Cyclone Nargis

I work with numbers every day. I am, or I was until a week and a half ago, a financial analyst. All day, every day, working with numbers, trying to make them make sense to myself and others, putting things in layman's terms, but the numbers of people dead in missing in Myanmar make my head spin.

On Tuesday, state media reported more than 22,000 dead and 41,000 missing.

The death toll equals roughly twice the size of my hometown. Everyone I knew until age eight and just about everyone I knew until I was 17, everyone I saw, and a lot more I didn't.

Parents and teachers. Little sisters and big brothers. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. The local pharmacist. And the other local pharmacist. And the ones at the stores I never even saw.

Every man, woman and child in each of the seven elementary schools, the junior high and the high school, including my gym teacher with the leap year birthday and grey poly shorts, the art teacher, the band director, and everyone in every class I ever had. Their families. Their friends.

The people who scooped at the three ice cream parlors and everyone in each of the 41 churches, including First United Presbyterian Church across the street from the Second and Third United Presbyterian Churches. All eight Baptist churches.

Double that and I might get something close to the number of people who lost their lives Saturday to Cyclone Nargis.

It's beyond my grasp.

I'm not even sure I know what a cyclone is. Until this weekend, the name evoked images of amusement parks and roller coasters. One of the X Men. Somebody in Marvel's stable of superheroes and mutants. I'd never heard or taken note of one in real life.

"The U.N. World Food Program says as many as 1 million people may have been left homeless, with some villages almost totally destroyed and vast rice-growing areas wiped out," the Washington Post reported.

I think I heard more about the rationing of rice at Sam's Club a couple of weeks ago than I have about the cyclone and the destruction of rice-growing areas in Myanmar.

As for the country, I know it better as Burma; though, I wouldn't say I know it at all. I do know about the "panty protest" of last fall in which activists around the world sent their knickers to Burmese embassies.

"Superstitious junta members believe that any contact with female undergarments - clean or dirty - will sap them of their power, said Jackie Pollack, a member of the Lanna Action for Burma Committee," The Guardian reported.

"Myanmar (or Burma) has been under military rule since 1962. Its government has been widely criticized for suppressing pro-democracy parties such as the one led by Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who has been under house arrest for more than 12 of the past 18 years," according to the Washington Post.

The Post also wrote, "Protests in 1988 led to a crackdown by the ruling military junta that left an estimated three thousand people dead and intensified the country's isolation and poverty."

The cyclone hit a week before a key referendum on a proposed constitution backed by the junta. The vote has been postponed in the hardest hit areas.

Even now, politics play a role as aid workers await clearance to enter the country.Entire villages were destroyed. More than 22,000 dead, 41,000 missing and 1 million left homeless.

It's hard to comprehend.


Tag: Myanmar Cyclone Burma