart burns

A fifteen year old boy called Sine Ko said he could not accept that his mother and baby sister were dead. He had left the previous day with his father to get some construction materials (thatch and bamboos) for the family and he had never imagined that that was to be the last time he was to see his mother alive.

"My heart burns and I miss her terribly," he said.

He struggled to hold back his tears but they fell anyway and he turned away embarrassed that he had let a stranger witness his pain. I wanted to hold him as he reminded me of my own daughter, around his age. But I knew that it would just embarrass him more. So I too watched helpless as he struggled to cope with his grief.