U Mya Win with two of his three grandchildren
Stories of hope
With World Vision's support lives have been changed even in the most difficult circumstances
Read the stories below to learn more about how, with your support, World Vision can continue to work in emergency situations providing help and assistance to the most vulnerable.
Looking back: Six months after the cyclone
Nwe wasn’t at home the night the cyclone struck. She was spending the night at her aunt’s as she frequently did. So when the storm began to tear at the house, it was her aunt who ran with her to the safety of the village elder’s brick house. More than one hundred people found refuge there, and stood pressed against one another as the cyclone raged all night. When the sun came up, they found that every house but the village elder’s was flattened by the storm. The cyclone destroyed Nwe’s home and killed her family: her parents and three siblings.
Seven-year-old Nwe is one of 700,000 children in Myanmar in need of long-term assistance following the devastation of Cyclone Nargis last May. The storm that left 140,000 people dead has affected the lives of some 2.4 million people in Yangon and the Ayeyarwaddy Delta.
Keeping the children safe
“Children are among the most vulnerable after a disaster such as Cyclone Nargis,” said World Vision response manager Judy Moore. “They require special attention to see them through the hard times that follow.”
In response to the threats of abuse, violence, exploitation and neglect that children like Nway may be exposed to, World Vision has opened 84 Child Friendly Spaces in the affected areas. These centres have already provided psychosocial care for more than 10,000 children, offering them a safe place to play and recover from their experiences. This is the largest number of Child Friendly Spaces that World Vision has ever established in a single country following an emergency.
World Vision is rebuilding livelihoods
The devastation caused by Cyclone Nargis was vast: it damaged or destroyed some 800,000 homes. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, World Vision launched an appeal while simultaneously mobilising its local relief teams. Thanks to the phenomenal response by UK supporters, and grants from other funders such as the DEC, DFID ECHO and the World Food programme, World Vision UK was able to direct almost £2.2 million to Myanmar’s cyclone-struck areas. With teams of staff and volunteers already in place, emergency supplies of food, tarpaulins, water purification systems and important medication were distributed among tens of thousands of the worst affected families.
Yet nearly one million people depend on food aid even today. With the planting season now over, much farmland remains un-sown. The salt water washed in by the cyclone has rendered acres of land unusable. Hundreds of thousand families will consequently remain with limited food for months, even years to come.
Farmer U Mya Win, whose entire family, save for three young grandsons, died in the storm, lost everything. His buffaloes were killed, his stored food was swept away and his rice paddy was soaked with sea water. “Sometimes I wished my grandchildren and I had never found that big haystack to float on and survive,” U Mya Win said. “Living seemed impossible.”
However, in August, World Vision brought fresh hope to the villagers in the form of a hand tractor. U Mya Win joined the village’s farmer group that looked after the tractor and successfully planted a small plot of paddies. “I hope [the yield] will be enough for the four of us to eat,” U Mya Win said. “Without World Vision’s help, we could never have planted.”
U Mya Win’s grandsons are studying at the temporary school tent set up by the UN and other donors, such as World Vision. The short-term immediate relief distributed in the first month after the cyclone hit, has now been replaced by long-term recovery of communities. The focus has shifted to helping families rebuild their lives and their livelihoods through agricultural assistance and rehabilitation programmes as well as sanitation and disaster risk reduction, among others.
World Vision’s relief response is targeting some 338,000 people across the Delta and the affected regions of Yangon, the country’s largest city.
Nwe (not her real name) survived cyclone Nargis because she stayed the night at her aunt's house. The rest of her family died in the cyclone