An Umbilical Rescue
Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY
Some of the poorest people in the world are still struggling to rebuild their lives in Myanmar, four months after a cyclone and tsunami-like tidal surge swept away the lives of more than 138,000 people, and left 800,000 more homeless.
The aid trickles in, mass starvation was avoided, but many of the people of the devastated Irrawaddy Delta are haunted by ghosts, the scale of destruction, the remaining corpses and some of the most remarkable stories of survival you will ever hear :
(The storm surge) leveled most of the fragile thatch homes in its path, uprooted trees, swept away the livestock and fishing boats that provided a livelihood and polluted many rice fields with salt.
For those fields that survived, this year’s planting season has now passed, and experts say it may be more than a year before many people see their next decent harvest.
Although some houses are being rebuilt and some fields are being worked, the delta remains a vista of ruin and debris, where human and animal bones and the last decomposing bodies still cluster at the edges of waterways.
Fantastical tales circulate among the survivors, the photographer said, weaving a tapestry of stories from this world and the next.
There is the tale of the boy who survived by clinging to the back of a crocodile, and the story of the boatload of people stranded at low tide who sat waiting on the silt for the water to rise, surrounded by stranded corpses.
There is the story of the mother who was reunited with her baby after it was swept away in a washtub, and the story of the woman who gave birth as the cyclone hit and pulled her baby from the water by its umbilical cord.
And there are the stories of wandering ghosts, whose cries for help can be heard at night in haunted places that no villager dares to enter.
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