Myanmar’s plight touches West Seneca native working for aid organization
Mercy Corps worker bemoans slow progress
When Michael Gabriel arrived in Myanmar on May 15 — less than two weeks after a killer cyclone devastated a large swath of the South Asian country — he was struck by the sight of thousands of trees broken in half and strewn all around the streets of Yangon, the largest city in Myanmar, also known as Burma.
“All I see are broken trees here,” the West Seneca native said by phone in an interview. “That’s something Buffalo people can relate to.”
But the cyclone was so much more devastating that the October Surprise storm in 2006, he said.
“Imagine that Buffalo storm times 1,000,‘ Gabriel said.
Gabriel, 42, who grew up in West Seneca and graduated from West Seneca West High School, is an emergency program manager with Oregon-based Mercy Corps, one of the few foreign organizations in military-controlled Myanmar.
Over the past eight years, he has been dispatched to every corner of the world — Pakistan, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Macedonia and Kosovo — to help people recover from disasters of every kind.
His mother, who lives in Kenmore, often worries about his assignments.
“But she worries if I go down to Wegmans,” he said.
Gabriel was in Kenmore waiting to get a visa approved to go to Pakistan when Mercy Corps changed gears and decided to send him to Myanmar, he said.
In Myanmar, Gabriel heads the group’s Village Rehabilitation Program and works with village residents in rebuilding and restoring their town’s infrastructure.
With the help of interpreters and local aid workers, Gabriel gathers up villagers for a meeting to discuss what they would like done: from clearing debris and clearing out drainage to fixing the village monastery or health clinic and restoring irrigation canals and docks.
“We can help provide the tools and equipment and pay you guys,” he explains to them.
The money — even at $2 a day, the going rate for unskilled labor in Myanmar — helps the villagers save up some much needed cash to “go buy fishing nets if they were fishermen or go buy scissors to be a barber again,” he said. “Little bits of money can really help them get their lives back together.”
The people of Myanmar are still suffering terribly from the May 3 storm, he said. Fierce winds obliterated thatched homes and triggered a tidal wave that swept away thousands of men, women and children and countless houses and rice farms.
The Myanmar government recently raised the death toll to 84,000 people. More than 50,000 remain missing.
Cleanup and recovery have gone at a glacial pace. Nearly two months after the storm, debris is still piled high all across Yangon, formerly Rangoon. In the Irawaddy Delta — a rural section ravaged by the tidal wave — corpses and skeletons can still be spotted in drinking water ponds and the many waterways that connect the villages.
The junta government has been widely criticized by the international community for resisting help from outside agencies in the wake of the storm.
Gabriel said in the past few weeks, the government has eased up some of its restrictions and aid is starting to flow to people in need.
Mercy Corps teamed up with London-based Merlin, an emergency medical care organization which was already established in Myanmar, and has been given a three-month pass to work inside Myanmar’s borders.
Unlike in Indonesia, where Gabriel was sent to help people rebuild after the tsunami of 2004, accessing the hardest hit villages in the Irawaddy Delta has been incredibly challenging.
“There are no roads,” Gabriel said. Just water.
“Getting around means getting in boats to go to villages,” he said.
Relying on boats has made transporting food and supplies especially cumbersome, Gabriel said.
When he arrives at the villages, he has found that the people are eager for assistance in getting their lives back together.
The meetings often turn into cathartic sessions where the village people share their stories of survival and heartbreak.
Gabriel said he was deeply moved by the story one woman told of how she climbed a tree as the tidal wave swept through her village.
“She was grabbing children as they were floating by,” he said. She talked of how “she struggled to hold on to them in the wind and everything and how she finally was able to get them, one by one, into a boat and took care of them for the next two days.”
Then there was a man, wealthier than most, who had opened up his home to Gabriel and other aid workers.
“He had a spare house on the side of his house, a modest house, but it turned out it was there because he lost his wife and seven children,” Gabriel said. “He was left completely alone in the world.”
Gabriel urged anyone who would like to help the people of Myanmar to donate to his organization at www.mercycorps.org or to any aid group working in the region. Gabriel said the people of Myanmar are still reeling from the cyclone.
“There’s trauma out there,” he said. “But they do their best. They are noticeably sad, but they are doing their best.”
