Daw Aye Kwe, "I have been fishing since I was seven"

After spending most of her life fishing in the Andaman Sea off the Delta's southern coast, Daw Aye Kwe, 60, a fisherwoman, has been forced to hang up her nets and return to her village of Kone Tan Pauk. Cyclone Nargis destroyed her boat and killed some of her relatives, and she now lives in a temporary shelter.



"I was seven when my father first took me out into the sea on the boat to fish; I was very excited. I have been fishing since then, but I was only allowed to go out into the sea independently when I turned 21.



"We had moved from our village to the southern end of the Delta to be able to catch more fish in the sea, but as time went by it became hotter and hotter.



"We began to see more storms and cyclones. We had to go further and further into the sea, where it was colder, to catch the fish. You cannot do that in an ordinary canoe - you need a motor in the traditional boat.



"Life was still good there [in the south], but then Nargis came - it swept away my daughter's husband and her family. Never seen anything like that before.



"We [husband, daughter-in-law, son and two grandchildren] had pulled our boat into our hut as the water level rose, but the winds kept on. The hut was destroyed and so was our boat. We managed to get back on land - we hung on together.



"We had nowhere to go but back to the village where we came from. We then just walked and walked for two days till we got here. But again, we had no shelter here - we had sold our land when we had gone south.



"We have no home, no boat, and we live in this temporary shelter. When the rains came it would get really unbearable, but now some aid agency has provided us with plastic sheets, which has made it better.



"Money is hard to come by. I can't go out to sea. Now, I sometimes sell fish caught by other fishermen - some days are better than others. We can make 1,000 kyat [about US$1] to maybe 5,000 kyat [$5] a day; on some days, maybe nothing at all.



"We eat maybe once a day - some rice and maybe some fish, or just chillies. There are more than 150 families like us in this village. They say it will cost us 50,000 kyat [$50] to buy a new plot of land."



jk/he