By Ajesh Patalay
Last Updated: 5:20PM BST 21 May 2009
Burma: the children of cyclone Nargis
Ye Pyint, 10, has become s surrogate father to his brother, Nge Lye,
three, and sister, May Hnin, six
On May 2 2008, at about 6pm local time, Burma was struck by the worst
natural disaster in its history. Unleashing winds of up to 135mph and
triggering flood waters that surged to 16ft, Cyclone Nargis tore
across the Irrawaddy Delta in southern Burma and swept up through
Rangoon, leaving roughly 140,000 dead and 2.4 million displaced or
severely affected.
Among the survivors were tens of thousands of children, orphaned or
separated from their parents, who in the immediate aftermath were left
to fend for themselves.
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A year later, some have been reunited with family members, some have
been taken into orphanages and monasteries, and some have ended up in
refugee camps on the Thai-Burma border. But many children are still
eking out an existence on their own, faced with the daily ordeal of
accessing food and drinking water, while living in makeshift huts
constructed out of bamboo and tarpaulin that offer scant protection
from the impending monsoons.
Orphans of the Storm, a remarkable documentary that uses footage shot
undercover by Burmese cameramen across the restricted delta region,
tells the harrowing stories of these orphaned children and honours
their extraordinary resilience in the long year since Nargis.
The idea for the documentary originated with Evan Williams, a former
south-east Asia correspondent for ABC (Australian Broadcasting
Corporation), who approached Ed Braman, the commissioning editor of
news and current affairs at Channel 4, shortly after the cyclone hit.
In collaboration with Quicksilver Media, the production company behind
the acclaimed Unreported World series, Williams, 45, was determined to
document on film the unfolding situation in Burma.
It quickly became apparent how urgent that situation was. In the tense
few weeks after Nargis, the ruling military junta in Burma, the State
Peace and Development Council (SPDC), severely restricted access to
international agencies and aid workers. French and American naval
ships bearing supplies waited offshore for two weeks until, lacking
official permission, they were forced to withdraw. (The SPDC's
hindrance of international relief efforts during that time was
impugned by the US Secretary of State for having caused tens of
thousands of deaths.)
Even when foreign aid got through – Save the Children reports having
reached more than 160,000 people with food, water, plastic sheeting
and basic provisions within two weeks – it proved inadequate to meet
the need. Human Rights Watch later noted that only just over half of
those affected by the cyclone had received any form of international
assistance after two months. Instead of deploying its 500,000-strong
army on emergency relief, the Burmese government was seen to focus its
resources on mounting a national referendum.
For Williams and the team at Channel 4 it was essential to be able to
tell this story through the eyes of Burma's orphans. But how? Foreign
journalists were banned in Burma. Access to the delta for local camera
crews was prohibited. The only option was to film covertly. Williams
knew exactly whom to approach. The Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), an
organisation that runs a radio and television news service from exile
in Oslo, feeding its material back to Burma via satellite, had through
its network of underground cameramen (or VJs) already provided much of
the early footage of Cyclone Nargis that was shown around the world.
(Their footage of the 'saffron revolution' protests held by Buddhist
monks in September 2007 was used extensively in this year's Sundance
Award-winning documentary, Burma VJ.)
'It is a remarkable organisation,' Williams says of DVB, whose
operatives he got to know during his time at ABC. 'Their cameramen and
reporters risk very long jail terms – anywhere between 18 and 30 years
– if they are caught. But there's this Burmese thing: they won't let
it stop. Every time I go back there's a new generation of kids who are
saying, "This is wrong, we want democracy, we're going to do something
about it." It's incredibly humbling and inspiring.'
>From the outset DVB was keen to be involved, partly to get the story
out but also for the chance to work with an experienced Western
documentary crew ('to increase their own skill set,' Williams says,
'which helps DVB and media in Burma long term').
None the less, the project posed considerable risks to DVB's
cameramen. 'A lot of these guys were used to grabbing quick bits of
information, sticking it in their bag and disappearing,' Williams
says. 'This was a whole different ball game.' For the purposes of a
documentary, Williams required the VJs not only to travel extensively
through the delta in search of stories, but also to return to the same
spots again and again as they followed particular survivors.
Given the proliferation in the area of intelligence officers and
informers, any of whom could shop them to the authorities, Williams
says, 'It upped the danger considerably.'
Williams recruited three teams of two, each comprising one DVB
cameraman and a colleague to 'keep an eye out' while filming. In early
June 2008 the cameramen – codenamed Zor, Sam and Tom – broke protocol
to meet each other (for security reasons the VJs prefer not to be
acquainted) and Williams near the Thai border.
Over the next two days Williams played them various documentaries –
none of them was very familiar with the format – as well as detailing
what kinds of footage he was after. Then, equipped with special HD
video cameras ('slightly bigger than they were comfortable with,'
Williams says), the cameramen crossed back into Burma and journeyed
separately down into the Irrawaddy Delta. Now it was up to them.
Of their first impressions of the delta post-Nargis, one account comes
from a diary kept by Zor, 27. 'When I arrived in Labutta [in the
central delta] I couldn't believe my eyes. I asked myself, "Is this
Burma or what?" The whole town was full of debris and I couldn't
forget the image of people who were chasing after the cars to get any
kind of aid, like food. After that, I went out in a boat and it was
worse. Dead bodies, starving children…'
Approaching each village, the cameramen had first to earn the trust of
the villagers and orphans before getting permission to film, mindful
that at any point they could be informed on to the authorities.
Zor says, 'I had to build a relationship with the villagers. Villagers
know who is who, and if you are in danger the villagers will help you
out. That's how I protected myself.'
Relating the experiences of another DVB team, Zor says, 'A woman
phoned the local government authorities and informed on our cameramen.
Our group had to leave the area by boat, but they were chased by
government intelligence agents all the way back to Rangoon and were
lucky to escape without being arrested.'
Then, in September, fearful of renewed protests a year after the 2007
monk uprising, the government clamped down across the region, making a
number of arrests. For a couple of weeks the DVB cameramen were forced
to stop filming.
The early footage Williams received, smuggled across the Thai border
then sent on to Quicksilver Media's offices in Oxford, was patchy.
'They were still trying to work out what we wanted because they had
never done anything like this before,' Williams says. But the
cameramen were quick learners and by communicating regularly with
Williams, either on satellite phones or via secure online instant
messaging services, the quality of footage improved rapidly.
Over 10 months of filming, some powerful stories emerged. Ten-year-old
Ye Pyint, his sister, May Hnin, six, and brother, Nge Lye, three, lost
both parents to the cyclone and were living together in the east
delta. 'We never found my mother,' Ye Pyint says. 'Someone told me
they saw my father's body with some rubbish on a beach.'
Ye Pyint had become a surrogate father to his younger siblings. 'The
baby is always asking other people for food and if he doesn't get it
he cries,' he says. 'If I cannot get fish or crabs, then we have to
buy food from the shop without paying and then we owe them money that
we have to pay back later.'
The children's 19-year-old former neighbour, Wai, who was herself
orphaned by the tragedy, articulates a dilemma common to the delta.
After the cyclone killed three quarters of livestock, sank half of the
fishing fleet and drove saltwater inland, which ruined millions of
acres of rice paddies, thousands of people have been left without a
job or food. (More than a third of the 480,000 people living in the
Labutta district still rely on handouts from the UN World Food
Programme.)
'If there is a rice crop, I can earn some money harvesting rice but
there is no work,' Wai says. 'I pawned my only earrings and my other
set of clothes to buy some food for the children.' Forced to buy food
on credit (debt is an ever-increasing problem in the region), she
says, 'We try to find some money to pay the shopkeepers back, but we
don't have any. We spent what little money we had on the children when
they were sick and now we have no money.'
In the south-west delta, Khine, a 16-year-old orphan who lives with
her 14-year-old sister, Hlaing, is one of thousands forced to scavenge
for food such as mud fish, river prawns and crabs. 'When our mother
was alive, we would catch most of our food like this and make some
money by selling what we didn't eat,' she explains. 'Now there's only
me and my sister but we don't dare go to catch crabs because too many
people are doing it.'
Khine and Hlaing decided to take the only work they can – a 10-hour
shift pushing a heavy roller in sweltering heat on a military-owned
salt field, which is a three-hour round trip from their hut. It earns
them just enough to buy rice and vegetables, which they supplement
with offcuts given to them for helping the local fish seller.
'I don't know why our lives are so full of misery,' Khine sobs. 'When
it's windy and the tide is coming in I'm scared the house will
collapse and I will die, and then how is my sister going to live? My
sister and I want to stay together until we die.'
Thirteen-year-old Silver Moo, a member of Burma's Christian Karen
ethnic minority, is one of 140,000 children now living in refugee
camps along the Thai-Burma border. Her mother, father, two sisters and
younger brother were swept to their deaths after their house collapsed
in the flood.
Her memory of that night is still vivid: 'The water was rising more
and more, and when the house leant over my mother stood up. She said,
"Pray to God because he listens to the prayers of children." Soon, the
house couldn't stand any more and collapsed, and we all had to swim.
At that moment I couldn't see my mother and brother and sisters. Then
I swam and tried to grab whatever I could reach. I kept calling out
but nobody could hear me. I kept shouting and shouting but nobody
came. I closed my eyes and floated away.' After the storm, Silver Moo
sought refuge at a Buddhist monastery, where several days later she
was reunited with her uncle, with whose extended family she later fled
to Thailand.
For 29-year-old cameraman Sam, bearing witness to such stories as
Silver Moo's and seeing first hand the carnage in the delta left him
deeply shaken. 'I can't imagine how they could escape from that
night,' he says. 'They told me their families disappeared in the flood
in a minute. Some people were hanging at the top of the trees, some
were struck by the arrow-like rain and at last gave up and died in the
water. Some died waiting for rescue. After hearing such stories, I was
shocked and traumatised by their words. I still remember the dead
bodies and the bodies of animals along the river.'
A year since Nargis, most relief workers in Burma stress that progress
has been made in delivering aid to millions of cyclone survivors,
despite early claims of government confiscation. The Red Cross has
sent 130 tons of aid; the World Health Organisation has distributed
350 tons of medical supplies. At the same time everyone acknowledges
the desperate need for more.
Of the £320 million target set by the UN's emergency appeal for Burma,
only £211 million has so far been raised. Unicef has reported modest
progress in providing aid in the form of vaccinations, food for
acutely malnourished children, the rebuilding of schools, and the
registering of 'unaccompanied children'. Humanitarian groups still
warn of the risks to (especially orphaned) children from traffickers
(into prostitution and bonded labour), and of forced recruitment for
children as young as 13 into the army.
Unicef's 135 newly built community-run 'child-friendly spaces' in
Burma, staffed by NGOs trained to provide psychosocial care and
support for roughly 30,000 children, may go some way towards easing
the trauma felt by many post-Nargis. But what Orphans of the Storm
impresses on us most powerfully is how deeply those scars run.
Particularly moving is the story of Min, a 16-year-old orphaned boy
from the central east delta who finds solace after the death of his
mother by becoming a novice monk, only to find himself suddenly
compelled to leave the monastery that has been his home for six months
and journey 100 miles back to his old village where he has no secure
means of support. 'I am not happy [here at the monastery],' he offers
by way of explanation. 'It's not that I don't like the people. I like
them. But in the evening I can't cope with what happened to me.'
For the DVB cameramen, the whole process has instilled in them a sense
of achievement, even hope. In January, halfway through filming, when
they were shown a 10-minute cut of early footage 'a couple of them
cried,' Williams says. 'They were amazed because they could see how
putting together their footage could tell a story and capture the
emotion and reality of what was going on.'
There are plans to air the documentary in Burma via satellite. 'The
most important thing is that we could highlight the forgotten future
of these poor kids, and we hope the world will pay more attention on
that issue,' Sam says. 'If they do, that will keep encouraging us to
work on.'
Tentatively looking forward to a democratic Burma with a thriving free
media at its heart, Zor says, 'I'm afraid of there being a lack of
skilful young journalists in our country. Some have been put in jail.
Some have fled abroad. At this time, the role of journalism is
restricted, but hopefully our role will be in the front line of a
coming democracy. Our country needs a skilful and informed generation
for the future and for democracy to be progressed. I'm dreaming of the
reputable role of journalism in Burma soon.'
The orphans' names have been changed.
'Dispatches: Orphans of the Storm', will be shown at 8pm on June 1, on
Channel 4
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/burmamyanmar/5350077/Burma-th
e-children-of-Cyclone-Nargis---myanmar.html
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