In the Mouth of Madness: Burma after Cyclone Nargis
Pictures and text: ©Austin Andrews / ZUMA Press
For a region that four months ago witnessed one of the worst humanitarian disasters in recent memory, the waterlogged highway descending into Burma’s Irrawaddy Delta reveals little of what it saw. Uniformed children skip to school in sync, passing the same motley assortment of stray dogs, wayward goats and discarded rubbish endemic to all this impoverished nation’s roads. Overstuffed buses, some still carrying advertisements for distant Western cities — their last homes — bounce passengers from pothole to pothole along the eight hour, 80 mile journey to colonial capital Rangoon. And reminders of the paranoid military are everywhere, eyes burning from behind the AK-47s and highway checkpoints designed to keep foreign press and big city samaritans out of what has quickly become the biggest disaster zone in the country’s history.
Cyclone Nargis made landfall not far from here on the night of May 2, 2008. It arrived unannounced from the Indian Ocean, ripped the mouth of the nation open and, shoving a fire hose down its throat, claimed as many as 200,000 lives before it traced upcountry and dissipated into a thick seasonal storm somewhere near the Thai border. But if the highway keeps its secret well, even the proverbial man who’s lived under a rock since April wouldn’t need to stray far before the scale of the disaster, and the amount of work still to be done, becomes apparent. Felt across 20,000 square kilometres of tarp-and-tent villages, Nargis has left Burma with US$10 billion in damage and over two million lives and livelihoods shaken, shattered or lost.
The highway ends in Bogale, a muddy city of 100,000 walled in on all sides by a web of rivers and tributaries. Before Nargis, this was the spoon to Burma’s “rice bowl”, preparing the staple crop and feeding it into roads and waterways to be fought over by a hungry nation. Today, Bogale has all the feel of a makeshift UN refugee base in a war zone, which, in a way, it is. A who’s who of the world’s international aid organisations operate out of tin hovels and hastily-erected hotels; logos for Unicef and the International Red Cross are as common a sight here as Marlboro and Coca-Cola billboards are in other Asian cities. An atmosphere of civic brotherhood pervades even the simplest exchange. One could well imagine lines from the city’s inner monologue: “you’re all in this together,” maybe, or “wait just a little longer, the nightmare might still pass”. Nargis is never far from anyone’s lips.
If anything, Bogale is one of the few places in the delta to have grown in population this year, as heartsick villagers stumble through seeking opportunities to rebuild their lives. Kept on a short leash by the image experts in Rangoon and in the public eye by relief organisations, Bogale looks and feels alive.
The Irrawaddy Division has as many villages as a leaking water bucket might have drops: 11566 in 2005. It was here where, between noon and midnight on May 2, the wickedest wars were waged. Untold thousands of villages were washed out to sea by a four metre tidal wave and peak winds that topped out at 215 km/h. Many have since been rebuilt, with donated blue tarpaulins and camping tents woven into the familiar patchwork of palm frond roofs and bamboo walls. Others have disappeared from the memory of all but a handful of survivors; not enough, in any case, to pick up the pieces and start over again.
The story of Pyin Song Kyay, a small community adrift on a thin strip of land between Bogale and Laputta, is typical of the Irrawaddy Delta, albeit with different numbers and different heroes. One-fifth of villagers here perished, including 21 schoolchildren. Describing the night of Nargis, one man tells me that “looking around I thought we were in the middle of the ocean, all I could see was water”. Another man swam to a floating palm frond to stay afloat, only to find himself clinging to the top of a tree as daylight broke and the water level subsided. With their boats wrecked and crops destroyed, and far enough from any population centres that it was forgotten, the village’s 600-odd survivors subsisted off patience and coconut flesh for eighteen days as they waited for the outside world to arrive.
A walk through the village reveals deep scars. The gentle smiles carried in public by most Burmese are fewer here, replaced by a dull-eyed weariness that suggests that, although their houses have been rebuilt and fields sowed, these peoples’ spirits may take a little longer to mend.
Sixteen kilometres away, near the village of Aung Hlaing, a Buddhist monastery was reduced to a mound of twisted metal and wood splinters. The night of Nargis, ten monks and sixty villagers clutched pillars and each other’s arms as the torrential waters rose past first their ankles, then their knees, then their waists. They didn’t know when, or if, it would stop. U Sittama, the hyper-animated septuagenarian monk who has made this monastery his life’s work, wonders and worries whether he’ll be able to salvage it. Four months after Nargis it looks just as the receding waters left it and it breaks his heart. The “razorblade winds that sliced off treetops” sliced off its upper level too. A stack of tin roofing sheets, donated by a Japanese shipyard, sit unused, too few to cover more than a corner of the structure. Wood for floorboards is still scarce this deep into the delta. For now, U Sittama has neither the materials nor the labour to rebuild his dream.
With most of the two million delta dwellers left homeless by Nargis still waiting for their worlds to return to normal, the rest of Burma waits with flickering hopes for their chance at a brighter future. The ham-handed rule of an iron-fisted military junta runs the gamut of adjectives from negligent to barbaric, making a third world mockery of a country that was once among Asia’s most prosperous. International watchdogs hoped the fallout might be enough to usher political change, similar, perhaps, to the events following the 1970 Bhola cyclone in neighbouring Bangladesh, when mismanagement of the disaster drove an angry populace toward independence. But instead, Burma’s xenophobic junta has wrapped itself up even tighter inside its borders, initially rejecting or hoarding international aid and flexing its military might to frighten a restless people further into submission.
As the international media retires the story of Nargis, Burma retreats back into the shadows of its tragic obscurity. Sixty years into an uneasy independence, and eighteen years after the election that was meant to restore it to democracy, its people resume their generations-long wait. What comes next, no one knows.
A boatman sits on the prow of his newly-repaired fishing boat at the jetty in Bogale, tarps donated by NGOs doubling as storm roofs. 90% of the city’s infrastructure was either destroyed or badly damaged by Nargis’ raging crosswinds and waters.
A temporary school rises like a fluorescent apparition across a seasonal floodway from two new bamboo-and-wood boats.
Villagers and schoolchildren pose for a photo along bamboo runners.
Lessons and a distraction.
Schoolchildren wait for their teacher to arrive and the day’s classes to begin under the light of the blue tarpaulin roof of a temporary school.
Bracelets and bare feet.
Two cyclone survivors, wary of the photographer.
Drop puddles.
A young boy looks over from his lessons.
New mothers pose with their babies. All were at one point presumed dead during the frenzy of Nargis.
A fallen jewel-and-gold umbrella was the only damage incurred by this Buddhist zedi on the banks of the Bogale River.
A novice monk stands with hands folded in front of his destroyed monastery near Aung Hlaing.
76 year old monk U Sittama opens the door to what was once the upper level of his monastery.
Two monks, U Sittama at right, describe the winds and rains of Nargis.
U Sittama sits with two novices in their temporary sleeping quarters.
A zedi under repair.
A villager stands in front of a fallen coconut palm tree.
A convoy of Unicef trucks haul aid into the Irrawaddy Delta from Rangoon.
Repair work continues on a damaged home on the main street of Bogale.
Reflected moonlight shimmers off a new tin roof during a windstorm.
Palm fronds and scaffolding encircle a zedi under repair.
Three Angles on a Cyclone-Ravaged Primary School
Children congregate along the path to their blue tarpaulin-roofed temporary school in Kyone Sein Lay, a small village decimated in May by Cyclone Nargis, which claimed the lives of as many as 200000 people in Burma’s Irrawaddy (Ayeyarwady) Delta and is the nation’s worst natural disaster in recorded history. The brick remains of the childrens’ former school, ripped apart by the raging winds and thrashing waters, now pave the way to the new structure.
Twenty-one of this boy’s 122 classmates died in the cyclone. With approximately 150 lives lost, one Kyone Sein Lay resident considers his village “lucky” compared with neighbouring villages, some of which were washed out to sea with too few survivors to pick up and rebuild.
English lessons continue today as before, with students learning basic anatomy and simple sentence construction.
More stories from the Irrawaddy Delta will follow later in the week.
(For anyone who knows me and is wondering why I’m not replying to long-overdue emails, I’m sorry to say you may need to wait a few days longer. I will be away from internet until August 24.)
A Burmese Government Ferry
A shore scene as passengers embark and disembark a three-deck government ferry in Kachin State. Seen here at the beginning of its two-day, thrice-weekly voyage, this ferry will travel down the Irrawaddy River from Bhamo in the country’s north to upcountry trade capital Mandalay.
The arrival of the ferry sets off a bustle of activity at each new town it docks in, with opportunistic vendors and trinket dealers swarming the jetty.
Teak planks span shore to ship.
A jetty scene at Shwebo, south of Bhamo.
Muslims onboard organise for afternoon prayers, mats facing Mecca.
A hatch to lower decks.
Stories after dark (how many faces do you see?)
Locals bathe in the Irrawaddy River near the jetty in Katha. Perhaps best known as George Orwell’s backwaters outpost in his days as a soldier in British India, today the lifeblood of Katha is its connection to the river, Burma’s largest and most important.
The View from the Jetty
Two Burmese fishermen peer out over the carcass of a trawler sunken in shallow water by Cyclone Nargis. Even three months later reminders of the disaster can be found everywhere.
Visions of Rangoon
Commerce and play: moments in Burma’s erstwhile capital Rangoon.
Peanut vendor.
Apples by candlelight.
Cover search.
Inflatable colour.
Departure times.
Eyes in the crowd.
Ground rush.
Incredulous.
Indifferent.
Price per handful.
Colonial yellow.
Median muslim.
Wrong bus.
Sule Pagoda in the distance.
Committing the Basket Case Nation
It may have taken a two-day standoff and uncomfirmed dozens of fatalities to get there, but with the actions of thousands of Burmese monks the lid on the long-simmering nation may have finally opened a crack.
The streets of Rangoon are under lockdown after last week’s protests turned to bloodshed with many of its long-suffering people either in prison or hiding behind drawn blinds. But unlike the 1988 student uprising, when on the day the government slaughtered 3000 demonstrators the New York Times devoted its front page to a rafting accident in Alaska, reliable information is escaping the nation’s sewed-up borders and the world is taking notice.
I don’t have much new to add to what the BBC has already reported, or to what the Guardian is inferring, but what I’ve found most interesting is the savvy use of contraband modems and mobiles by the Burmese people to deliver a different version of the truth to what their xenophobic regime would have us accept. On the same day state-run newspaper New Light of Myanmar reported that “saboteurs from inside and outside the nation and some foreign radio stations, who are jealous of national peace and development, have been making instigative acts through lies to cause internal instability and civil commotion”, the images of baton-charging and monk-beating captured by citizen media have burned their way into the consciousness of everyone who’s picked up a newspaper or turned their computer on since Wednesday.
The images and stories that have emerged show above all a government afraid of its own people, without control over their minds and under too many watching eyes to curb the dissent in the manner it had grown accustomed to. The regime won’t topple easily — long-time ally and trading partner China will likely see to that — but with the events of the past week the Burmese people have succeeded in getting the world on their side.
Some Favourite Stragglers, Part 2
Three images from Burma that I missed posting earlier:
Outlines in paint where a bank once was. In 2003 the United States imposed a series of trade sanctions on Burma that resulted in the collapse and closure of all private banks in the country. Even now, four years on, credit and foreign bank cards aren’t worth their weight in plastic.
Sugary smiles, in Mandalay.
Tissue-thin dress shirts catch fluorescent light and the attention of shoppers at the night markets in Mandalay.
This Week in Photos
Homeless and destitute in Rangoon.
Domes.
Birds on a wire.
Thatched green roofs at the labyrinthine, colonial-era Rangoon Central train station.
Ghosts in transit.
Religion and the state at Rangoon Central.
Footballs at the station.
Footballs crossing the road. For more footballs, see Will’s blog (link on sidebar).
Departure gate at Rangoon International.
Singapore public transit.
Bric-a-brac council flats in Singapore.
A newsagent opens for the day in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Will fast asleep at the Kuala Lumpur bus station.
The 21:40 to Kota Bahru.
Naypyidaw: Abode of Kings in a Derelict Kingdom
To understand Naypyidaw (interchangeably spelled Naypyitaw or Nay Pyi Taw, and translated from Burmese into “Abode of Kings”), it helps to know a little of the situation in Burma, the country to which it now serves as capital city. The poorest nation in southeast Asia, and home to the world’s longest-running civil war (infighting has been ripping state lines to shreds since independence from Britain was granted in 1948), the universally-abhorred military government is fighting a difficult war with the very people it should be protecting. A progressive democratic party was elected in 1990 but prevented from taking power, its Nobel Prize-winning leader put under a house arrest that lasts to this day. The GDP has become stagnant. Cities are in shambles while in the countryside thousands die every year from starvation. And in a greenfield site miles from anywhere sits a surreal suburban fantasyland where tap water is drinkable and electricity runs freely.
On November 6, 2005 the Tatmadaw military government surprised the world when it announced it had moved the capital to an empty tract of farmland 230km north of colonial capital Rangoon. No one knows exactly why: the consensus among news agencies and political pundits attributed it to geography, shifting the command centre north to avoid any potential seaborne invasion by US-led forces, while the military government maintained it was because Rangoon was simply “too crowded”. Even Burma’s main ally, China, criticised the move, wondering why a nation too poor to even feed its own people would spend so much money moving its capital city.
The city took shape as 2006 ran its course, boulevards and buildings popping up across the plain, and by our visit in June 2007 Naypyidaw was beginning to look like the squeaky-clean showcase city its creators had in mind, albeit without perhaps answering first the all-important “why”. We went in without knowing what we’d find or where we’d find it: there was nary a mention of the city in the travellers’ bible Lonely Planet and we were told by the manager at the hotel that we were the first uninvited non-delegate foreigners to stay overnight (in effect, the first two tourists).
The official line remains that Naypyidaw is off-limits to foreigners, although if that’s true it seems no one told the local officials. Apart from suspected tailings (a possible paranoid hallucination) and one unpleasant chitchat with a cop who had designs on our none-too-subtle Nikons, our overnight stay was remarkably hassle-free.
To our knowledge this is the first thorough online photo journal of life in the new capital; a companion set can be found on Will’s blog.
Constructing a Capital
Much of the infrastructure in Burma — a nation perennially on the UN’s list of the worst human rights abusers — was constructed with forced labour. While it’s difficult to tell for certain whether much or any of Naypyidaw was built by slaves and drones — locals have their suspicions but can’t substantiate them — we observed that most worker gangs had a uniformed officer supervising them very closely.
Framed by a watchtower on one side and an unfurled flag on the other, this dozer on a dune could very well be the poster image for a propaganda campaign.
Walking through the entrance to even the most finished-looking mall reveals another layer of construction.
Although the “official” population figure of one million looks to be some ways off yet, the number of new housing developments in Naypyidaw is staggering. Note the absence of cranes.
Architecture and Civic Planning
A flapping Myanmar flag points out the valley to bric-a-brac housing blocks.
A shantytown, home to displaced construction workers and poorer families, “clogs” the view of a palatial government building.
Perhaps the tallest building in Naypyidaw, and viewable from almost anywhere in the city centre, is a hilltop firehall.
The design and build quality of the housing looks about on par with American suburbia, which is to say it’s a little shoddy but they’ve done a convincing mimicry.
A bustling traditional Burmese hawker market on one side and a near-empty shopping mall on the other.
The Naypyidaw “city centre”, an inauspicious-looking traffic circle with five spoked boulevards leading to far-flung apartment blocks.
The first to move to the new capital back in 2005, the military still has a strong presence in Naypyidaw.
Life in Naypyidaw
Floor staff and kitchen boys look over the city from out the back doors of the restaurant strip. Naypyidaw enjoys a constant supply of electricity while the larger population hubs Rangoon and Mandalay sit in the dark for as many as twelve of every twenty-four hours.
The mall after dark.
A shop stall in the main shopping mall. This one sells bags of rice; another was empty save for one shelf with a boxed keyboard, a copy of Windows ME and sundry other computer parts. I felt bad for the shopkeeper and bought a blank DVD.
Reminders of Big Brother are never far away.
Mostly-empty trishaws ply the deserted boulevards of Naypyidaw.
From dinky toys to bathroom fixtures, most consumer goods in Burma are hand-me-downs from nations developing at a faster clip than they are. Even the slick new capital wasn’t spared: one paint job ago this city bus served the Narita (Tokyo) Airport.
A mother and daughter walk hand-in-hand through a fairytale land.
The Past Two Weeks in Photos
This monster post takes us through another two weeks in Burma, stopping along the way in the royal capital Mandalay, hill station retreat Kalaw and aquatic breadbasket Inle Lake.
Watch this space for a flurry of pent-up posts coming later this week after we’re back in Singapore.
Crushed areca nut doused with limestone extract and wrapped in betel leaves. A mild narcotic when chewed, the nut rots the teeth of regular users to stubs and leaves a nasty residue on the streets. Chewing betel is popular across most of southeast Asia.
A streetside chapati assembly line. Strollers and locals gather around multicoloured kiddie furniture every afternoon to scarf down this tasty fried bread. A flat frisbee-sized piece with accompanying vegetable and meat curries runs for 150 kyat — or 12 cents — on the streets of Mandalay.
Three on the grill with saturation cranked.
Widget shop.
Afternoon siesta at the monastery.
Cricket vendors.
Dead crickets and swarming flies.
Clean ‘n scrub duty on a Mandalay high-rise.
Local kids kick around a deflated football in an alleyway.
Needless to say, Will and I often end up with the same photos. The photograph he’s seen taking here can be viewed on his blog (link on sidebar).
Backs to the window.
A thannaka-streaked boy peeks out of a train window.
A platform market. Although cheap to ride, the government-run trains in Burma are among the slowest in Asia and crawl across the countryside at about the speed of a morning jog. Most rolling stock and rails are still leftovers from the early-20th century British colonial era and derailings are common.
Two porcelain toilets look out from the space where a wall once was in an abandoned colonial-era building in Kalaw.
Morning traffic in a village outside Kalaw, one of our first stops on a three-day, fifty-kilometre trek to Inle Lake.
Lost in the landscape. Photo essay coming soon.
Checkerboard hills, in close-up and from a distance.
Our trekking guide, Alex, surveys the neon landscape.
Butterfly.
Welcome to Inle Lake. Some 70,000 people live in the eighteen villages and towns built on stilts across this long, shallow lake. All trade and transportation, from the growing of crops to the staging of the markets that sell them, gets carried out on its waterways.
Three teachers paddle to school. Note the earbuds.
Inle suburbia.
Washing laundry.
Fishing in the sticks.
Storm clouds gather behind a sunlit pagoda. Photo credit Will van Engen.
A rainbow breaks a storm on Inle Lake. One of our first “postcard” pictures; I spotted, Will snapped. Go team.
A woman spins cotton and lotus thread at a textile shop on the lake.
Women assemble cigars from locally-grown tobacco.
Smoke break…
…
Nuns-in-training in the town of Nyaungshwe, near Inle Lake.
Traffic on the canal. Photo credit Will van Engen.
Bows. Photo credit Will van Engen.
