My heart and sympathy go out to the many many thousands who lost their lives to the 'Myanmar' cyclone. I find that new broadcasts and web images are inadequate to bring home to me the enormity of what has happened. Last week, I watched the BBC weather person showing the cyclone hovering over the ocean. It seemed so far away from Myanmar at that point. This is a strange cyclone was the comment. To the weather person, the cyclone had a nature of its own and just seemed to be staying put and not going anywhere.
The cyclone had grown to an immense scale by the time it struck the Irrawaddy delta of Burma several days later. If one examines the news images coming back from Myanmar, one is impressed with the ferocity of this storm, which must easily compare in scale with the one that hit New Orleans.
What one does not see is the true scale of the horror that this massive storm brought to these lovely people. As in New Orleans, the tidal wave or flow seems to have been the real killer of human beings. As in New Orleans, the true scale of what happened as water engulfed people was not known for many days. As in New Orleans, the authorities seem to have been unable to respond adequately, and though it is still early days for these people, one might hazard a guess that there are no modern heroes coming to their rescue.
On Monday, May 5, 2008, the BBC said that over 10,000 were feared dead after Nagris. By Thursday, May 8, 2008, the death toll speculation number has risen to over 100,000 people, a number that is so large that it staggers the human brain. It is a number so large that we cannot even conceptualize it. Our reality is that we do not know how much suffering has gone on in Myanmar over the past week. My guess is that even if we did we would not be able to comprehend it. Our brains are not equipped to understand misery on such a scale on a community that is largely in poverty as in Nyaung U, Pagan.
Images of Burma before the cyclone give some idea of what a cyclone can do because the new images will look very different. A picture on the internet of a railway station in Taikkyi shows some of the people that the storm would have affected. Compare what you find now for the Dhamma-ya-za-ka Zedi pagode. Perhaps many of the beautiful Bagan pagodas will have been destroyed. What we are going to see will no longer be images like these. Our experience in North America of what a cyclone can do comes largely from our experience with New Orleans, and the experience was not a good one!
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We can see where people have their farms alongside the delta waters. How vulnerable these people must be to a major cyclone. We can't even imagine the time it will take for them to recover. The cost of reconstruction is prohibitive. Remembering that in the Iraq war many have lost their lives over a longish period. In Myanmar and in these delta areas, as many people have possibly lost their lives and livelihood in a matter of days.
