''Sixty-one-year-old Daw Myint Shwe has had to move her house in Thingangyin village in Ayeyarwady Region four times. “When the waves start lapping at the base of my house, it has to be moved. I move it a hundred feet or so back at a time. I can’t afford to build a new home so I just move it bit by bit. This year, three families had to move their houses – the year before it was twenty.” She lives in a fishing village that’s part of the town of Labutta, which was one of the worst hit when Cyclone Nargis struck in 2008. She recalled the day that a group of politicians came to inspect the damage after the cyclone. “It was high tide when they arrived so they could see how dangerously close our village is to the water. Erosion makes things worse – it’s why I have to keep moving my home. The government provided rehabilitation funds and asked us to move to a new place. The local school was destroyed so a new one was built about a mile-and-a-half away. Some families moved to be close to it and the temporary shelter, but everyone returned within two years. Some stayed as little as a month. The problem was that the jobs are here, near the water, and transport from the new village to this village is difficult because there are no roads.” She said that parents worry about their children’s safety when they travel to school when the area floods, but that out of economic necessity moving isn’t viable. “I was born here and I love the river, and I depend on it too. We all do, because we fish for a living. In summer, the big-time fishermen go to the Bay of Bengal to catch the bigger fish. But life is very difficult,” she said. Ma Sandar Aye, 39, is one of Daw Myint Shwe’s neighbours. She and her husband fish for a living, but are finding it increasingly difficult to make enough to get by on due to difficult weather conditions. “We haven’t been able to fish for over a month because the winds are so strong. The winds were never as strong as this in the past. I don’t know when the weather will improve and my husband and I are starting to think about looking for different work because it’s become too hard to survive.” She said that on a good day, she and her husband can earn K10,000 (US$7.35) but the average amount is K2,500...''