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Stories
Three-month-old baby now an orphan
I want to go home
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Three-month-old baby now an orphan
16 May 2008
Daw Pauksee and her orphaned baby granddaughter Nilar have taken shelter in a relief camp.
Nearly 2,000 people lived in the village of Shawchaung, but only about half that many survived Cyclone Nargis. Among them is a three-month-old baby girl who is now an orphan.
Little Nilar was the youngest of her family of five, and she doesn't yet realise how her life was changed forever on 2 May, 2008. Some day, her grandmother, Daw Pauksee, 70, will tell her how her family members and thousands of other people were killed by a powerful cyclone.
Nilar’s was typical of families in this small coastal village who made their living as rice paddy farmers. Daw Pauksee explained that on the eve of the cyclone, the wind became more ferocious and the water began to move inland. Daw Pauksee picked up Nilar and headed to one of the bigger houses in the village.
“It was so messy with the wind and rain. I grabbed the little girl, and her mother followed me. There were other villagers (mostly women) around us. At one point, a big tide took away the girl's mother. Instinctively, I tried to rescue her without letting go of the baby,” explained Daw Pauksee, recalling a hellish moment.
“A woman beside me shouted, ‘Baby, baby!’ and told me to hold on tightly to the baby, but let her mother go.”
Daw Pauksee paused before continuing. “I don’t know why such bad things happen to us. I am so exhausted.”
Nilar had stopped breathing by the time they reached the safe house, so Daw Pauksee used basic first aid to revive her. “….then the little girl came back to me.”
After the storm passed, the bodies of Nilar's parents and two elder brothers were found. Now Nilar only has her grandma. “She’s been wrapped up into my longyi (a traditional skirt-like dress) until we reached this camp,” said Daw Pauksee.
The two traveled by boat to reach the district centre because they couldn’t stay in their village. Dead bodies were everywhere, and Daw Pauksee said there was not enough manpower left to bury them.
The baby was weakened by hunger and thirst during the journey to safety, so Daw Pauksee begged for a bottle of milk to keep her granddaughter alive.
Many people in the relief camp have asked Daw Pauksee if they can adopt Nilar.
“My relatives urged me to give her up, but I can’t do that. She's my hope of living in this world.”
I want to go home
16 May 2008
Sleeping is difficult for many cyclone survivors who are crammed into temporary relief camps that have been set up in schools and monasteries.
It has been almost two weeks since Cyclone Nargis struck Myanmar and many children and families still have nowhere to go because their homes have been destroyed. Nevertheless, one young disabled boy wants to go home immediately.
Life seems cruel for 14-year-old Thant Zin. He came into the world with a lifelong friend, his twin brother. But disabled from polio at the age of four, he stays at home while his brother works to support their family of eight.
Like most disabled children in the country, he doesn't go to school.
“My whole body was soaked with rain when our bamboo hut collapsed,” explained Thant Zin. ''We ate nothing on that day.”
In the first days after the storm, Thant Zin's family sheltered in a community hall. Then, they moved to a relief camp set up at a state-run high school.
Thant Zin grew up in one of the poorest communities in Yangon, where families often build makeshift huts illegally on land outside the township. When Cyclone Nargis struck, the makeshift huts completely disappeared.
World Vision has already provided water and food for people displaced from this area, and is about to begin distributing shelter kits.
While most of the people would prefer to stay at the relief camp, Thant Zin can't wait to return home.
“Here, there are so many people. I'm not able to sleep. I want to go home,” he said.
More Stories
A World Vision worker talks to a family made homeless by Cyclone Nargis.
Too many grandchildren to remember the number, eight children, and numerous other relatives – this is Grandma Pwa Ni’s family – and they are all camped in a relief camp with no home to return to.
The extended family either lost their wooden homes or they were severely damaged when the high winds of Cyclone Nargis whipped through their impoverished SaePin community.
There are some 80 family members now living in a camp, some 10 kms from Yangon.
Pwa Ni, 74, said, "I was never afraid like this before."
She said the family’s 10 feet square bamboo hut blew down long before the gale reached full throttle. Most of her grandchildren’s homes were also damaged. As soon as the light returned they trekked to the community’s monastery, a nearby large wooden-brick building. Five hundred other people had the same idea.
Pwa Ni’s family belong to a poor uneducated community of SaePin - literally a community of garbage collectors. The word SaePin, means ‘prosperity’ in Burmese. The community are street cleaners and refuse collectors and they are among the poorest people in Myanmar.
When World Vision staff visited the family today they had already been living in the monastery for three days. Since then they have been looked after by the Buddhist monks who gave the hundreds of guests food to eat for the first two days until they ran out of food.
Nearby communities, who often donate food to monks as part of their merit-making, no longer had enough themselves to spare due to the destruction wreaked by the Cyclone, the worst to hit Myanmar in recorded history.
"We had one meal in the morning of just rice. But we have had nothing in the evening," said Pwa Ni.
World Vision began providing rice hours later to her family.
When World Vision staff asked when she planned to go home, Grandma Pwa Ni said, "I've no idea." Her small bamboo hut was broken in pieces and lying in a paddy field.
When a five-metre sea surge tore through the village of o-Opor, farmer Ko Zaw Oo swept his two youngest children into his arms and made a desperate attempt to cling onto a coconut tree as his home broke apart around him.
As he tried with all his might to hold onto the tree and his children, the forces of the cyclonic wave ripped one of them away. His wife and eldest child had already been lost to the deluge that roared in across the Ayerarwaddy Delta area.
His wife and two children are now among the tens of thousands dead or missing. Their loss has ripped his heart out.
Of his village of 300, only 70 people remain. In one moment the village of wooden homes in Latputa township, where he has lived almost his whole life, was decimated.
Shaking with emotion and tears, Ko Zaw Oo said, "I found it hard to hang on as my hands were full. Finally I had to let go of my four-year-old."
Ko Zaw Oo, who is in his mid-30s, knew there was a storm coming but he didn’t expect the terrible wave that came with it.
"It wiped away our bamboo house," he said. “There was nothing left to hang on to. My wife and eldest child disappeared."
"At one point, my two-year-old daughter froze. I feared she was dead. But when I shouted at her and shook her, she came back to life."
Ko Zaw Oo is now being cared for by relatives, but since no aid has arrived in the town, survivors are living on the scraps that have been left behind.
Meanwhile, in a nearby town, only 400 people survived from a population of 4,000. The town was also hit by the 2004 tsunami, but in that disaster only a few people in the town died.
Ko Soe Kyaw Kyaw, a World Vision area development manager who conducted the informal assessment of the area, said, "The number of orphans would be significant in Latputa because many children go there for schooling, leaving their families in nearby villages, some of which have totally vanished."
Ko Soe Kyaw Kyaw is one of a World Vision team that has just returned from Latputa in the devastated Ayerarwaddy Division and reported widespread carnage and pollution of fresh water sources that is now putting adults, and especially children at risk.
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