Gashwin has a post with links to information on the deadly impact of Cyclone Nargis.
Fort Wayne has a substantial Burmese population, so the local paper gets reactions:
Monday was a long day for Minerva Gyaw – the first of what will likely be a long week.
The 86-year-old Fort Wayne resident, like many other Burmese in the area, spent most of her day waiting to learn whether her extended family had survived a devastating cyclone.
Every few hours, calls went out.
But the landline telephones, Internet, even cell phones couldn’t connect Gyaw and many of her friends in northeast Indiana with their families in Southeast Asia.
“We’re all concerned,” Gyaw said.
Gyaw said her relatives live in one of the hardest-hit parts of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. Many live in Myanmar’s delta area, the country’s rice-producing region, where towns were reportedly flattened.
Fort Wayne is home to an estimated 3,000 to 3,500 Burmese.
The silence from Myanmar has been difficult for Gyaw to bear because of her mistrust of Myanmar’s government and any information it provides on the cyclone’s aftermath.
snip
On the south end of town Monday, cars crowded a circular drive in front of a house. Dozens of shoes piled outside the screen door.
The television in the Jetavan Vihara Buddist temple on Sylvia Street remained the main source of news for residents inside whose calls to Myanmar had been met with maddening silence.
Aye Htwe heard his relatives in Yangon had their roof blown away, but that small bit of news is all he’d heard by Monday afternoon. He plans to try to send them some money via his sister in Thailand.
“They have a lot of trouble right now,” he said.
This is a compunded tragedy. I think that the Burmese leadership is letting nature do what they’ve been trying to do for a whle now: get rid of that part of the population they don’t want.
I believe the rest of the world should keep calling it “Burma” (and “Rangoon”) to help discredit the ruling junta.