From the Sunday Times:
When three-year-old Su Myat Khain wakes up crying in the middle of the night, it is her brother Kyaw Kyaw Min, now 16, who cradles her and tries to comfort her. Su Myat Khain is still too young to understand that her parents’ quick thinking saved her life when Cyclone Nargis devastated Burma’s Irrawaddy delta last May, but that they never made it to the temple where they sent her and her two brothers. That night, unable to cross the village as the waters rose, they took refuge in their home, but were swept to their deaths by the devastating storm.
Kyaw Kyaw Min hugs Su Myat Khain close to his chest. “There are so many responsibilities now,” he says, sitting outside his makeshift home, with its flimsy tarpaulin roof, in a village in the southwest of the delta. “I have to look after my younger brother and sister. I feel like their father.” More:
Children in Burma separated from their parents by Cyclone Nargis, continue to survive on their own, very often because they simply cannot afford the bus fare that will reunite them with their families. Heather Mark reports for the Sunday Times.
IN a filthy destitute village, half an hour outside Rangoon, three-year-old Than Than Nues was dumped days after Cyclone Nargis had ravaged her home in Burma’s Irrawaddy delta and made her an orphan.
The toddler, who lost both her parents when 12ft waves swept through their home in Bogalay, a coastal township, was carted off in a government lorry and handed over to strangers. Villagers, who struggled to feed their own families from their meagre rice paddies or from working in a factory on a daily wage of just 75p, were forced to provide for the extra mouths.
Last week underfed children played in the mud-filled main street, still trying to forget the traumatic night in May when they saw their closest relatives swept to their deaths.
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Twenty-one days after Cyclone Nargis, Burma finally seems to have agreed to allow all aid workers in. Red Cross volunteers are there already, but there’s still miles to go, writes Markku Niskala in The Guardian’s Comment is Free
Now that the Burmese government has finally indicated it may allow all aid workers into the country, the task of reaching Burma’s remoter regions becomes even more pressing. Every night, the dire situation facing hundreds of thousands of cyclone survivors grows more and more desperate. Solutions tailored to Burma just have to be found.
At least one and a half million cyclone survivors remain homeless, many of them hungry, many of them weak, ailing or exhausted. As the rain pours down there is some relief: people can harvest drinking water. But the misery grows, along with the burgeoning health threats. The homeless – a portion of the 2.4 million people the UN estimates have been affected – are facing their 21st night since Cyclone Nargis swept in from the Bay of Bengal and crossed the Irrawaddy delta. Each night is more wretched than the last. Conditions are worsening all the time, and the need for basic lifesaving aid becomes more urgent.
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[Pic: Portraits of cyclone victims hang on what is left of their home in the Irrawaddy delta, Burma. Getty]
Amitav Ghosh on cyclones in the Bay of Bengal, in the New York Times
THE word “cyclone” was coined in Calcutta (now called Kolkata) in the 1840s by an eccentric Englishman named Henry Piddington. Inspired by the great British meteorologist William Reid, Piddington became one of the earliest storm-chasers, besotted with a phenomenon that he once likened to a “beautiful meteorite.” His elegant coinage was originally intended as a generic name for all revolving weather events, but is now applied mainly to the storms of the Indian Ocean region like Cyclone Nargis, which struck Burma with devastating effect last week.
Piddington was among the earliest to recognize that a cyclone wreaks most of its damage not through wind but through water, by means of the devastating wave that is known as a “storm surge.” In 1853, when the British colonial authorities were planning an elaborate new port on the outer edge of Bengal’s mangrove forests, he issued an unambiguous warning: “Everyone and everything must be prepared to see a day when, in the midst of the horrors of a hurricane, they will find a terrific mass of salt water rolling in …” His warning was neglected and Port Canning was built, only to be obliterated by a cyclonic surge in 1867.
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