Myanmar bamboo village resists cyclone's wrath

HLAING THA YAR, Myanmar (Reuters) - When the full force of Cyclone Nargis passed overhead, people in this one village in southwest Myanmar could do little but sit tight and pray their lightweight bamboo shacks stood up to the ferocious winds.

For the most part, they did.

Elsewhere, deep in the vast marshlands of the Irrawaddy delta, people were less fortunate as winds of 190 km (120 miles) per hour caused a sea surge that swept inland, killing most of the cyclone's 15,000 victims, according to the military government.

"No one died around here. We were very lucky," said one 18-year-old student in Hlaing Tha Yar, a village of about 10,000 people an hour's drive west of Yangon. He did not want to be named.

In the village, roofs had been ripped off about one in ten of the houses, simple bamboo structures with roofs made of leaves and walls of rush matting.

But in most cases, they simply shook violently and bent before the force of the blast, before springing back up when the storm passed, residents said.

Further south, CNN showed footage of one village in which it said every house had been virtually destroyed.

The relative absence of destruction in villages such as Hlaing Tha Yar is making it all the more difficult for the government and aid officials to work out how many people have been affected, and who is in biggest need of help.

United Nations aid officials can say only that the number of homeless is in range of several hundred thousand.