PA DEWE GAW, MYANMAR — Tropical Cyclone Nargis didn't kill Ma Thein Hlaing. Neglect did.
She was in the village monastery, reciting Buddha's canons day and night in the five-day ceremony of pahtan, as the storm gathered strength over the ocean close enough to see from her riverbank village.
The cyclone struck like a ferocious beast clawing at its prey. Thein Hlaing, 56, cowered inside with 19 other worshipers who fought to hold on against a rising flood.
The monastery began to break apart and a large stereo speaker toppled onto her, forcing her head under the surging seawater.
Several men heaved the teak speaker off. But when the 12-hour tempest had subsided May 3, her 19-year-old son, Saw Ko, had disappeared along with the splintered pieces of the family home.
Thein Hlaing was still conscious. She needed a doctor, but in a flattened village with no boats left, her husband, Ko Myint So, had no way to get her to one.
He watched the horizon, hoping help would come from one of the nearby military bases guarding the southern coast of Myanmar, also known as Burma. It never did. More than three weeks after the storm struck, no one from the government, neither soldiers nor civilians, has come here.
In the early days after the storm, as the military government insisted that it had everything under control and shunned most foreign relief aid, the armed forces moved slowly to assist hundreds of thousands of survivors stranded in devastated Irrawaddy River Delta villages.
The government estimates that the cyclone killed 78,000 people, and that an additional 56,000 are missing. The number of injured survivors isn't known yet. Many survivors are only now being reached as civilian relief workers push farther into isolated areas.
For days, Thein Hlaing lay in pain, pleading with her husband to do something. Each time one of the few remaining civilian vessels plying the river passed the village, he and neighbors frantically shouted and waved from the ruins.
On the fourth day after the cyclone, the crew of a fishing boat stopped at the remnants of the village dock. It would take almost three more hours to reach the nearest hospital, 25 miles northeast, in the town of Bogalay.
Thein Hlaing held on long enough to reach the jetty in Bogalay, a military relief hub. She was still alive when villagers eased her onto a stretcher and took a few hurried steps along wooden planks toward the main hospital, her husband and other witnesses said.
