Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Twitter gives the lowdown on the situation in Burma




More evidence of the advantages of Twitter comes from Burma where its feeds are giving much information and limks to blogs about what is going on in the country.

This was updated 12 hours ago on the KyiMayKaung blog on reports of people being taken away by force

Some people - I understand about 900 of them - were taken to Ma-ubin but the cyclone victims did not want to go there. So, they used force to take them away and some families got separated. For instance, husbands were moved and wives were left behind or children taken away without the husbands, and so forth......They were taken away in military trucks. People were forced into the trucks and ordered not to remain at the monasteries. Many cyclone victims who did not go with the trucks were evicted from the monasteries and some of them are now living along the coast.


This paints a vivid picture of the events of the storm

On May 2nd, we got news that the storm was heading directly into Yangon, so the employees were released to go back home early at 2pm. Even at that time, I was planning to stay until office hour was over because looking outside, the sun was still shining. But later, after being urged by friends online to go back home early, I went back home. When I got home, electricity was still on, so we opened TV, and on MRTV 3, there was a news flash scrolling, saying that the storm had passed Hi-gyi Island and is on its way towards Ayeyarwaddy, Yangon, Bago, and Mon States. The radio station was also broadcasting warnings of this. Electricity was cut off at 6:30pm according to ration schedule, so we just sit around with emergency lights. It had started raining, but it was not very windy yet. So I went to bed around 9pm. I hardly ever wish anything whenever I prayed, but that night, I prayed that the storm will not cause many casualties. I wasn't able to fall asleep quickly, because of the noises of the rain falling on the roof, but I think I did nodded off.
When I woke up, it was around 2:30am, and the wind was howling now. I can hear noises on the roof, and I was afraid that the roof, even though it's one of those big one-piece roof that covers the whole house, will fly away with the wind. So I got my pillow and a blanket and went into the living room and found my mom and my cousin sitting on the seats with a candle lit. They couldn't sleep either, I guess. My father was praying in the shrine room, and my brother was awake too. It wasn't raining heavily at that time, but there was very strong wind

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