Come for dinner

My husband's (pre Nargis) story (names and places deleted to protect the family):

"While eating at a nearby restaurant I was approached a local guide. We discussed the normal tourist questions. Then he invited me to dinner at his home the following night and asked whether I would like chicken or beef. I said I preferred chicken (not having had a reasonable piece of beef in Asia in the last 3 years) and we made a time for the following night. His house was in walking distance of where I was staying.

At the airport the day before I had eaten some Simosas which had given me an upset stomach. Later after a scanty meal at the restaurant I was violently ill. The following afternoon still feeling queasy I went back to the restaurant and left a message cancelling my dinner invitation with my new friend and his family that night. I said I would catch up with him at the restaurant the following afternoon.

The following afternoon I met him at the restaurant again. He had misunderstood my message and thought that I was to have dinner with him that night. I could see that he was particularly keen for me to meet his family and despite the rumblings in my stomach went home with him.
As soon as I was seated his wife brought out a table full of various dishes - the prize one being a beef curry. His two young children gathered around to watch. Eager not to offend my host I ate as much as I could, all the while wondering how the spicy accompaniments would treat my battered stomach. It was beautifully prepared food and surprisingly not as spicy as much of the Thai food I was used to. So I did the meal justice. He showed me through his home. It was perfectly kept despite the dirt floors. There was next to nothing in the rooms and no operating electrical appliances (another story). I noticed that the generator was missing from the diesel motor.

He told me that he had sold the generator the day before for $15. He had paid $85 for it new last year and had been hoping for $40. But no one was interested. He said they were only interested in getting a bargain and profiting from his misfortune. I asked why he ended up selling to an Indian secondhand dealer for just $15. He said he needed the money urgently.
I asked why.
He said: Do you really want to know? I said yes.
He said that after inviting me to a chicken dinner his wife had pointed out to him that they didn't have the money to buy the ingredients. The dinner to impress me was more important than electricity to him (another story!) and so he sold the generator to the secondhand dealer who had been pestering him. As it was he received only $14 as he had to pay for transport of the generator to the dealer.

They bought 500g of chicken for $4 and various vegetables and condiments for the meal. When he heard I was not coming to dinner he and his family ate it. They have no refrigeration. It was the first meat they had had in months. Then, thinking I was to be there for dinner the following night, he then bought 500g of beef for $4 and his wife prepared another meal.
When I heard this I was speechless. Through my ignorance I had caused this family great hardship. They had already suffered greatly. I was rocked to my core. For the first time I could see that despite the best intentions in the world my western values coloured everything I saw and heard."

In a hurry

When the planes failed to appear at the airport at Ngapali last weekend, some tourists became impatient to return to Rangoon (Yangon). The local bus takes 14 hours to cross the Irrawaddy delta and is famously uncomfortable. Still, eager to make their connections in Yangon, 17 travellers climbed aboard with their roll-on luggage and sunscreen. Forty eight hours later Chris boarded the first plane out to Yangon. The bus travellers had not returned to Ngapali. Perhaps they are still skirting the swirling flood waters?

News of cyclone Nargis broke in Australia last Monday. By 7.09am I was in a tail spin. My husband had emailed me the previous week to say he was heading south from Mandalay through Yangon to Ngapali beach. With trembling fingers I launched Google Earth and pinpointed Ngapali on the Bay of Bengal, just west of the flooded delta. Photos of the hotels showed bures dotted along the beach. Images of beaches swept away by tidal waves in the tsunami flashed through my head.
Each day I pored over internet news pages, travellers' chat pages and maps of the cyclone's path trying to calculate the possible damage to Ngapali. There was no news of the area. The Australian consul said communications were down. They had no news of anyone outside Yangon. Teams were telephoning Australian nationals from Canberra, as the local embassy had no outgoing lines. My husband had not taken his mobile phone as there is no service outside Yangon, where it is CDMA anyway. I wasn't even sure which hotel he would be staying in or even if he actually was in Ngapali.
By Thursday morning I was beside myself with worry. I phoned his friends in Chiang Mai, Thailand. They were expecting him on the evening flight. I calculated there was less than a 50/50 chance of him being on the flight but pinpointed my hopes on a call at 8.30EST never the less.
My mobile phone did not stop buzzing all evening. Our children, his sisters, old friends, everyone kept calling to see if I'd heard anything. When it buzzed at 9.30pm I was exhausted and totally focussed on the work I was doing and didn't answer. Unknown caller, the mobile screen announced. I called messagebank and sank to my knees when I heard his voice. He had arrived back in Chiang Mai on all the pre-arranged flights. Until he was back in Yangon to catch his flight he had had no inkling of the cyclone.
He had been in Ngapali. A bit of a storm had broken communications - a not unusual occurence as infrastructure in Myanmar is very fragile. In Yangon he saw the result of the winds, people clearing roads and an avalanche of military outside his hotel. The junta were meeting to discuss the situation in the hotel, he was told later. It was only on the plane back to Chiang Mai that he saw CNN footage of the flooding and realised the enormity of the situation.
The country was on the brink of disaster before the cyclone, he says. Unimaginable hardship for all Burmese, not just those directly affected, will be the only outcome.
I shall post some of his stories, as he tells them.