(Image of the Irrawaddy River from Manas Dichow's S. E. Asia photo set on Flickr.)
On May 2, while you and I were sound asleep in our warm beds, a monster ripped through the land I once called home.
Like a mythical serpent awakened from its long slumber, it whipped itself into a frenzy. Along the Tamil Nadu and the Andhra Pradesh coastline, the Indian ocean writhed and spewed frothy waves. Then, with 165 MPH wind and fury, it slammed into the Irrawaddy Delta of Burma. From 7,900 miles across the Atlantic, in my quiet apartment in San Francisco, I felt the impact.
The official body count is 79,000, with 55,000 still missing or unaccounted for. With every day that passes, the toll climbs higher. Nearly 1.5 to 2 millions now huddle under roofless monasteries and tent cities, with the open sky as their canopy and the muddy earth as their mattress.
Among the dead and the displaced might be the jasmine-scented girls I once serenaded, the swift-footed Indian boys I once tackled in a soccer field, the abbots who indulged me with Buddhist parables, and the curbside booksellers who introduced me to Sherlock Holmes.
The cyclone is called Nargis, or daffodils in Urdu. The delicate name is a cruel joke, considering its devastating power.
These days, my heart is too heavy to dash off light-hearted passages, so you must pardon the sea change in my prose. Bear with me but for a while. I promise to be my perky self once again, once I've done all that I can for the lives that now hang in balance.
The same green-clad soldiers who unleashed their rifles into a sea of saffron-robbed monks last September are now impeding the international relief workers' rescue and recovery mission. Their superiors deny emergency visas to the disaster experts from UN and World Health Organization, keeping them stranded 400 miles away in Bangkok, Thailand, a mere 45 minutes' flight from the devastated area. They harass the local volunteers trying to smuggle food to the survivors. They threaten the monastic elders sheltering refugees. They intercept cash donation meant for the orphaned kids.
Meanwhile, the UN Security Council, as always, couldn't reach consensus on a plan to intervene.
My friends on the ground post messages,written with restraint because they know their outgoing communications might be monitored, but I can see their seething anger between the lines.
"Inya Lake, once the romantic spot where lovers walk hand in hand, is now where everyone goes to wash their clothes," said one of them. "We have no power, no water. The government isn't helping. The kids from my neighborhood church had to help me remove the tree blocking our gate."
"The tents that [the foreign aid agencies] donated are now showing up in the black market," wrote another. "They cost 8,000 kyats to 12,000 kyats [$8 to $12] each."
Over there, ordinary folks earn about 16,000 kyats, or $16, a month.
On Friday May 9, I and two other guests, both with their own strong opinions about the military regime's mishandling of the cyclone's aftermath, sat in the darkened radio studio where KPFA's Flashpoint was produced. Dennis Bernstein, the host of the program, was an affable man with a shock of untamed hair.
"What are you concerns?" he turned to me at one point.
"My concerns is that, if the regime insists on refusing help because they don't want the westerners to appear as the savior that come to the people's rescue, many more people will die," I said.
Have you ever tried to speak up for 2 millions desperate lives in 20 minutes? It's a dreadful burden, one that heavily weighs upon my conscience.
Last week, while I was sitting behind the orchestra box, watching a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream with my Facebook buddy Sassy, I was all too aware of the nightmare unfolding on the other side of the world.
My dreams must be put on hold, because as many as 2 millions dreams have been washed away. I've taken it upon myself to stay the tide.
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that does fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
--The Tempest
If you'd like to help, contact Foundation for the People of Burma, a non-governmental organization that has somehow managed to put people in the disaster region.
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