What if another Cyclone Nargis comes?
Ayeyarwady Delta – Nine-year-old Chit Lin Nwe owes her life to a tree. As Cyclone Nargis swept away her home, family and friends in Aung Chan Thar village in Myanmar’s Ayeyarwady River Delta, she clung to its sturdy trunk. “As the water came up, I had to climb higher,” she said. The storm surge that accompanied Nargis was more than three metres high. Not everyone was lucky enough to find a tree or shelter in the flat, mostly exposed terrain of the southern delta. Village headmen IRIN spoke to recited the death toll in their small communities: “500 died”, or “1,000 died”. Often it was almost everyone they had known, and more than a year later many people still seem traumatised. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said about 14,000 hectares of the delta’s 275,000 hectares of mangrove forests had been destroyed, but Chit Lin Nwe’s tree is still standing. “Should another cyclone come around, I know what to do,” she grinned. Nargis killed more than 140,000 people and ruined count
