On the Road to Labutta

By KYI WAI Friday, January 23, 2009

I just got back from the Irrawaddy delta yesterday. When I got back to my home in Rangoon I had such a sore back and a headache from the long, bumpy bus journey that I had to take a painkiller and go to bed immediately. At least, I think it was the potholed roads that gave me a headache. But perhaps it was a delayed reaction from all the trauma and despair I witnessed last week.

This was not my first trip to the delta since Cyclone Nargis tore through the region on May 2-3, so I thought I was prepared for it and was confident that I knew my way around.

I took the bus from Rangoon to Myaung Mya, a ride of around 4 or 5 hours. I was woken up at a police/ military checkpoint just before Myaung Mya. They were looking for foreigners and journalists. One foreigner was wearing Burmese clothes and pretending to be local, but he was easily identified and could not speak Burmese, so he was taken off the bus and sent back to Rangoon. The people on the bus who had been sitting next to him were then questioned. They denied having known the foreigner.

After the bus journey, I decided to hire a motorcyclist to take me to Labutta in the southwestern corner of the Irrawaddy delta. Motorbike taxis are considerably more expensive than the public buses, but generally twice as quick as they can body swerve the checkpoints.

Of course, two and a half hours sitting on the back of a small motorbike winding along a potholed road is not the most comfortable way to travel, but my driver was very chatty. He asked me lots of questions—where I was from; why I was going to Labutta; if I had been there before. Later, some locals in Labutta told me that most of the motorcycle drivers are members of the Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA) and are informants for the junta.

We passed two refugee camps on the road to Labutta. The first was called Kyar Kan (Lotus Lake) camp, is situated about 10 miles (16 km) before Labutta and shelters about 250 cyclone refugees. The other was called Pain Hnel Taw camp, is about 7 miles (11 km) before town and has about 300 people. The military authorities reportedly don’t allow just anyone to enter the camps. Even the international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) have to coordinate their donations through a military-operated center in Labutta and must have approval and permission to take supplies to the camps.

My impression is that the INGO staff cultivate smooth relationships with the Burmese military officers in the karaoke bars of nocturnal Labutta. I also get the feeling they would not stick their necks out by talking to a reporter and jeopardizing their status in the area. That’s why so little gets reported from the delta—the INGOs and NGOs probably worry they will be exposed as being complicit in the military’s opportunistic and often brutal treatment of the cyclone refugees.
As far as I know, the majority of the people in the camps are Burmans. The military distributes food to them every day, but in return the refugees are expected to work on recovery projects, such as road-building.

Fortunately, I again managed to get through the special branch’s questions at the checkpoint into Labutta. But I was not hanging around—after dinner I arranged my boat trip to some of the cyclone-affected towns. I left at 1a.m. It was a freezing cold night as we navigated the Yay and Pyan Ma Lawt rivers. The captain told me that it had been colder since the cyclone, because so many trees had been destroyed. He said this was the coldest winter he could remember. We arrived in the first village at 5 a.m.

An NGO had dug three underground water sources in this village, but the water is not clean—it really needs to be tested by water experts. The villagers said that the water quality before Nargis was not as bad as what we were witnessing that day. They told me that they collected rainwater for drinking, but in this dry season, the stored water would soon run out.
I travelled to the following villages: Sar Chat, Patauk Khone, Thabyay Chai, Ye Twin Khone, Ah Matt Kalay and Wel Dauk. Each was experiencing a water shortage. Cyclone Nargis had devastated all the freshwater lakes in the area. Although some had been drained of salt, it was still not potable.

The towns of Patauk Khone and Wel Dauk have become ghost towns—not only in the sense that there’s nobody living there any more, but because neighboring villagers claim that the devastated towns are now haunted by the ghosts of those killed in the cyclone. Seventy-five percent of the approximately 1,000 villagers in Patauk Khone and Wel Dauk lost their lives on the night of May 2-3 last year.

Now, people from the neighboring villages are afraid to go near the two “ghost” towns. On Christmas night, they say, the sound of ringing bells from the ruined Christian church could be heard all night.

On a more positive note, I came across several houses in the villages that had set up small stores in front of their homes with money lent (interest-free, they told me) by consortiums of businessmen, philanthropists and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).

However, at the same time, I noticed there were several more liquor shops and makeshift bars in the villages. In the evenings, the men congregated around the bars and drank until they cried. I was told that an estimated 80 percent of the men in these towns had become alcoholics since the cyclone. They could work hard by day, I was told. But by night the depression of losing so many loved ones came back to haunt them. The men said they couldn’t sleep unless they were drunk.

Many men swapped their fish and shrimp for alcohol, or even the last handfuls of rice in their homes, such is the extent of their depression.

The food that is delivered to the villagers looked like animal feed. The UN agencies supply 5 pyi (2 kg) of rice to each person in the villages every month. It is not enough to survive on. The villagers then have to find fish, shrimps and crabs to balance a meal. They said they hadn’t had chicken for eight months. If they kill a pig, every family in the village shares the pork with each household.

On cold nights, they share blankets and sweaters among the young and the elderly. However, the system of communal sharing as a survival mechanism made me feel that they had been reduced to the mannerisms of a primitive tribe, almost Stone Age in instinct.

Although schools had reopened in the area, only one-third of the children had enrolled. The rest have to spend their time fishing, and catching frogs and crabs. Some have even followed their parents’ example of drinking alcohol.

Some children work for a living. Fishermen hire them for about 300 kyat ($0.25) per trip—much cheaper than paying an adult the standard rate of 3,000 kyat ($2.50).

There are so many economic problems facing the people in the delta region. Farmers are enduring the worst harvest for years, their lands only producing about a quarter of the normal yield. They are also forced to borrow money to pay off their escalating debts.

The farmers told me they had heard about donations of cows and buffalos, but haven’t seen any to date. Although the government provided one or two mechanized ploughs to their villages, each farmer barely had enough time with the plough to sow enough seeds to grow paddy. Now, the authorities have taken the ploughs back.

Yet, even in these desperate times, the villagers of the delta do not appear to me to be afraid. I believe they are despondent, but they have no fear. They simply cannot contemplate their futures—the day-to-day struggle is all-consuming. If you look into their eyes you’ll see they are thinking only of survival.

(From Irrawaddy On line News Magazine)