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Grief over missing family lingers

The life of San Aye is consumed by his bid to find out about his siblings in a village in Burma, reports Thulasi Srikanthan.
The Ottawa Citizen
July 18, 2008

Nearly 11 weeks after a deadly cyclone devastated Burma, Ottawa resident San Aye still doesn't know if his family members are alive.

Nothing has been able to shed light on the fate of his two brothers and two sisters, who are from a remote riverside village located in the Irrawaddy Delta, more than 430 kilometres south of Burma's new capital, Naypyidaw.

While Burma's plight has relatively faded from the spotlight, Mr. Aye's world is filled with grief that resurfaces time after time with the memories of the siblings who helped raise him after his parents died when he was a child. Cyclone Nargis, which struck in early May, left more than 138,000 dead or missing and the region where Mr. Aye grew up, the Irrawaddy Delta, was the most devastated.

The first week was the worst, when the 39-year-old man was unable to leave his house, consumed by tears and grief.

"I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, I wanted to be left alone," Mr. Aye said from his Ottawa home through a translator.

He immigrated to Canada in 2006, lives with his wife and two children and is taking English-language classes.

Nowadays, his lifeline is calling whoever he can -- friends, monastery officials and strangers -- who might know something or can give him some clue. The Internet and television are his only other potential sources of information about the whereabouts of his siblings, Myo Myint, San Myint, Than Myint and Khin Htay Myint.

That, however, doesn't stop Mr. Aye from trying.

"After this disaster, hope is the only thing they can keep," Mr. Tin Maung Htoo, executive director of Canadian Friends of Burma, said about Mr. Aye and others like him in Ottawa who are still waiting to hear about their relatives.

Mr. Aye was born in 1969 in a village in the township of Dedaye. By then, a young democracy had been replaced by a dictatorship. When he was 10, his mother and father died, leaving his siblings to become his pseudo-parents. Even they only had Grade 2 education, they did everything they could to provide their youngest brother with a good life, scraping together everything they had to send him to high school in Burma's former capital, Rangoon.

"Almost the whole village didn't have an education; all the money they found in the village, they gave to him because he was the youngest one," said Toe Kyi, Mr. Aye's friend and translator. Mr. Kyi is also waiting to hear about his mother-in-law, who is in Burma.

In Rangoon, Mr. Aye not only studied, but also joined thousands of others in protesting against the country's military rule and demanding democracy in the 1980s. However, hopes for a freer society were dashed when a military coup took place. Mr. Aye, feeling like a marked man, fled to the border with Thailand.

The military junta's handling of the recent crisis remains a sore point for Mr. Aye and many other Burmese several weeks after the tragedy.

As Mr. Aye kept hearing that the military junta was not opening up as much as possible to let in international help, he became angry.

During an interview, though, he is also quick to mention he hopes the Burmese government will be lenient because he is not active like he once was. Mr. Aye said he tried to keep his family safe by trying to stay away from contacting them for a number of years. He said he was only speaking out now in hopes of ensuring they were safe. He hopes they will not be harmed, if they are still alive. Another sibling, Myint Myint San, is believed to be in Rangoon, which was less affected by the cyclone, but he has not heard about her, either.

The tragedy of the cyclone has been difficult for many families in Canada who have been affected, Mr. Htoo said.

"They are quite sad, it's always there in their minds," he said. "Some people don't even talk about what happened to their families."

Many, like Mr. Aye, have also turned to fundraising as an outlet to help those in their homeland. Ottawa's Burmese community, approximately 400 people, has raised more than $10,000. Overall, Canadians have donated about about $3.3 million to the Red Cross.

Mr. Htoo says more money is still needed. While there may be problems with the military junta, the people on the ground still need help.

"It is a long way to go before they could be brought them back to their normal life," Mr. Htoo said. "They have nothing now; they lost all of their livelihood."

Fears that much of the money will not get to victims should not stop people from helping however they can, he said. "We cannot let people die by disease or starvation."

He said there are ways to donate, through organizations such as World Vision, Humanitarian Coalition, Red Cross and Buddhist institutions.

"There no quick solution to fix the system that has been there for decades," he said. "We have to squeeze through the line."

Meanwhile, Mr. Aye and others like him keep waiting for news.

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