Boat

The last time I went on a boat on choppy waters I ended up being sick over the edge, just before my friends jumped in to go swimming. I didn’t tell them until we’d got back to land they probably had bits of last night’s rice in their hair, mixed with orange juice and stomach juices. Needless to say, we’re no longer in contact with those friends and I’m sure that’s one of many reasons.

I got to go another boat today, only this time I wasn’t sick. Nor did anyone go swimming, because I was warned there were snakes doing their own snorkeling in the rivers, and we wouldn’t very much want to join them.

Riverside homes

The boat, a barge-sized thing with oodles of cheap 3-in-1 coffee on-board, took us along the Delta’s river network for about an hour, and dropped us off at a community health centre where midwives and health workers were being trained. There they told me that, sadly, one of the midwives had been killed the previous night by a snake. Apparently, she had been awoken at midnight by what she thought was a cat scratching her elbow, but fifteen minutes later she was struggling to breath. When she then woke up her fellow health workers in a panic she didn’t realise she only had ten more minutes to live, and not enough time to get help.

She was not a Merlin staff member, but it was still a terrible thing to hear. I’m not so sure how everyone else in the room felt about it; I had to remind myself most people living here had experienced a loss of life and community unlike anything I had experienced myself. Laputta, the town where I am now working, had been massively hit by a series of calamities throughout the past decade including the 2004 tsunami, the 2008 cyclone Nargis, and the 2010 cyclone Giri. Cyclone Nargis alone killed 198,000 people in Myanmar and hit this town the worst (80,000 people were killed in Laputta, where there are now only 47,000 residents – the number of deaths here is roughly the same as were killed by the atomic bomb in Nagasaki) and the village I saw had been completely leveled by the storm and now rebuilt, save for the Buddhist temple which holds its own relic of the disaster.

A temple's fallen spire, still unmoved after 5 years

Laputta is a small town, quiet and slow-moving, and, along with its surrounding villages, rightly proud of its community spirit and sense of connectedness. The village I visited was delighted to share the story of how, during last week’s cyclone near-miss, they had sheltered hundreds of people from surrounding sites and used new technologies to warn people of the impending potential disaster. In some parts of Myanmar this warning ended up with its own disasters, but here in Laputta it was a sign of strengthening capacity and greater forethought amongst its leaders.

When our boat returned to dock in Laputta’s main town, the storms for this season had just started. Now there are two months of heavy rains to look forward to, and even choppier waters ahead.

Live shot from a scooter, speeding (sort of) along the main street

 

Lonely house, as viewed from the boat