ELIZABETH BRACKETT:
Just over 4,000 Burmese people have now settled here in Fort Wayne. All three religious groups are represented, Buddhist, Christian and Muslim. And though there are traditional tensions between these groups both in Myanmar and here in Fort Wayne, now the horror of the storm has brought those groups together.
Prayer services have been held across the city, as Fort Wayne responds to the disaster. Long term, Fort Wayne homes are being renovated for the rising number of Burmese refugees, this renovation coordinated by the Fort Wayne Baptist minister, who sponsored the first Burmese refugee family back in 1989.
Neil Sowards, the son of a missionary who worked in Burma, enabled the first refugees to get out of Burma after their lives were endangered by participating in the political uprisings against the military junta in 1988.
As the military junta became stronger, many more Burmese followed to build a new life in a city very different from the ones they had left behind.
Sowards says the cyclone is the worst storm to hit the country in the last 100 years, and he worries that the death toll will only continue to rise.
NEIL SOWARDS, Friends of Burma: The first death came from what we call a hurricane, they call a cyclone. The second will come from bad water, dissenter, dengue fever, and cholera has already broken out. And the third will come from starvation.
And they just — they will not have a crop until September, and their food has all been wiped out.
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