By Pamela Sitko, World Vision Asia-Pacific Communications

“Rice paddy, fisherman, school, students...” Nway reads out loud from her school text book with great ease. “I can read sentences now,” she coos as she talks about her teacher’s loving encouragement at school and her new ability to write advanced vocabulary words.

When World Vision first met nine year old Nway, she carried a blank look on her face and walked around her cyclone-ravished village in shock. She stood on the foundation of what used to be her school, her tiny legs full of scratches, and her heart broken with the knowledge that every member of her family had been killed by the cyclone.

When the cyclone struck, Nway was staying with her favourite Aunty. The pair squeezed in to the village headman’s house along with 100 other people. After hours of lashing rain and 240kmh winds, night turned to day and revealed flattened rice crops, flooded roadways, houses reduced to rubble and an unprecedented death toll. In Nway’s village, located several hours by boat from the nearest town, 120 people out of a population of 430 lost their lives.

Immediately after the cyclone struck, World Vision provided Nway’s family and thousands of other cyclone survivors with emergency survival packs containing food, water and clothing. World Vision also looked after the mental well-being of disaster-affected children in Nway’s village and around the Delta by setting up of Child Friendly Spaces, places where children play and work through their grief.

Nway shares her memories: “When I walked to my Aunt’s house that day, my legs were scratched and I passed lots of dead bodies.  I wanted to help because everyone was working, but I was too scared so I only helped clean up my Auntie’s yard,” she recalls.

One year later, Nway is wise to the pain in the world. She wants to make it a better place.  “I want to be a doctor,” she says. Her decision was made after watching a mobile medical clinic treat the injured people in her village not long after the disaster struck.

During this year’s summer break Nway is helping her Aunty sell vegetables from their garden. She wakes in the mornings, carefully smoothes dabs of Thanaka on her face (a powder made from tree bark used as a skin beautifier by women and young children) and then balances a tray of vegetables on her head as she sings out to houses on either side of her village road.

There are many more difficulties to face if Nway is to realize her dreams. She will have to attend a school away from home. Her middle school, currently under repair by the village, only accommodates students up to grade nine. Her family’s income earning potential – once derived from renting eight buffalos to plough fields for other villagers – will also need to return to what it once was in order to provide Nway with the financial support to pursue her dreams.

But this little girl isn’t taking “no” for an answer. World Vision’s work in the community over the past year has supported her to stay at school with school supplies and a new uniform. After school, and even now in the summer break, Nway and her friends often meet for a little ‘classroom talk’.

“I have four best friends,” she says. “We like to memorise new words. Then we have competitions with each other,” she says with a cheeky grin on her face that hints at her competitive spirit.

The girls meet not only to compete at spelling but at athletics too. “We like to play hide and seek and tag after school,” says the young star. “I’m always the fastest runner,” she adds.

Cyclone Nargis stuck on the evening of May 2, 2008 hitting southwest Myanmar, affecting 2.4 million people across the Ayyerwaddy Delta and Yangon. The storm resulted in an unprecedented death toll of more than 84,000 with a further 50,000 missing. It wrought severe damage and destruction over the Delta, a fertile rice farming region commonly referred to as Asia’s rice bowl.