Crisis Afloat: Turning the Tide for Ayeyarwady's Displaced
The following update and donation request comes from our team leader, who continues to assess the critical need following the mass flooding which has overtaken many parts of Myanmar.
Dear Donors,
I am writing this to call for help for your kind considerations and donations to support the helpless families who have lost everything due to the recent flooding disaster. After distributed your generous donations and food assistance for the flood victims in Bago last weekend, we traveled from to the Ayeyarwady Region along the Yangon-Pathein and Yangon-Hinthada Roads. Due to the heavy rain, we had to travel slowly and stop frequently in different villages on the way to Hinthada.
Along the way, we sadly heard that hundreds of households in the townships of Pantanaw, Hinthada, Zalun and Ingapu have been displaced by river bank erosion and they are in dire need of food assistance and household goods for their relocation. According to the local villagers we met, the number of villages and houses displaced by the erosion this year was higher than in the last 4-5 years. RFA Burmese News also published a news report about these vulnerable and helpless people on October 31st. According to an officer from the Department of Disaster Management, who did not want to be identified, over 10,000 people had been thus displaced in September and October, and in dire need of food, drinking water, etc. In some areas, the disaster occurred suddenly in the nighttime, and most of these people could not bring anything from their houses; some could only get some roof panels and wood columns taking off their original houses. These vulnerable people include the aged, who live alone and are not in good heath.
One of my wife’s relatives, who lived in a village on a sandbar between the main channel of the Ayeyarwady River and a tributary for years, told us that they used to face this kind of river bank erosion in the rainy season every year, and just lost their farmland; but this time, his family lost their home, as happened to the everyone else in the village. He believes that the immense disaster that has befallen his family and life were caused by the heavy rain this year. He said, “It has been much rainier over the whole country this year than in previous years.” He also suggested that the river streams may have changed course due to illegal gold panning, which he’d encountered just a few miles upstream. It could well be true that a rush of gold panning along the river upstream areas of the river has led to the collapse of long stretches of river bank downstream. This has been exacerbated by the junta’s lack of restrictions over this illegal gold prospecting during the summer. We have heard that about 18,400 acres of land have eroded in the Ayeyarwady Region this year.
In order to help some of these people, we are hoping to provide urgent relief to those who totally lost both their houses and farmland. Depending on the need, we are contributing rice, cooking oil and tent canvas. We are planning to distribute about 80,000 kyats per household (approximately equivalent to $25) for as many households as we can support; this figure will supply 6 pyi (12 kilos) of rice, 1 viss (2 liters) of cooking oil and other foodstuffs, such as chickpeas or peanuts, or else, 300 sq-feet of tent canvas. In collaboration with local abbots of village monasteries, community leaders, and village elders, we will identify families in the most dire need of help.
We hope you will pass this information to potential donors. We call upon your help in sympathy for these people in need.