Across the Irrawaddy Delta, a strange silence

3 June 2008

"He keeps running back to where our house was, and just sits there, like he is waiting for them to come home," said his mother Ma Lwin. "The last time he saw his younger brothers, they were crying to him 'save me!', and then they were washed away.
"He could see his brothers floating on the river but he couldn't do anything to help them, and he cannot forget."

More than 130,000 people are dead or missing after Cyclone Nargis tore through southern Myanmar May 2 and 3. For the survivors, they are facing a future where the life of their villages is gone – in some areas, more than 80 per cent of the people who died were women and children.

Like Win Lwin Oo’s brothers and sisters, many children were simply not strong enough to escape the floodwaters and four-metre high wave that crashed through their villages with the force of a burst dam, carrying away everything in its path.

"The people were not prepared for the wave of water. We have had cyclones before, but never like this. They didn’t see it coming," said U Khin Maung Lwin, field coordinator for CARE's emergency team in Myanmar.

In the wake of the cyclone, a strange silence has descended over the Irrawaddy Delta; the surviving children play more quietly than before, under the watchful eye of the adults. The usual sounds of village life – children herding cows, the morning call of the rooster – are gone, washed away with the houses. Rice fields that should be filled with the busy sounds of the planting season lie untended, littered with trees and wreckage and polluted with salt water.

But across Kunyangon, families have slowly started rebuilding their homes from what they could salvage from the wreckage. Many of the houses were simple huts made of bamboo and thatched roofs, and were blown away by the ferocious wind of the cyclone.

At least once a day, all work stops as people dash for cover from the torrential monsoon rains that pound down, turning roads and pathways into seas of mud.

"Everything is wet," said one woman, who rebuilt her bamboo hut with material they found in the wreckage. "The roof leaks, because we cannot repair it properly."

CARE is providing families here with food, emergency supplies and plastic sheeting so people can repair their homes or build temporary shelter. But recovery is more than just material goods; CARE and other aid agencies are also working with community members to help them cope with the trauma of seeing their villages destroyed and family members swept away by the storm.

"Before the cyclone, there were differences, some people had more than others. But now, everyone is affected in the same way. Everyone is traumatized by this, and they are trying to help each other," said U Khin Maung Lwin.

In devastated villages, children still run and hide when the wind starts to howl, asking fearfully if there is going to be another storm. Win Lwin Oo's mother hopes that when the schools open in a month, it will provide a welcome return to some kind of normalcy for her son, but she fears he will be returning to a classroom that is only half-full. Each time she asks him if he wants to go back to school, he shakes his head, saying he doesn’t want to leave her.

"He is just 11, but he thinks that because his father is gone, he has to take care of me," his mother said, wiping tears from her eyes. "But he is just a child."

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