Still-suffering Myanmar braces for monsoons

The monsoons are due any day now, and for the hundreds of villagers with fresh memories of last year’s deadly Tropical Cyclone Nargis, an emergency shelter that opened Saturday was yet another reminder that their lives remain fragile.

“How are we going to survive if another strong wind comes?” said Hla Thin, who clung to a coconut tree with her husband on May 2, 2008, when Nargis whipped through and wiped out their former home. “It was so dark, and the sound of the water and wind was so terrifying. We heard people calling for help.”

Nargis crashed into Myanmar’s southwestern coast in the middle of the night, demolishing villages and killing an estimated 110,000 people. A year later, people in some of the hardest-hit and most isolated areas are still suffering.

“We have no solutions and no help,” said Hla Thin, a 38-year-old farmer. She used to scrape by on rice farming but now has no money to hire farmhands and no seeds for planting and expects to miss the planting season already underway. “My husband has contemplated suicide rather than face the difficulties ahead.”

The cyclone churned for two days and sent tidal surges as high as 12 feet inland up to 25 miles. It was the worst natural disaster Myanmar, also known as Burma, has ever seen and one of the deadliest in recorded history.

Most of the dead were in the low-lying Irrawaddy River delta, the country’s rice-growing region on the southwestern coast, where tens of thousands of farm families were swept to their deaths.

Humanitarian agencies say 90% of the survivors have been provided with food, drinking water and basic shelter needs. But hundreds of thousands remain without decent jobs and proper housing, leaving them vulnerable to the coming monsoon rains and with little to lift them out of poverty.

“Shelter is probably the No. 1 challenge or difficulty faced by hundreds of thousands of families across the delta,” said Paul Risley, a spokesman for the U.N.’s World Food Program, which expects to provide rations for the rest of the year to at least 350,000 survivors.

Hla Thin’s family was among the hundreds that attended the opening of the delta’s first cyclone shelter in Tha Gyar Hin Oh, at the mouth of the Pyapon River, which opens into the Bay of Bengal.

The shelter, sponsored by private donors, can hold 1,500 people from several surrounding villages.

Like many parts of the delta, Hla Thin’s village is accessible only by boat. Residents say they received food and other assistance after the cyclone, but that it stopped coming months ago and they need more.