Sleepless and swamped in Myanmar

Making do: Aung Myo Tun (centre) with his family on the temporary platform he built above his home in the village of Kyouk Ye. Below: The entire nine-member family is now living on a makeshift platform salvaged and lashed to the partially submerged house. — AFP

EVERY night Aung Myo Tun climbs onto the raised platform where he sleeps with his wife, six children and mother-in-law, listening in growing panic to the sound of water lapping around his house in Myanmar’s Irrawaddy delta.

“We are in trouble,” says the farmer, his face etched with tiredness from two weeks of guarding his family from the swirling river that has swallowed his village, as the country battles its worst flooding in years.