How one family in Burma (Myanmar) reconnected after the cyclone

Cut phone lines and travel bans have blocked survivors’ efforts to locate loved ones.

posted May 20, 2008 at NaN:NaN p.m. EST

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This has fueled fears that parents may never find lost children. "It's a real heartbreak to parents" seeking closure, says James East, a World Vision spokesman in Bangkok.

One family's journey

In the two weeks since the cyclone, Khin has since been reunited with his mother in Burma.

Khin's mother, Daw Htay, moved part of the family to Rangoon to give her son a better education. Mr. Khin went to the Thai-Burmese border to develop a trading business, leaving his mother in their Rangoon home with his sister, where they prayed for survival during the cyclone.

"I was very afraid," recalls Htay, with heavy circles around her eyes from several sleepless nights. "At other homes in our neighborhood, all the zinc roofs and satellite TV dishes were blown away. But everybody came to see our house, because the satellite dish was not gone. Our home was lucky."

Worried about food shortages and that nobody would take care of her, she paid double the usual price to take a mini-bus with seven strangers for the 12-hour trip to Myawaddy and then across the border to Mae Sot.

Her journey followed that of more than a million Burmese who have fled to Thailand in recent years. She was fortunate not to have to walk.

Thousands of ethnic Mons, Karens, and Burmans often trek days through the jungle and wade across the Moei River to reach clinics in Thailand. Their risks include cobras, tigers, and mine fields. Human rights groups claim that Burmese soldiers rape the travelers or force them into slave labor as porters.

Htay says she felt relief when she finally met up with her son. But then the two had a difficult decision to make: Do they continue to pray and hunt for missing relatives, or accept that they are in fact dead?

A week after the cyclone, they decided to hold Buddhist funeral rites to allow the souls of their relatives to journey from their dead bodies to new incarnations in the next life. They sought out Buddhist monks in Myawaddy to chant prayers and perform funerary rituals.

"We had to wait a couple of days," Khin says, "because the monks in Burma are busy."

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