Outreach, Relief

It’s rice planting season here in Myanmar and, two months after Cyclone Nargis, many of the more able-bodied survivors are experiencing a sense of urgency to get their rice crops started. If they can plant quickly, they have much better likelihood of reestablishing their homes and their lives, hopefully harvesting rice in 6 months rather than having to wait until December 2009. Unfortunately, many things still stand in their way.

Seed is an obvious need for almost all of the farmers in the delta. Survivors who are asked to prioritize what they need help with have recently been telling HOPE and other relief agencies that seed is up at the top of their lists. Seed will allow people to secure their own food supply, and many people are expressing a preference for help to grow their coming year’s food supply over many of the other types of aid that the UN and other organizations are now offering, including shelter and food aid.

Seed is available, although it is not easy for all relief organizations to source it in quantities that would match the demand for it. The distribution process itself also remains difficult for many of the same reasons that have hampered the distribution of all other assistance so far.

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Another major barrier standing in the way of timely planting is the condition of the fields and villages that the survivors must return to in order to plant. In recent weeks, the government, operating from the perspective that the cyclone was almost two months ago and so relief is no longer necessary, has energetically pushed survivors to leave the temporary settlements and return to their homes. Some of these people have not been back to their homes since the cyclone hit.

Even when people try to return to their villages, they do not have the equipment, the help or the energy to support more than the rebuilding of crude, temporary shelters. Fields and water sources are often still heaped with debris and in many cases, the carcasses of animals and the bodies of community members are still trapped under fallen buildings or tangled tree roots. Survivors struggle to find the physical and emotional energy required to tackle the burying and cleanup process that must take place before the villages are habitable and the fields are cleared so they can be plowed and planted.

This community cleanup process is where HOPE and some of our partners have been spending our energies lately. Through our local partners, an organizing process takes place so that volunteers are matched up with community members from a set of villages near one another. These joint teams select leadership from among the community members and then they work together to clean up not only their own village, but those of their nearby neighbors, as well.

In this way, we are trying to use the cyclone as a tiny opportunity to help people reach across former boundaries to create a new sense of community and sharing where the old community and community relationships may no longer exist. HOPE has provided very basic cleanup equipment and supplies to each of these teams, along with feeding all the team members during the cleanup process (in a kind of “food-for-work” scheme). HOPE has also helped to define the organizing and operating principles that the teams use and has provided counsel to local partners regarding the inevitable trauma experiences that this cleanup process will evoke.

Our local partners have managed to gain the support of 1,431 volunteers and community members in these cleanup teams! As one foreign aid worker recently said, work on the Nargis aftermath reminds us of an anthill – thousands of local people are swarming to repair damage in many small and some not-so-small places and ways. The story of this disaster response and of its successes thus far includes actors from both inside and outside the country. But the heroes continue to be the local people who, time and time again, rally to overcome the insurmountable. I’m reminded constantly what a privilege it is to be present here at this time.

Nargis was almost two months ago, but please keep this place and these people in your thoughts and prayers – that is needed as much now as it has ever been needed. Thank you for the many ways in which you have shown and continue to show your generosity towards Myanmar people.