He had been visiting his home village with his eleven-year-old son on the night of the storm. As the wind and rain increased he had realized that there was going to be a lot of damage so he went from house to house in his community and persuaded people to move from their bamboo and wooden houses into the brick church building.
The next morning he went with his son into Yangon for help, traveling by boat, motorbike and foot, arriving cold, wet and exhausted in the evening.
We travelled to the Pyapon area, about four hours (180 kilometers) from Yangon, by car on the Wednesday, five days after the cyclone. We took 5 million kyat ($5,000) worth of essential supplies with us, including plastic sheeting, Water Guard (water purification treatment), dried biscuits, rice and medicine, including oral rehydration salts, pain medication and antiseptic lotion.
The road was passable but after driving for two to three hours we were stopped by a military road block. A helicopter had landed on the road because a high ranking official was visiting the area. After about an hour we were allowed to continue.
When we arrived in Pyapon we could see that most houses had been damaged and many had been laid flat.
There were people around the town and the tea houses, an important center of Myanmar community life, were operating.
We visited a church in that town that had been so badly damaged that only the frame was left standing. Only one of the neighboring houses was still standing.
We met an elderly lady there who was very distressed. She said she had lost everything and there was only God for support now.
After leaving some supplies for some badly affected people there we loaded the rest of the supplies onto a small boat and set off for more remote villages.
In the river we saw many dead animals: buffalo, pigs, dogs, chickens and we also saw human bodies. I have to say that after the first five human bodies I just stopped counting. They had been in the water five days now. It was very distressing.
Although the area that we were in was less affected than areas closer to the sea (where the water level had risen by 3 meters) the destruction was evident.
The water level had risen here to about 80 cm and gone down again after a couple of hours. The wind had been overwhelming. Most of the houses had been flattened.
There were lots of people along the river picking up the pieces of their lives. Some were cleaning and washing household items and clothing that had been muddied by the flood waters, others were trying to dry their rice stores in between the showers of rain that were making the recovery more difficult.
Someone would be washing in the river only 10 meters away from a dead buffalo or 50 meters away from a dead child floating in the river. No one was collecting the dead bodies.
At the first village that we stopped to distribute supplies they told us that on their side of the river 500 people had drowned or were missing and on the other side the figure was 200.
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