Australia
Myanmar (Burma) cyclone
Sarah's blog from Myanmar
Sarah is an Australian working in Myanmar for the Save the Children UK Emergencies Team as a Regional Logistics Adviser. Read about Myanmar, her job and her experiences in her blog below. 
September 22: Like a lot of Australians my age, I was living in London on my almost obligatory Working Holiday Visa, traveling through Europe as much as possible while trying to get some good work experience to list on my CV. At the end of March I joined the Save the Children UK Emergencies team in the Logistics department. A few weeks after Cyclone Nargis hit Burma on May 3rd, I flew to Bangkok to help with the relief efforts. By June I was in Rangoon, caught up in the manic emergency madness. Before I knew it I was signing a contract to stay until December.
The cyclone affected area is divided into three – West Delta, East Delta and Rangoon division. I’m the Regional Logistics Adviser for East Delta, which has four main offices – Pyapon, Kyaiklat, Mawlamyinegyun and Hlaing Bone. Although based in Rangoon, I travel a lot, working closely with Min Oo, the Regional Logistics Manager, and the local area logisticians. Save the Children already had a large program in Burma before the Cyclone, and a lot of the emergency staff are previous Save the Children employees. However, there were no ‘Logistics Officers’ prior to the Cyclone, meaning that not only are these staff learning entirely new skills, they are working in an office with people who have never previously heard of 'logistics'. So not only are we training the logisticians, we are also educating the entire staff on logistics in the effort to make purchasing and transport more effective, efficient and accountable.
Basically, the Logistics Officers are responsible for purchasing all items for programs whether it be toy kits for the Child Protection teams; construction materials for the Education team’s school reconstruction; water tanks for the Water and Sanitation teams; boats and fishing nets for Livelihoods; drugs and First Aid Kits for the Health teams; or rice for food distribution. The Logistics Officers are then responsible for storing these items in the warehouse and organising all the transport of people and cargo out to the villages we are working in.
Although the emergency craziness has slowed down slightly in Rangoon (the 15 hour days have now reduced down to a mere 10!), the staff in the Area Offices are still working flat out. Many staff members themselves lost family and friends in the Cyclone but are still working long hours to help other people, who not only lost loved ones, but also their houses and livelihoods.
Last week I was in Mawlamyinegyun where there are 120 Save the Children staff. Visiting one of the villages, I spoke with a 21-year-old woman who was working at a Child Friendly Space, a safe place established for children to come and play, bringing an element of normalcy into their recently disrupted lives. Almost crying, she said that even though she had lost her father in the Cyclone, she was so happy and proud to be able to help other children who not only lost their fathers, but in some cases their mothers and siblings as well. It’s this spirit that can be seen throughout all the offices, with staff often working away from their friends and families, still working long hours months after the Cyclone and often traveling to villages in the monsoon storms to help people get their lives back on track in time for the rice harvest and the upcoming dry season.
Mawlamyinegyun is a beautiful town, with bicycles and rickshaws far outnumbering the cars (all four of them!) and the sound of guitars and singing floating out of cafes and restaurants, heard long into the night. Staying at the staff house, I cruised around the town on my bicycle, a 1970s style bright blue ladies bike complete with a basket up front (all I needed were the spokes on my wheels and multi-coloured streamers from the handlebars), stopping at the fish market to buy some prawns, ones that make even our famous Australian prawns look small by comparison.
So even though there is still a lot of work to be done, it’s clear to see how much has been done in the short months following the Cyclone where hundreds of thousands of people were affected by its devastation. I’m heading to Pyapon this coming week where we are distributing food, a much needed relief until the upcoming harvest.