Cyclone destroys house and crops

Daw Khin Tan is a 61-year-old woman with 5 sons, living in Min Gan village, Bogolay, Myanmar. She and her husband own 8 acres of 'Le' (rice paddy field) and a small duck farm with 200 ducks. They grow rice two times a year as their 'Le' is topographically higher than others and near to water resources. 

On the night of the cyclone our house was completely gone.

Almost all the properties in the village were destroyed so inhabitants had nowhere to live and nowhere to buy food. Luckily, ActionAid partner Pact was quick to respond and was able to provide aid within a week.

Daw Khin Tan received 40,000 Kyat ($ 40) for house reconstruction. "I used the money provided to buy Nipa sheets, bamboo sheets, iron nails, and plastic strings to tighten the joints of the house structure", she explained. They reconstructed the house, a big wooden hut, using left over wood from the wreck of their old house and made the roof out of Nipa palm leaves and bamboo sheets for covering. "It was really very good to receive money to rebuild the house from Pact so quickly because it left some money spare for me to buy food".

"Later on,” she said, “we received rice from other individual donors such as Titagu monk and WFP, but Pact was the first donor to reach us here and provide for us".

Other villagers also got money for food provisions and cash for work, mostly clearing the village. However, long-term many villagers still suffered from food shortage. Of the 48 households in the village, 19 are farmers and their rice crops and seeds for next year’s crop had all been swept away by the Cyclone.

Daw Khin Tan’s family had a tractor but it was broken. “We have no money to repair it”, she said, “and even if it were repaired we cannot afford the diesel to drive it”. They would have liked to take out a loan so they could afford to rent a tractor and get their crops growing again and then pay back the loan after the first successful harvest, but the money lenders were also broke, because they are usually rice mill owners and now their rice mills and the rice stores in the warehouse were gone.

Even once they were able to plant a new crop, with "Zabba" (paddy in Burmese) there is usually a 4 month wait from seedling time until harvesting, so they would struggle to survive until harvest time.