On the first day of April, social worker and rescue volunteer Wai Lin Thit rushed to the city of Sagaing in central Myanmar, which—along with the larger cities of Mandalay and Naypyitaw—had been struck by a 7.7-magnitude earthquake three days earlier, impacting an area inhabited by some 17 million people.
As the disastrous news broke throughout the country and spread to screens and airwaves around the world, Wai Lin Thit left his home city of Yangon. Along with the team of rescue volunteers he had formed from a group of complete strangers, he set out to save any lives he could in the country’s devastated heartland.
“The smell of death became perceptible as we got closer to Sagaing, and the scale of the damage was on full display. There were thousands of damaged homes everywhere you looked,” said Wai Lin Thit, who had previous experience as a relief volunteer during the Covid-19 pandemic in Yangon.
Myanmar has been rocked by civil war for more than 75 years, but unrest and realignments precipitated by the 2021 military coup brought a new intensity to ongoing conflicts. Since the coup, more than 3.5 million people have been displaced—the latest, and likely underestimated, figure reported by the United Nations (UN).
A UN statement released on April 7 remarked that, while still embroiled in a multifront civil war, Myanmar’s ruling regime has been pushed to the “verge of collapse” in its ability to provide the essential services and functions of a state to its people.
“Now, with needs escalating rapidly, the earthquake has pushed those already vulnerable people even deeper into crisis—while tipping many others into new and urgent needs,” the statement said.
Heartbreaking work
Wai Lin Thit’s experience handling scores of bodies during the Covid-19 pandemic was not enough to prepare him for the sight of the bodies of dead children and young students killed in the collapse of a Sagaing school.
They were among the 3,649 deaths confirmed so far by military authorities across Sagaing and Mandalay regions and the Naypyitaw Union Territory, which is home to the junta’s administrative capital. An additional 5,018 people were injured in the quake and 145 people are currently reported missing.
According to experts, the total number of deaths may be higher than authorities have reported.
The quake buried the two lower levels of the four-storey Myat Private High School building in rubble, killing a total of 11 people, including six students, four teachers, and a student’s father.
Accompanied by members of the Myanmar Fire Services Department as well as a rescue team from Malaysia, Wai Lin Thit and his fellow volunteers searched around the clock, making camp at the collapsed building sites.
Although the chances for survival were slim for those still trapped under the rubble after five days, the group of rescuers continued to look for people trapped inside the collapsed building even while the smell of putrefaction started to emanate from inside, said Wai Lin Thit.
“To the end, we tried our best to find the victims while family members waited anxiously nearby,” he said.
“Relatives rushed to the scene even if dismembered body parts were found; asking if they were identifiable as their loved ones,” he added. “You can imagine what it would feel like answering those bereaved family members’ questions.”
The families waited in front of the collapsed building until the end of the rescue mission, which lasted nine days, hoping their loved ones would be found alive.
“It made me very sad to see very innocent kids dead. Then the scene of their surviving parents waiting for them—whether alive or dead—was really heartbreaking for me,” Wai Lin Thit said. “Nobody expected their loved ones to be dead. Some family members even fainted after finding their loved ones had died.”
Once, he said, a young woman saying she was based in Dubai contacted him on Facebook to ask after her boyfriend, who she had been in a relationship with for ten years.
After the collapse of a hotel in Sagaing, the woman had reported her partner missing along with four others at the hotel. He had to tell her two of the missing people had been found alive at the hotel, and two were found dead, leaving only her boyfriend still missing.
“She is still texting and phoning me because she cannot accept that her boyfriend is dead,” he added. “I was told she’s returning to Sagaing in the coming days to find him.”
“She kept asking for him while crying. I felt terrible that I didn’t know what to say. Unfortunately, we simply couldn’t find him,” he told Myanmar Now.
Irreparable damage
Across both Mandalay and Sagaing regions, the 7.7-magnitude earthquake has caused incalculable damage to roads, houses, hotels, schools, monasteries, and other buildings, including administrative infrastructure in the capital Naypyitaw and centuries-old temples and pagodas in Myanmar’s ancient former capitals.
Citing remarks from junta chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, regime-run media said on Wednesday that a total of 48,834 public housing structures had been destroyed throughout the country, as well as 2,171 government offices and halls, 3,094 monasteries, 2,045 schools, 5,275 pagodas, and 148 bridges.
The report did not include an estimate or information on the number of damaged mosques and churches.
The earthquake also caused major damage in Naypyitaw, the seat of the military’s administration and the junta headed by Min Aung Hlaing, toppling civil servants’ housing and government office buildings. Most of the junta’s top generals remained in Naypyitaw while local volunteer rescuers worked tirelessly in Mandalay and Sagaing regions.
“Everything we lay eyes on is damaged,” Wai Lin Thit said, recalling his thoughts as he arrived in Sagaing.
He saw countless temples, convents, and monasteries that had fallen completely to pieces in the region, he remembered.
“I saw nuns in front of their ruined convents waiting and asking for donations. They are facing more difficulty because they have to feed many more mouths than a normal family,” he added. “They needed a lot of help.”
International rescue teams from countries like China and Russia—the junta’s closest global allies—have been allowed to operate in the country with relatively little restriction and have helped to rescue people from severely damaged domiciles and buildings in the most heavily impacted areas of Mandalay and Sagaing regions.
In those cities, even those survivors without physical injuries are now carrying deep, painful psychological wounds from the loss of homes and loved ones.
Photos and reports from disaster-impacted areas have shown people making temporary homes and sleeping on tarpaulin mats. Some have no cover but a mosquito net as they lie on road platforms under the blazing sun and intermittent showers that presage the rainy season.
“Today we went to a place in Tada-U; we saw the people sleeping with nothing but a tarp on the ground at a football pitch,” said Wai Lin Thit, referring to a town southwest of Mandalay.
Aside from the lack of electricity and drinking water in the affected areas, he noted most of the survivors would have benefited from help with recovery and rehabilitation, with some even in need of food and water for basic nourishment.
“In some places, people are just eating crackers and drinking water to quiet their hunger. The people have little to eat until some food is donated,” he said. “As we arrived, they looked like they had been waiting for the aid for too long.”
No homes… no money
Remote villages and other areas with limited access have been even more difficult, if not impossible, to reach with aid since the earthquake struck.
There is no doubt that villages high up in the hills or across rivers and away from major roadways have received the least aid proportionate to their needs, according to Wai Lin Thit.
In one of his rescue missions in Sagaing Region, he said, monks living on top of the mountain were in dire straits after the quake destroyed their monastery, killing three novices and leaving 16 monastics homeless.
“We usually go places where the greatest numbers of people need help because the funding we receive is from the people themselves,” he said.
However, while donors have flocked to give to relief efforts in cities like Mandalay and Sagaing, the remote areas in those cities’ surroundings have received little help despite being in possibly greater need.
“Some people are getting a lot of donations while most needy people in remote areas are getting almost none,” he said.
As the rescue effort in Sagaing ultimately wound down, Wai Lin Thit and his team began to go out to more rural areas to distribute food and other essential aid to the people there.
One of those remote villages he recently visited, called Bhon Taw Naingan, is located on the east side of the Ayeyarwady River in Amarapura Township, Mandalay Region.
The settlement, formerly inhabited by about 500 people in over 100 houses, was now sitting on deep cracks in the ground that ran the length of the village. The quake had also destroyed the nearby riverbank, which used to protect the village from flooding during rainy seasons.
“The village sits on the Sagaing fault line, so most of the houses were split into two or more pieces,” he said. “Now the whole village is taking shelter at the nearest monastery compound.”
The village had been on its way to recovery from major recent flooding when the earthquake hit, destroying not only most of the homes in the village but also one of the few natural barriers that used to protect them.
“Now they have no homes and no money to rebuild. Besides, we have no way to know if the authorities would ever help them or not,” he said, before adding: “I want to encourage people to try to give to people most in need, rather than to just any charity asking for donations.”
