This opens my memoir about our project. The manuscript will be ready for the publisher by September
CHAPTER ONE
For an hour we’ve been trailed by spreading waves down the Irrawaddy. Fastest boat on the river…it’s covered a stretch that would take an entire morning for a local fishermen paddling while standing on the stern of his narrow canoe. A 40-horse Honda engine powers our speedster; six of us are scrunched against its fiberglass hull. We’re much faster than the locally-designed 10-20 ton wooden freight boats with single-stroke engines, or the 200 passenger ferry which moseys along at one-fifth our speed. Bouncing through their wakes, we overtake everyone and spray splashes a tinge of salt on my lips. The Indian Ocean tidal current is moving upriver now and I sit near the prow where the sun roasts my forehead, hands and arms an unnatural pink; what contrast to the hazelnut brown of my host and her companions! We got an early start after sunrise, but sweat already gathers down my back. April marks the end of the three month dry season, as hot as it gets in the delta; mango showers may begin any day.
In 2008 three million families in the Irrawaddy’s delta villages, towns and cities had just finished thin-gyan, Burma’s version of a water festival the 1.5 billion people in Southern Asia celebrate; each according to their national style with water throwing and statuary sprinkling. For Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian and animist alike it signifies nature’s abundance, renewal of crops and the glory of our existence. Glory to the monsoon rains! Everyone along the multiple branches and kyaungs [bayous] welcomes the rainy season.
But just three weeks after Thingyan, the night of May 2, 2008 Cyclone Nargis blew ashore and changed life in the mighty river’s delta more than invading armies, insurgent wars, pandemics and poverty had ever done. 140,000 died between midnight and dawn as the storm’s eye passed directly overhead; horrific winds and torrential rain smashed houses, pagodas and schools alike, uprooting trees and sweeping hundreds of villages into the rising sea. Vast stretches of paddy fields were submerged by the wind-driven surge, as if a jealous ocean was reclaiming lost territory. Come daylight the living climbed down after clinging to palm trees. Nothing was the same. The retreating sea carried into the kyaungs bodies of cattle, buffalo, parents, children, elders and tiny babies indiscriminately battered and drowned in the awful nightmare. It took over two weeks to bury and cremate bodies tangled in branches and debris along the riverbanks, the stench became hideous. Their boats smashed, food stores destroyed, and water wells polluted, villagers survived only because of rice, bottled water, tarps and medical support rushed in by Burmese volunteers from Yangon and beyond. Established humanitarian organizations—Save the Children, World Vision, Swiss Aid, Doctors Without Borders, Metta Foundation—and dozens of local groups rushed by boat, truck and car into the delta, some appearing within a day of the harrowing storm. India, Japan, Thai, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippine, Pakistan, China, Vietnam, and European countries airlifted tons of disaster relief, much of it flown on American C-131 cargo planes—relief that initially backed up at the airport and were rumored to have been seized by the military.
The government was sharply criticized for hesitating to accept international aid; that stigma remains alive in the minds of many foreigners and expatriate Burmese hostile to the military junta. Yet many lower ranking military and local militia helped monks and business leaders, doctors and nurses, students and volunteers as they descended from Yangon to save hundreds of thousands who would have perished from injuries, water-borne diseases and starvation. International media gave intense coverage for the first week and then moved on to China’s devastating earthquake after savaging the leadership for rejecting assistance from American and French flotillas parked south of the delta. The important story they missed: civilians and foreign relief groups stepped into the breach to correct a terrible situation; they performed a miracle beyond anyone’s imagined response. Some people still died after the storm and everyone suffered grievously as widely reported by international media; yet within weeks, recovery was underway, and within months most towns and villages were beginning to regain a semblance of normalcy.
But I get ahead of myself, as if the force of the storm is pushing the story beyond my control. Before we enter villages recovering from Nargis and talk with their elders about how important libraries are to them, consider how villages and libraries came to exist in such an exposed place in the first place, and how I came to be visiting them. Three hundred years ago few Burmese lived in the lower delta. It was mostly a chain of mangrove swamps and islands– a swampy region created from Irrawaddy mud delivered in annual floods following torrential of rains carried by monsoon winds from the Indian Ocean north against the Himalayas and across the huge Tibetan plateau.
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