CARE’s emergency teams are reporting traumatic scenes of decaying bodies strewn amongst piles of debris in the Irrawaddy delta. Disease is now a major concern. Nay Myo Zaw, one of CARE’s staff on the ground has shared some of the survivors’ heartbreaking stories.

While distributing blankets to 600 survivors who were camped in a high school building in Pathein, the capital of the Irrawaddy Delta, Nay spoke to a grief-stricken fisherman whose life had been changed forever. Before the cyclone, he had a family of five: a wife and three children. He tearfully told Nay that none of them had survived.

Another man taking shelter in the camp explained the loss of his only son. As the cyclone tore through the village, his family desperately tried to protect their belongings. At the height of the storm, the man’s eight-year-old son ran out from their house attempting to stop the pig-feeding bucket from being blown away. As he did so, the water level surged and he was swept up in its path. The man tried desperately to save his son, but the flood waters were too strong and he watched helplessly as he was washed away. His wife and daughter managed to survive.

While visiting one of the 27 camps in Myaung Mya Township which shelters approximately 10,000 survivors, Nay met a man who witnessed his neighbours’ house, with four people inside, be literally torn from the ground and blown away. Within minutes his own house was swept from its foundations by the floodwater and he and his family were drifting rapidly. The family managed to survive by holding onto a tree until the floodwaters subsided.

CARE is mobilising to provide safe water and sanitation for survivors in the Delta and has secured food supplies through the World Food Programme. In Yangon CARE is assembling non-food items such as children’s t-shirts, sarongs, underwear, mosquito nets, plastic sheeting, blankets, cooking and eating utensils, gas lighters, toothbrushes, toothpaste and buckets which will be packaged and transported to the Delta by truck early this week.