Sunday, May 11th

We were out buying a Mother's Day gift for my boyfriend's mom when he got a news alert on his Blackberry. It read:

"BODIES FLOW INTO HARD-HIT AREA OF MYANMAR: The bodies come and go with the tides. They wash up onto the riverbanks or float grotesquely downstream, almost always face down. They are all but ignored by the living. In the southern reaches of the Irrawaddy Delta, where the only access to hundreds of small villages is by boat, the remains of the victims of the May 3 cyclone that swept across Myanmar are rotting in the sun. "These people are strangers," said Kyaw Swe, a clothing merchant who said he expected the tides to take away the six bloated bodies lying on the muddy banks near his collapsed home. "They come from upstream." Villagers here say it is not their responsibility to handle the dead. But the government presence is barely felt in the serpentine network of canals outside Bogale and Phyarpon, devastated towns in the delta, one of the areas hardest hit by the storm."

Today a Red Cross boat, after an eleven hour journey into the region, sank. It was carrying food and aid for 1000 people. My heart too sank when I heard about this. The boat had hit a tree that was submerged under the water.

But one can't lose hope. Relief and aid WILL get there. And when it does, we will begin only our first baby step of recovery to build Burma, nurture Myanmar, back to health and to heart.