CHIANG MAI, Thailand – The news continues to report the extent of the damage and the lives lost. While in Chiang Mai meeting my other team members to strategize on how we are going to implement our projects, we met a couple of gentlemen from a large NGO.

They were from Yangon and were there when the cyclone hit. One of the older gentlemen said,” I have lived in Yangon all my life and never once have seen such a cyclone. We’ve had many cyclones which normally lasted for an hour, but this one lasted more than 10 hours. I could hear the trees falling around my house.”

These gentlemen belong to a network that reaches out to about 20,000 people in just one village. He claims that about 5,000 of them have lost their lives and the numbers continues to increase for lack of food, medicine and water.

“We know of villages that are completely submerged underwater. All the fishermen and their boats are underwater. There are no signs of any life in some of the locations. This is heart breaking. We are doing our best to help these families.”

OBI has a disaster relief specialist on the ground in Myanmar who is right now strategizing our relief efforts to help aid these desperate survivors.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 11th, 2008 at 9:30 am and is filed under Asia, Kumar Periasamy, Thailand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.