Nway, nine, lost her family in the cyclone
My story: Nway, aged nine
My story: Nway, aged nine
“Rice paddy, fisherman, school, students…” Nway reads aloud from her school textbook with ease.
“I can read sentences now,” she says as she talks about her teacher’s encouragement at school and her new ability to read and write.
When World Vision first met nine-year-old Nway, she carried a blank look on her face and walked around her cyclone-ravished village in shock.
She stood on the foundation of what used to be her school, her tiny legs covered in scratches and her heart broken with the knowledge that every member of her immediate family had been killed by Cyclone Nargis.
When the cyclone struck, Nway was staying with her favourite aunt. That night, the pair squeezed in to the village headman’s house along with 100 other people. After hours of lashing rain and 240-kilometre winds, night turned to day and revealed flattened rice crops, flooded roadways, houses reduced to rubble and an unprecedented death toll.
In Nway’s village, located several hours by boat from the nearest town, 120 people out of a population of 430 lost their lives.
Survival packs
Immediately after the cyclone struck, World Vision supported Nway’s family and thousands of other cyclone survivors with emergency survival packs containing food, water and clothing.
The charity also looked after the mental well-being of disaster-affected children in Nway’s village and around the Delta by setting up Child-Friendly Spaces where children could play and work through their grief.
Nway shares her memories: “When I walked to my aunt’s house that day [after the cyclone], my legs were scratched and I passed lots of dead bodies.
“I wanted to help because everyone was working but I was too scared so I only helped clean up my auntie’s yard,” she recalls.
Nway’s ambition
One year later, Nway is wise to the pain in the world. She wants to make it a better place.
“I want to be a doctor,” she says. Her decision was made after watching a mobile medical clinic treat the injured people in her village not long after the disaster struck.
During this year’s summer break Nway is helping her aunt to sell vegetables from their garden. She wakes in the morning and carefully smoothes dabs of Thanaka on her face (a powder made from tree bark, used as a skin beautifier by women and children in Myanmar). Then she balances a tray of vegetables on her head as she sings out to houses on either side of her village road.
There are many more difficulties to overcome if Nway is to realise her dreams. She will have to attend a school away from home. Her middle school, currently under repair by the village, only accommodates students up to grade nine.
Her family’s earning potential – once derived from renting buffalos to plough fields for other villagers – will also need to return to what it once was in order to provide Nway with the financial support to pursue her dreams.
But this little girl isn’t taking no for an answer. World Vision’s work in the community over the past year has helped her to stay at school with school supplies and a new uniform.
“I have four best friends at school. We like to learn new words and have competitions with each other,” she says, a cheeky grin hinting at her competitive spirit.
The girls also enjoy playing games like hide and seek or tag.
“I’m always the fastest runner,” says Nway.
Cyclone Nargis struck southwest Myanmar on the evening of 2 May 2008. Some 2.4 million people were affected across the Delta and in areas around Yangon. The cyclone wrought severe damage and destruction over the Delta, a fertile rice-farming region commonly referred to as Asia’s rice bowl.
One year later, World Vision continues to work for the benefit of children by ensuring girls and boys have the chance to go to school. Across the Delta and Yangon, the organisation is building new schools, distributing school uniforms and setting up early childhood care and development classes for children and parents alike.
