Like Irresponsible Parents

When I was younger, I hoped and waited for outside help to come to our country and liberate it. Now I realize that we have to rely on ourselves.
—Hnin Se, George Packer, “Letter from Rangoon” (25 August 2008)

“We had to swim. I grabbed onto a piece of rubbish, I climbed to the top of the rubbish. I shouted, but nobody came.” Thirteen-year-old Silver Moo’s voice is steady as she remembers Cyclone Nargis. Descending on Burma’s southern coast on 2 May 2008, the Category 4 storm destroyed homes and families, 130 miles-per-hour winds whipping the Irrawaddy River into swells of 12 feet and more. Silver Moo and her family ran from their home to a nearby church, hoping it would provide sanctuary. When the roof blew off, she lost sight of her family. “I saw a woman,” she says, “And I thought, ‘That’s my mom.’ I called out to her.”

In fact, Silver Moo lost most of her family that day. As Eyes of the Storm reports, the storm left over 130,000 Burmese dead and another two million homeless, among them thousands of young children. Their stories—tragic, heroic, incredible and terrifying—were all but lost as well, except for the efforts of independent journalists, who resisted government efforts to stop the “flow of information.” As Aaron Brown reports, these reporters risked their lives to find out and record what was happening to citizens of Burma, revealing at the same time the government’s stunning lack of aid and organization.

Eyes of the Storm features orphans taped by journalists who have been trained and supported by the Oslo-based Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), the same group that produced Burma VJ. The orphans’ experiences are framed by interviews with the New Yorker‘s George Packer and producers Evan Williams and Siobhan Sinnerton, as well as footage from their documentary, Orphans of the Storm, all emphasizing the courage of the children and the stunning neglect of the Burmese government. “The thing you’ve got to understand about the regime,” asserts Packer, is that “it’s not incompetence. It’s a deliberate policy to destroy every institution of society that could produce a middle class that would become a threat to the regime.”

The DVB has been “smuggling out news reports of all kinds since the early ‘90s,” including images of the September Demonstrations of 2007 (the protest movement led by Buddhist monks). Packer suggests that even though the government famously repressed that movement, killing, imprisoning, and torturing unknown numbers of people, the resistance persists. “Far from being completely crushed by the regime,” he says, “there is a real social force in Burma that just needs an outlet and the cyclone gave it an outlet.”

This may be true, but the costs have been immense. As Eyes of the Storm narrates, Cyclone Nargis left wide swaths of loss and devastation. It also shows that the government—a junta in place since 1962—was utterly unable or unwilling to attend to that devastation. Brown notes that the generals have for years been “imprisoning opposition politicians and suppressing free speech and information.” The aftermath of the storm led to more of the same. Footage secretly recorded by one DVB journalist shows the Prime Minister, General Thein Sein, and others surveying damage in a village, “bringing not help, but words.” Wearing a crisp green uniform and standing over scores of citizens, barefoot and hungry, he assures them, “We just came to check things out. We will arrange things later. Don’t dwell on the sadness, don’t think this only happened to you. It happened to others too.” 

The program makes this last point abundantly clear. Among its subjects is a family of three orphans, 10-year-old Ye Pyint, his six-year-old sister May Hnin, and their baby brother Nge Lay. Ye Pyint announces, “I want to catch crabs,” as his sister smiles, imagining their future. “When he catches the crabs, I’ll cook them for us and the boy.” What the children can’t imagine, of course, is how impossible their lives might become. Even when they are taken in by a couple of young women (who have their own babies to care for), they’re in trouble. Ye Pyint finds himself the only person working in their new family, setting out each morning to deliver water in order to earn a few pennies for food, the camera walking along behind him as he shoulders large jars, heavy and sloshing. 

Sixteen-year-old Min finds another sort of refuge in a Buddhist monastery. Overwhelmed by the loss of his mother to Nargis, Min tries to adapt to his new circumstance, thinking that maybe he will become a monk. But the boy’s attempt is fraught with doubts. “In my mind, I have my own thoughts and sadness,” he says. “It’s not that I don’t like the people, but in the evening, I can’t cope with what has happened to me.” Noticeably traumatized, troubled by disturbing dreams of his mother, Min can’t focus on his new life and studies in the monastery.

Eyes of the Storm insists on the importance of making the children’s experiences visible to the rest of the world. To that end, it doesn’t so much resolve or even structure their stories, instead allowing them to address the camera, following them along in their daily, apparently endless struggles. While observers like Packer, Williams, and even Brown might provide commentary on the government’s failures, the program is primarily a means for survivors to speak. Silver Moo’s uncle takes her in, then moves his family to a refugee camp in hopes of escaping Burma. Angry that his former employer, the government, is behaving “like irresponsible parents,” he sighs. “I am confused,” he confesses, “I don’t know if we are right or wrong to come here, but if I go back to my village, the government won’t offer any help. I cannot go back to our farm because all the dead bodies and skeletons are there. Also, the spirits of the dead are there and they would haunt the children.” It’s important that the rest of the world see them, the film insists, see that they haunted as well by the neglect of the living.