Eyewitness account from a MSF doctor working in the Delta region.
This eyewitness account is from a 27 year old female MSF Medical doctor. She has recently returned to Yangon after working for two weeks with a mobile medical team in Ngapudaw in the Delta region.
"I spent the first week living on a boat moored off the coast of the middle island. The entire team of 15 people were living on the boat. It was not a happy place. The weather was very bad and it rained everyday.
The boat trips were very difficult. Each night we slept on the big boat where the supplies are kept and during the day we would use small boats to travel to the villages. We had to depend on the tide to reach some of the villages. The living conditions were extremely difficult; everything was wet, and we had to use salty water to shower or travel 30 minutes to a freshwater stream. We spent the nights together on the boat but we didn’t have any distractions. There was no music to listen to and nothing to keep our minds off the terrible things we had seen and heard working in the Delta.
It was horrible, but I am very glad that I could do this work. The people desperately need our help there and I would like to go back again once I have had a chance to rest…
Our team spirit was very good. But at night it was very difficult to fall asleep. I kept thinking about the horrible stories I had heard and at times I felt very unsafe, because of the bad weather and the fear of another big storm.
In the morning we would be woken up very early at around 5:00am by the sound of boats passing by the jetty. We would get dressed into our damp clothes, brush our teeth and have some instant noodles and coffee. After breakfast each team would leave on smaller boats to travel to one of the villages. On the way we would pass dead bodies and animals in the water. In some places bodies were buried under collapsed houses and the villagers had not yet been able to remove them. The smell was horrible – I don’t think that I will ever forget it.
In the villages people were happy to see us arriving. They would see our life jackets from a distance and know that we were coming to bring them help. In many small villages we were the first people coming to bring any kind of support to the population.
From the moment we left the boat the villagers would come and follow us around. They’d help us to find a house to do consultations and set up the distribution. We saw a lot of patients with stress symptoms, aching limbs and hypertension, especially in villages where the destruction is on a massive scale and many people have been killed by the floods. It is very sad. They are still afraid and many people come to talk to us just so that they feel a bit reassured that somebody has come to support them. It makes them feel a little bit safer.
We’d normally spend the whole day doing consultations. If there was still some food in the village the people made us something to eat. But in some villages they had nothing left to offer us except the things we brought. We hear many stories from patients during the day. There are so many distressed people who have lost their families - children and parents.
One patient, a 35-year-old man, came to see us with black wounds all over his back that looked like lashes from a whip. The wounds were caused by the wind lashing the rain onto his bare skin. He climbed up a palm tree to save his life when the flood hit his village. The wind was so heavy that he took of his longgyi (Burmese sarong) and tied himself to the tree. He was hanging there for 5 hours after he had seen his family drown below.
We treated an old lady with signs of malnutrition. She had only eaten a small amount of rice in the past five days. Her and her husband, who is very old, were the only people in their family to survive the cyclone, as their children and grandchildren had drowned.
In a monastery in a bigger village we found 14 people who were the only remaining survivors of their entire village - a man, a woman and a few children. Everyone else had drowned and their village had disappeared. They had nothing left; some of them did not even have any clothes left on their bodies after the cyclone.
After a day of consultation we would come back to the big boat in the evening. We would meet the other teams and talk.
During the first week in the delta we still felt quite heroic, like we were really helping people in difficult circumstances. But during the second week, we all started to become much more depressed. Everyday we heard more stories, and saw more destroyed houses and more dead people. We were getting tired and the sheer scale of the destruction started to feel overwhelming. We had one mobile phone that was working and in the evening the whole team was sitting around the phone waiting for their turn to call their family and friends.
I am very glad that we are in Yangon now to have a break and regain some energy, so that we will be able to go back to the Delta and continue the work there."
"I spent the first week living on a boat moored off the coast of the middle island. The entire team of 15 people were living on the boat. It was not a happy place. The weather was very bad and it rained everyday.
The boat trips were very difficult. Each night we slept on the big boat where the supplies are kept and during the day we would use small boats to travel to the villages. We had to depend on the tide to reach some of the villages. The living conditions were extremely difficult; everything was wet, and we had to use salty water to shower or travel 30 minutes to a freshwater stream. We spent the nights together on the boat but we didn’t have any distractions. There was no music to listen to and nothing to keep our minds off the terrible things we had seen and heard working in the Delta.
It was horrible, but I am very glad that I could do this work. The people desperately need our help there and I would like to go back again once I have had a chance to rest…
Our team spirit was very good. But at night it was very difficult to fall asleep. I kept thinking about the horrible stories I had heard and at times I felt very unsafe, because of the bad weather and the fear of another big storm.
In the morning we would be woken up very early at around 5:00am by the sound of boats passing by the jetty. We would get dressed into our damp clothes, brush our teeth and have some instant noodles and coffee. After breakfast each team would leave on smaller boats to travel to one of the villages. On the way we would pass dead bodies and animals in the water. In some places bodies were buried under collapsed houses and the villagers had not yet been able to remove them. The smell was horrible – I don’t think that I will ever forget it.
In the villages people were happy to see us arriving. They would see our life jackets from a distance and know that we were coming to bring them help. In many small villages we were the first people coming to bring any kind of support to the population.
From the moment we left the boat the villagers would come and follow us around. They’d help us to find a house to do consultations and set up the distribution. We saw a lot of patients with stress symptoms, aching limbs and hypertension, especially in villages where the destruction is on a massive scale and many people have been killed by the floods. It is very sad. They are still afraid and many people come to talk to us just so that they feel a bit reassured that somebody has come to support them. It makes them feel a little bit safer.
We’d normally spend the whole day doing consultations. If there was still some food in the village the people made us something to eat. But in some villages they had nothing left to offer us except the things we brought. We hear many stories from patients during the day. There are so many distressed people who have lost their families - children and parents.
One patient, a 35-year-old man, came to see us with black wounds all over his back that looked like lashes from a whip. The wounds were caused by the wind lashing the rain onto his bare skin. He climbed up a palm tree to save his life when the flood hit his village. The wind was so heavy that he took of his longgyi (Burmese sarong) and tied himself to the tree. He was hanging there for 5 hours after he had seen his family drown below.
We treated an old lady with signs of malnutrition. She had only eaten a small amount of rice in the past five days. Her and her husband, who is very old, were the only people in their family to survive the cyclone, as their children and grandchildren had drowned.
In a monastery in a bigger village we found 14 people who were the only remaining survivors of their entire village - a man, a woman and a few children. Everyone else had drowned and their village had disappeared. They had nothing left; some of them did not even have any clothes left on their bodies after the cyclone.
After a day of consultation we would come back to the big boat in the evening. We would meet the other teams and talk.
During the first week in the delta we still felt quite heroic, like we were really helping people in difficult circumstances. But during the second week, we all started to become much more depressed. Everyday we heard more stories, and saw more destroyed houses and more dead people. We were getting tired and the sheer scale of the destruction started to feel overwhelming. We had one mobile phone that was working and in the evening the whole team was sitting around the phone waiting for their turn to call their family and friends.
I am very glad that we are in Yangon now to have a break and regain some energy, so that we will be able to go back to the Delta and continue the work there."
MSF-Luxembourg© |