23 April 2009
When Cyclone Nargis crashed through their village on the night of May 2nd 2008, Daw Pu Tin, a 70-year-old widow, and her nine-year-old granddaughter Hla Hla San lost almost everything they had. One year on, DFID programmes have helped put a roof over her head, and helped ensure the relief effort understands and meets the needs of the elderly.
A wall of water
“We looked after each other during the cyclone,” said Hla Hla, when staff from DFID and HelpAge International visited her village in March 2009. “We were scared, especially at night when the winds were the worst, but we looked after each other.”
Daw Pu Tin and Hla Hla live in a village on the outskirts of Kyaiklat (“chai-lat”), a delta town four bumpy hours from Rangoon which stood right in the path of the cyclone. Many of the town’s flimsy wooden houses were flattened; people and belongings were washed away.
Hla Hla’s parents live and work in a nearby village, and, when she’s not at school, the little girl looks after her grandmother. The pair scrape together a living breeding ducks and selling eggs to their neighbours. It is the rural poor, those like Daw Pu Tin and Hla Hla, who have suffered most since Cyclone Nargis. Many lost nearly everything they owned overnight.
Winds tore the roof off the grandmother’s house and she lost most of her assets, including many of her 25 ducks. In the wake of Nargis came a wall of water, which flooded the house and surrounding fields. The old woman and her granddaughter sat in water for 10 to 12 hours after the storm, until the floods finally receded.
Yet more suffering followed: like hundreds of thousands of others in the Irrawaddy Delta, Daw Pu Tin and Hla Hla survived those first few days and weeks by eating what they could scavenge – coconuts and sodden, rotting rice stocks.
DFID-funded assistance from HelpAge International arrived three weeks later. A mobile medical clinic came to the village and field workers distributed rice, salt and vegetable oil. “Had it not been for the quick assistance of HelpAge, I would not have survived,” Daw Pu Tin said.
Meeting the elderly’s needs
The needs of the elderly are all too often over-looked in humanitarian responses to natural disasters. Elderly people can be pushed aside in queues for relief items, do not have the strength to walk to distribution points, and sometimes don’t come forward for help at all, because they don’t feel worthy of assistance.
Under a DFID-funded programme, HelpAge sought to raise awareness in the humanitarian community of Daw Pu Tin and others like her, to ensure the needs of the elderly were understood and met by relief agencies responding to Cyclone Nargis.
DFID funds were also used to rebuild the roof of her house with stronger, more durable materials. Her house looks old, but the new roof will withstand the rains of the coming monsoon season. HelpAge also provided Daw Pu Tin and her granddaughter with mattresses and blankets.
In March 2009, Daw Pu Tin is in good health and recovering from the trauma of the cyclone, which had brought on asthma attacks and bouts of fatigue and anxiety.
But her meagre pre-cyclone income of 24,000 kyat (around $24) per month had been reduced to as little as $10 by the loss of her ducks. With the support of HelpAge, she has just enough to feed herself, but to re-establish her livelihood and survive by herself, Daw Pu Tin will need funds to buy more ducks.
This is why much of DFID’s funding in cyclone-affected areas is aimed at restoring people’s livelihoods.
Key facts
- For the relief effort, DFID has provided a total of £17 million to non-governmental organizations (NGOs), including Help the Aged and Save the Children (read our After the Cyclone: Improving water and sanitation in the Irrawaddy Delta).
- DFID announced in March that it will increase humanitarian aid to Burma by £20 million over the next two financial years (totalling a £25 million programme for 2009-10 and a £28 million programme for 2010-11).
- DFID and its partners continue to respond to the situation in the Delta and is assessing how best to respond to the needs of smallholder farmers in the run-up to the 2009 monsoon planting season.
- The UK has been one of the largest donors to the Cyclone Nargis relief effort. Its £45 million contribution has helped more than a million survivors