Word: rivering
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...Kalaylay," said the boatman Myint Swe, pointing to something floating in the Pyapon River amid drowned and rotting buffaloes. "Kalaylay," he said, pointing to another. And another. Kalaylay is a Burmese word for "infant," and he was pointing to their tiny corpses...
...junta claims otherwise. State-controlled media show high-ranking soldiers in uniform overseeing the timely delivery of relief supplies to a grateful people. But a tour of the cyclone-ravaged communities along the Pyapon River reveals the military's efforts to be criminally inadequate. Deprived of food, water, shelter and medical supplies, and stalked by disease, those who survived the cyclone might yet perish in its aftermath. A natural disaster has come and gone. A new, man-made one has already begun...
...cyclone raged for 12 hours, recalls boatman Myint Swe, and for three days afterwards the Pyapon River was clogged with bodies. Like hundreds of other delta villages, Myinkakon had few sturdy buildings to shelter in and no higher ground to flee to. And anyway, says Myint Swe, there was no way to outrun the storm surge, a wall of fast-moving water taller than the tallest man, which raced out of the darkness without warning and swept away tens of thousands of lives across the low-lying region...
...especially with post-cyclone prices rising. They have a store of unhusked rice, which is damp and inedible, and many people now survive on coconuts blown down from the trees. Clean water is also scarce. Their well is now polluted with sea-water, so villagers take water from the river and boil it, or collect the rain flowing from the monastery's shattered tin roofs...
Villagers will retrieve a corpse from the river if it is recognized as a family member or a neighbor. The bodies of ten babies, all from Myinkakon, washed up in the days following the cyclone and were buried at a nearby cemetery. Unidentified or unidentifiable corpses drift along the river or snag in vegetation along its banks. "Nobody is collecting them," says Myint Swe. "They're just floating around." There is a rumor, repeated by Myint Swe, that soldiers are not burying the dead, but tossing them back in the river. Just a few feet from these corpses there...