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These are messages from May 11th & 12th from an Aid worker in Yangon:

May 11th

There’s a lot to write and I don’t know where to begin. Whatever I write, it isn’t enough to express this situation. Perhaps I should start by letting you know that supplies are slowly beginning to come into the country. Several countries and agencies have received clearance for their cargo planes of supplies to come into the country in the next few days. The only restriction being placed on distribution of some of those supplies is that someone from the government must accompany those doing the distribution. Depending on the availability of government staff to accompany distribution teams, there may be more supplies flowing to more people soon.

I’m sure many people here share my sense that we are in the right place at the right time, but find ourselves bound and gagged. Hopefully, this is about to change. We are also hearing that the most successful way to distribute supplies to the neediest areas is to go by boat. While the overall picture is not at all what we would wish in terms of ability to have access and distribute supplies, no one is giving up.

One of the HOPE staff came back last night from the area where the medical and relief teams have been operating. She is resupplying and, along with two of our other staff, will head back with more medical supplies and water treatment and rainwater harvesting supplies. We’ve had really good cooperation with other international agencies and we’re all working hard to get support to the survivors.

Apparently there is a new form of greeting among cyclone survivors in the Delta. When they see someone they recognize, the first question they ask each other is, “How many family members did you lose?” What a stark statement of the magnitude of this tragedy! But last night we also started hearing some amazing survival stories. We learned of a seven year old child who was found still alive, three or four miles from his village. He had been swept away during the storm and badly injured – he was hit in the head by a board with two nails in it, and the nails went into his skull. He was brought to the medical team, and they were able to do surgery to remove the board and nails and treat infection. The child seemed to be recovering well after the surgery.

One of the most common injuries is a loss of all the skin on certain spots on the arms and across the torso and elsewhere. This occurred because the survivors clung to coconut trees or other rough places for 6-8 hours while the worst of the winds, tide surges and flooding occurred during the storm. Imagine clinging to something so precarious for so many hours, alone in the dark, with the wind and water dragging at you and making it hard to hang on, all the while fearing or knowing that other members of your family have been swept away. We’ve included a photo that shows a young man being treated for this trademark injury. If you want to see more photos coming back from the local medical teams, within the next couple of days you can go to the website for HOPE International Development Agency or for Tear Australia, one of HOPE’s partners. The medical teams also report that they are having to use sedation in a lot of cases where people are completely distraught or are no longer in their right minds after the huge losses of kin and community. Injuries to the psyche are at least as prevalent as physical ones.

The security situation outside the main towns is quite difficult. There are gangs of men roaming the areas, taking whatever they find and killing people who stand in the way. People who try to remain in the smaller villages are eventually forced to leave unless there are enough people staying in one place so that they can defend the place from the gangs. The army has been ordered to provide security and protection against the gangs, but how each group of soldiers accomplishes that differs. We heard that some groups of soldiers have entered small villages and told survivors they have three days to vacate the village, or the soldiers will return and shoot anyone who is still there, assuming they are gang members.

There is a Burmese saying that if your land is burned, you have only half your land, but if your land is flooded, you no longer have your land. That saying may be prophetic in this situation. I suspect we are seeing the beginnings of a huge loss of smallholder farms after this cyclone. Land registration isn’t all that common in many areas anyhow, and then with this huge population displacement, even if the fields remain fertile, it will be hard to know who really owns the land – many small communities have been completely erased already because of the flood waters. Under these conditions it is easy to imagine that the large landowners will be pressed by the government to take over more land and try to put it into production as soon as possible. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that planting will be able to happen this year. The Ayeyawaddy Delta is the biggest rice growing region for the country, and it won’t be producing much this growing season, and in some areas, won’t produce again for years.

Thanks to all of you for the greetings, the wishes, thoughts and prayers, and of course for all the things that you are doing to raise money, collect supplies, etc., to help this overwhelming situation. We have been buoyed by the news of so many of you who have a part of your heart now living in Myanmar and are working to help provide much-needed aid and other types of support.

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May 12th

I know you are hearing a lot on the news about what isn’t going well here in terms of delivery of assistance to cyclone survivors. You’re hearing about supply boats sinking, planes impounded and supplies being confiscated over technicalities, the slowness of unloading cargo, distribution being blocked, etc. While those reports can be corroborated here on the ground, it’s enough to drive us all to distraction. So let me counter all that with a dose of the good stuff – the cooperation and compassion and resourcefulness – that we see evidenced around us from Myanmar people and from both local and international agencies and their staff.

Yesterday, we were helping to re-supply the medical and relief teams that went out earlier last week. We were also trying to gather supplies for another local organization that is sending out many small groups into a relatively inaccessible area of the Delta. Based on the experience of the local medical teams last week, we have learned more about the physical forms that relief assistance has to take in order to reach people in need and be most useful to them.

People in many areas of the Delta rely for much of the year on rain water for their drinking water supply, but they have lost their rainwater collection materials. Water baskets and water purification supplies are essential to provide, but so are supplies to collect rain water where there is truly no source of “sweet” water close enough. So part of our job yesterday was to try to quickly figure out a way to provide rainwater harvesting materials. In fact, based now on two consecutive days of rain, and forecasts of rain every day for the next week, it appears that the monsoon rains are starting in earnest. So, we’re starting to place more focus on rainwater harvesting than on water treatment.

After we did some debriefing Sunday morning with our returning team member and doing some strategizing, we went over to IDE in the afternoon to see about getting water baskets and to discuss possible rainwater harvesting systems. We found a team at their office madly producing waterbaskets. We also found a friend in the office who offered to design and make up a few water collection tarp systems, right then and there, to send out with the teams so that they could try them out. We negotiated to be able to pick up 30 waterbaskets later in the day and then went to PSI to get water purification stuff and found the office closed – after all, it was Sunday afternoon. But as we were about to drive away, a local PSI staff member came. She opened the office, ane we were able to eventually connect with the director on the cell phone and get authorization to release supplies right then and complete the paperwork on Monday. By the end of the day, we were able to organize all these water materials and get them to the team that was heading out the next morning. Oh, and in the midst of it all, our clutch cable went out and we had to call a mechanic out to repair it – part of the reason we got to the PSI office as late as we did! Another member of HOPE’s staff has now gone out with the medical teams this week, and his responsibility will be to test out and then teach others how to establish water baskets and rain harvesting systems in local communities. He will report back to us his experience with the rainwater harvesting tarps so that we can get feedback to the engineer at IDE so that changes can be made to the design and more harvesting tarps can be rushed into production!

Cooperation between Myanmar organizations and volunteers from community groups is also strong. Some Myanmar organizations are sharing staff and are setting up rotation systems for volunteers who are being sent to the Delta, in hopes of avoiding complete burnout for everyone involved. Once out in the areas where they hope to provide relief services, every member of these volunteer groups has a role to play. When a group of Myanmar volunteers reaches a Delta community in need of assistance, the people from the local area immediately converge and want to tell their stories. They need to tell someone what happened to them, to their families, to their communities. What a welcome sight those volunteers must be – no uniforms, no foreign faces and unfamiliar languages – just local people who dress and eat and speak the way the survivors do! So the first role that the volunteers play is to listen to the outpouring of shock, grief and loss. Only then can they get set up and begin to provide the services for which they are technically qualified. While the technical staff set to work, the volunteer drivers, cooks and other support volunteers end up continuing to provide a listening ear. We are glad that the survivors are able to tell their stories to willing listeners who speak the same languages, but we are concerned at the potential impacts on the volunteers, when they listen day after day to the experiences of trauma.

Some local groups of people here in Yangon and elsewhere have become frustrated at the lack of widescale, well-organized response from some quarters, and are establishing their own centers for the donation and distribution of relief supplies. From all accounts, donations from local families and businesses are pouring in and are being sent to the Delta in truckloads. We sometimes are called upon to connect donors with those who are able to get into the more remote villages in the cyclone affected areas.

Naturally, cash is an issue – most organizations don’t keep lots of extra cash on hand in case of these types of disaster situations. Preparing for potential unrest as a result of the political process here we, fortunately, had a larger than usual amount of cash on hand. One of our partner organizations, TEAR Australia, was already committing early last week, by handshake, to provide financial support to their established partner agencies here. That means the need for the initial paperwork is largely postponed, and TEAR’s partners can immediately move on getting relief flowing to needy areas, instead of worrying about where the money will come from or taking the time to complete formal assessments and proposals and get formal approval. The HOPE office in Canada was also able to immediately inform us of commitments they were receiving, and so we were able to immediately resource these local teams. While the scale of these types of grants is not large, it does mean relief has been able to flow very quickly, and besides, a small amount of money still goes a long way in Myanmar. Please know that your support and the support of our partner agencies has allowed us to respond immediately to the needs here.

Cooperation, compassion, resourcefulness – I am fortunate to be surrounded and inspired by these on a daily basis, in spite of all the discouraging news we are also receiving. I hope you are inspired by these positive stories too.