Everything Is Broken (26 page)

The aid workers I was sitting with at the beer stand in Bogale weren’t that interested in debating the finer details of the regime’s intentions or the moral ramifications of what had occurred. Done with discussing work-related issues, the talk drifted from the day’s hurdles to the inability of Bogale beer stands to store beer at an adequately chilled temperature, and on to favorite bar snacks (even with the addition of ketchup, the crispy fried eel didn’t make it to anyone’s top five).

At the end of the evening I left the table feeling woolly-headed after too many glasses of tepid beer. With thoughts of french fries, salt-and-vinegar chips, and herbed olives in my head, I traipsed back through the dark streets to the guesthouse. The generator was turned off every night at 9:00 P.M., and without the electric fan my windowless room was humid and airless. Too hot to sleep, I lay on the bed swatting away mosquitoes and waiting for dawn.

O
ver a hundred years ago, only wild animals roamed the lower stretches of the Irrawaddy Delta. Elephants and tigers lived within the forest, and crocodiles and snakes flourished in the grassy swamplands and creeks. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, plucky cultivators were enticed to this wilderness by the British colonial government. Burma’s rice trade was expanding, and the government, keen to increase the acreage of cultivatable land, offered farmers tax incentives and other lures to try their luck in the frontier.

But carving a living out of the wetlands of the delta was no simple task. Would-be cultivators first had to hack down dense forests of tenacious
kanazo
, or Burmese grape trees, and the tough swamp grass had to be burned off and then uprooted. It took years before the land was ready for planting, and even once paddy seedlings had been sunk into the ground, they were vulnerable to numerous hazards. The low-lying land was prone to severe flooding and in some parts remained underwater for many months each year. Bunds and embankments had to be constructed to protect the rice fields from inundation; saltwater floods could kill off a crop and crabs carried along with the water could chomp their way through entire fields of young shoots. The area was also dangerous to new cultivators, who had to build stockades around their dwellings to prevent tigers from entering, and who lived in fear of the poisonous snakes that slithered through the undergrowth. Mosquitoes bred easily in the fetid air, and farmers often succumbed to malarial fevers and other potentially fatal diseases. In short, the rich and savage soil of the delta had been ploughed with a great deal of hardship.

One day I traveled some hours south of Bogale with Shwe Ya, a farmer who wanted to show me the land he had not been able to farm since Cyclone Nargis. Shwe Ya sat in the prow of the boat directing our way through the winding creeks—with so many trees and visual markers torn down by the storm, boatmen found it hard to navigate the watery maze they once knew so well. To me, the nuances of the scenery were indistinguishable, and all the boat trips I took had merged into one long and monotonous journey. The land was unceasingly flat. The trees that remained after the storm had been stripped of their foliage, leaving behind dead and contorted branches. The monsoon rains had leeched all color from the landscape; the river was always the pale brown of watery tea and the sky was a leaden white-gray that was more like an absence of color than any describable hue. Every boat I sailed on in the delta seemed to wind its way through the same postapocalyptic landscape.

At first, Shwe Ya’s land looked to me like any other part of the delta, but as he spoke I began to see it through his eyes—the possibilities and losses that had been bestowed upon it. Shwe Ya showed me where his house had stood before the cyclone. All that remained were a few stumps left over from the wooden posts and the slight depression of a foundation, no more than a soft shadow on the land. Nearby lay the shards of a smashed earthenware rainwater jar. It was like an ancient site recently excavated; proof that people had once settled there.

Shwe Ya wore only a
longyi
and had a sinewy body topped by a thick head of hair that looked like it had recently been trimmed with gardening shears. He strode barefoot and purposeful across his land, pointing out its boundaries and telling his story in a matter-of-fact way, as if it were an everyday affair for your house and community to vanish into nothingness. Shwe Ya and his family had been homesteaders, living out in the fields with four other farming families. The houses had not been close together but were spaced along the riverside so that each one was just visible and within yelling distance. There had been nowhere to run when the river began to flood; one family lost eight members to Cyclone Nargis and another family was killed off entirely. Shwe Ya’s wife and child survived because they had been away from the land, visiting Bogale.

After the cyclone, the farmers took the remaining members of their families to live in a nearby hamlet. A few weeks later, the men had returned to inspect their land and found the fields strewn with corpses. The land was still sodden with daily rains, so they weren’t able to cremate the bodies. Instead, they carried them to the river, reciting all the Buddhist prayers they knew and trying hard not to breathe in too much of the cloying smell of decay. “What a miserable task,” I said, half to myself. “None of them were people we knew,” Shwe Ya responded in his pragmatic manner, as if that made it somehow not so bad. “They came with the flood, from villages farther south.”

Shwe Ya showed me the bodies that still remained—the ones they had missed or that had washed up on more recent tides. In a hollow at the river’s edge lay a disconnected skeleton that appeared to have been picked over by wild animals, or the bones may have been pulled apart by the to and fro of the river. Farther inland a yellowing thigh bone protruded from beneath a sheer floral blouse, and not far from there was a lone skull matted with black hair and mud.

“Normally at this time of year you would see nothing but green,” said Shwe Ya, dragging his toes through the soil to indicate he was talking about his land. Had the cyclone not disrupted the agricultural cycle, the farmers would have spent the previous few months preparing rice seedlings and turning over the earth in readiness for a new crop. The rice seedlings would have been planted by then and should have sprouted into a field of neon-green shoots. But nothing was growing here, and the muddy land stretched out as far as the eye could see.

The farmers had no equipment with which to replant their fields. The three buffalo Shwe Ya once used to plough the land had disappeared in the cyclone, probably drowned. The seed stocks he had stored were also gone. Neither did he have any money to replace what was lost; like most Burmese who have no access to bank accounts or insurance polices, all that he owned had been kept in his house.

At the nearby hamlet where he was now living, he and his family had been given tarpaulin sheets to construct a shelter and were receiving regular rations of uncooked rice and other basic necessities from various aid organizations. The township authorities had distributed rice seeds and two power tillers to be shared among the farmers. It was nowhere near enough. The farmers in the hamlet worked a total of four hundred acres of land. With just two tillers, Shwe Ya explained, each farmer had to wait his turn and was only able to make use of the tiller for an average of two days out of every ten. Those two precious days were usually frustratingly unproductive; the farmers were unused to motorized equipment and found that buffalo were better equipped to work the excessively muddy fields. Tillers also needed diesel oil, and, though Shwe Ya had borrowed money to purchase the fuel and farm a quarter of his land, the crop had failed. He thought the failure was due to a combination of poor quality seed and badly prepared soil; the land had been inundated with saltwater during the storm surge, and the high saline content was not conducive to nurturing seedlings. “I know the food that people are giving us now will not last forever,” he said. “I want to get working. I want to survive off my own land. I just don’t know how.”

Farmers across the delta faced the same predicament. In each village I stopped at, people proffered mismatched equations between the number of farmers and the number of implements donated.

 

 

Daung Chaung village

Po Thin Kan village

Both the government and some aid agencies were reportedly transporting buffalo from Arakan State in northwestern Burma to the delta, but there simply weren’t enough to go around. Some farmers were able to rent buffalo for the planting season but, as the NGO representative had stated at the cluster meeting in Rangoon at the end of May, livestock are not easily interchangeable from region to region. Arakanese buffalo didn’t understand the commands uttered by delta farmers who speak a different dialect from their counterparts in Arakan State, and the animals were unused to the oppressive heat of the delta. In one village I came across a couple of buffalos standing beneath a specially built shelter. A young boy lay on the ground fanning them with a large leaf. It looked a little like he was paying homage to holy beasts, but further inquiry revealed that they were not deities; just Arakanese buffalo, easily tired in the delta heat.

Fishermen had similar problems: Unable to replace equipment that had been damaged or lost during Cyclone Nargis, they could not resume their work. People across the delta depend on a variety of fishing methods to make a living and supplement their diet. Most families practice some kind of small-scale fishing, such as collecting shrimp and tiny fish from the saturated paddy fields during the rainy season. Women spread the contents of nets onto bamboo trays and patiently sort through the muck, sifting out whatever is edible. People sail along the edges of rivers in wooden canoes leaving traps or casting nets among the reeds and shallows. Professional fishermen go out to sea for days at a time to fill the holds of their boats, while large-scale commercial farms breed fingerlings and shrimp. The cyclone not only sunk boats and destroyed nets and traps, but also damaged cold stores and ice factories.

Efforts to help fishermen have been plagued by the same shortfalls, and the troubling equations were similar:

 

 

Nee Laung Ye village

Aung Hlaing village

Even when they did receive equipment, it was sometimes inappropriate for the task; I met fishermen who had been given nets that were too fine, to be useful for dry-season fishing in the creeks when the water was low but useless for river fishing in the rainy season. The government did set up a boat-building program, and fishermen who were able to pool together enough cash could begin yearly payments for a new boat, but the fishing industry faced additional challenges. When I admired the midnight-blue shells of crabs caught in a bamboo trap, the owner of the trap insisted I take them as a gift. He wouldn’t accept my offers to pay him and walked me back to my boat, where he deposited the snapping, irritable crabs into the hull. When I thanked him profusely, he told me not to worry; it wasn’t easy to sell delta crabs anymore, as there was talk that they had been feeding on a macabre diet since the cyclone. He wasn’t sure whether a finger had ever really been found inside a fish, but the story had done its damage and the delta’s fishing industry had yet to recover.

It was early evening by the time I headed back to town after visiting Shwe Ya’s land. I lay sprawled out in the bottom of the boat and watched the dreary delta landscape slip past—the water, the unchanging scrubland, the dead sky. A wooden canoe emerged from a patch of twisted grass. A woman sat in the prow wearing a turban wrapped around her head and holding a thick white cheroot between her fingers. A man in a conical straw hat and faded mustard-colored
longyi
stood at the back of the canoe. With dignified, slow-motion strokes, he punted along the river’s edge like a gondolier. As I gazed lazily toward the canoe, I noticed an exact mirror image of the scene reflected upon the still and glassy surface of the river. Against the washed-out brown of the water, the reflection looked like a sepia photograph that might have been taken over a hundred years ago.

 

 

 

AT THE BEGINNING
of 2007, a secret letter-writing campaign had been launched in Burma. Known as the “Open Heart Letter Campaign,” it was run by the 88 Generation Students group, the organization made up of key leaders from the 1988 uprising who had been released from prison. Their aim had been to create a safe outlet through which people from across Burma could voice their concerns publicly. The organizers called for letters via underground contacts within the country and exile-run radio stations broadcasting programs into Burma, including VOA and the BBC. People were encouraged to write on a wide range of topics, such as politics, the economy, the education system, health care, and corruption. The 88 Generation group wanted to emphasize the importance of documenting abuse and injustice. To write down your grievances does not, they later wrote, “amount to breaking any law or committing any crime.” And yet the process of writing, sending, collecting, and compiling the letters had to be done clandestinely. In a country where voicing a complaint can put you in danger, this was revolution in written form.

A total of 2,649 letters had been received; others were intercepted by the authorities. Written and sent from across Burma, the letters now serve as a catalog of the everyday worries and underlying fears that characterize life in a military dictatorship. People from all walks of life wrote in: a housewife with seven children; a Christian minister in Chin State in the northeast; a high-school janitor; a shopkeeper. Civil servants wrote in too, along with headmasters, teachers, and students.