Under Water

The monsoon always pounds Myanmar during July and August. But this year the heavens (and surely many earth-based causes) created hundred-year flooding.

I watched the rain fall from inside Rakhine State village homes. For the past two weeks, I followed survey takers from the government’s Department of Rural Development as they asked female heads of household an hour’s worth of questions about hunger and poverty.

The answers kept returning to the rising waters. A few households reported hunger, but rarely because of shortages. In this part of Myanmar, emergencies are more common than food gaps. Sometimes we were told that flooding had left people with no dry spot to cook the food they stored, so they went to bed hungry. Lately the water has risen as high as six feet, said our informants. This difficult situation is compounded by Rakhine State’s crazy politics, which often translate into horrifying injustice.

In one village near Taungup, farmers described having to essentially pay to work. Floods wiped out their first crop and their seed stocks. The local landlord (one government official owns the whole village) offered to advance them their wages in the form of rice. Because of interest payments, they’ll still owe at the end of the harvest.

Yesterday Myanmar’s president declared this state a natural disaster zone, along with Chin State and Magway and Sagaing Regions. Personally, I’m safely holed up in a hotel (the only guest at a place that can hold 300 people!) where I'm humbled by the adaptability of the local people. They continue to go about their routines despite the deluge. Many of them put on shoulder-width conical hats. They know they’ll get drenched, but at least the rice will get planted. Some families add layers of bamboo flooring to their homes as the water rises, and bring livestock in to join them.

While I wait for the storm to let up, I stay at the hotel, trying to track the movements of five survey teams that are still in the field. One team is stuck on an island where ferry service stopped a week ago due to the tropical storm. I hope they’re OK there. I haven’t been able to contact them directly because mobile phone connections to much of the state have been down for the past three days. My fingers are crossed that the team isn’t in danger, just maybe wet and discouraged. When we were last in touch, I told them that the survey is less important than their safety. Hope they listened—during training I could see they were quite serious about this project.

The hotel TV features flicks starring Stallone or Jackie Chan. If I switch the channel to CNN I get non-stop coverage of a plane fragment that’s supposed to solve a several-month-old mystery involving a flight that left Malaysia one night and was never heard from again.

Last night an Austrian couple showed up in the dining room. I asked them if anyone had mentioned that it rains in Rakhine State during July. They said no, they were shocked! They had booked a 12-day holiday! I laughed a little bit and suggested they could proudly tell all their neighbors back home that they were in Myanmar when a state of emergency was declared. They did not smile. Their expressions said, “No laughing matter.” This morning they were gone.