Everything Is Broken Read Online Free Page B

global goodwill, this disaster would soon be overcome. In the pages of the New Light of Myanmar , at least, everything was under control.
    My Burmese friend Ko Ye, a publisher working in Rangoon, once taught me that if I wanted to know what was really going on in Burma, I should look for the absences; as the truth of events cannot be read in the pages of newspapers or seen on the nightly news, it is more likely to be found in what is not published or broadcast—the stories, or bits of stories, that are excised.
    There were, for example, no disaster pictures in the New Light of Myanmar or in any of the many private weekly publications. The images of bereft families and broken homes usually seen in the news after a major disaster were absent. Though many Burmese publications had been able to use the disorder that ensued after the cyclone to defy the censorship board, and had run stories and photographs of the destruction, by the time I arrived in Rangoon the censors had regained control of the news.
    The editor of a weekly news journal showed me a recent issue in which the censors had scrawled hasty lines across all photographs considered to be “negative” (images of collapsed buildings, sunken boats, unhappy people, etc.). Out of some one hundred photographs, the censors had only approved four images. Less than two weeks after the cyclone, Burmese journalists and editors were summoned to the central censorship office, the Press Scrutiny and Registration Division, and were told that the emergency period was over. From then on, all Nargis-related stories published in Burma had to focus on rehabilitation and convey only positive messages.
    It was impossible to see how the local media would be able to squeeze any positive stories out of the ongoing events. The conversations I had with friends and aid workers during my first few days revealed a reality that couldn’t be more different from that described in the New Light of Myanmar .
    Aung Thein Kyaw, a middle-aged man who runs a tour company, had temporarily shut down his business and was making repeated trips to the delta to hand out rice and medicine. The conditions he encountered were horrifying. In a tight and carefully measured voice he talked about how the boat he traveled in kept bumping against dead bodies. He described survivors with ghastly injuries. During the cyclone, flying sheets of corrugated iron had severed limbs and torn flesh from bone. While trying to stay afloat in the choppy waters of the storm surge, people had been battered by loose logs, boats, and planks of wood. Without medical attention their gaping wounds were turning gangrenous. Survivors who had held on to trees for the ten-to-twelve-hour duration of the storm had clung on so tightly and for so long that the skin on their arms, chests, and legs had been rubbed away.
    Wa Wa Myint, a doctor working in Rangoon who had been down to a delta town to treat patients, described some areas where the roads were lined with thousands of desperate and homeless people begging for food. “There are so many, many people,” she said. “And they have nowhere to go. They have nothing left. Some of them were naked after the storm. They have no home left and no family—they have absolutely nothing, not even their clothes.”
    One evening a friend took me to meet Chit Swe, who had just returned from traveling with a group of fellow businessmen to the southern stretches of the delta. Even before the storm, the lower regions of the delta were accessible only by boat, as no road network had ever been built there. Hardly any news had been heard from those areas, and it was believed that villages there must have taken the brunt of the storm. The businessmen had companies in the delta—fishing operations and rice-trading firms—and they had left the city soon after the storm, heading out to the villages in a large boat loaded with rice, drinking water, and tarpaulin sheets that could be used for shelter. Though the