Zay Yar Tun fills his truck with water for delivery to refugees in the parched hills of war-ravaged eastern Myanmar, where a heatwave is adding to the misery of life in displacement camps.
Under a roof of plastic sheets in one of the camps in Kayah state, Augusta waits for the 10 gallons that must cover her family’s drinking, cooking and washing needs for the next three days.
More than 123,000 people have been forced to flee their homes in Kayah by the conflict unleashed by the military’s 2021 coup, according to the United Nations.
Now, a heatwave that has sent the mercury in Myanmar to 48 degrees Celsius (118 Fahrenheit) in some places has added to uncertainties of life in the camps.
“Last year, we got water from a spring nearby,” Augusta told AFP.
“But now we can’t get water from that place as there is no water left there.
“We have to be frugal… If we don’t shower today, maybe tomorrow we can wash our hands and faces.”
The scarcity means she and her children are often unable to wash properly or clean their clothes in the baking heat.
“The children are itching and they seem dirty, and we also don’t have clean clothes for them,” she said.
A swelling camp
A dozen or so camp residents queue up at the truck for water rations that will have to last them three or four days.
Children carry the containers home in baskets on their backs or via trolleys as hot wind whips up dust from the dirt road.
“When there were only residents living in this place, there was enough water,” said Zay Yar Tun, of the charity Clean Yangon.
“But after the displaced people fled here, the population is too much for the amount of water we can get here.”
Donations keep Zay Yar Tun’s team and its two trucks running, and they make two deliveries to the camp each week.
Finding the streams or springs to fill up their truck can be dangerous in Kayah, which has emerged as one of the hotspots of resistance to military rule.
The military regularly calls in air and artillery strikes on its opponents and landmines are a constant danger.
Transporting cargo to the camps is difficult too.
The fuel the team needs to run their trucks and pumps is expensive because of military restrictions on importing fuel into Kayah, Zay Yar Tun said.
“The price of fuel is very expensive, and it seems like we are exchanging fuel to get water,” he said.
‘Borrowing water’
Families like Augusta’s are forced to make similar calculations as they try to get through the heat.
“If we are going to take a bath in the creek, we have to go far away from the camp,” she said.
“It’s not a walkable distance under this temperature.”
“If we go by motorcycle, it’s not worth it because of the cost of fuel. If we save money for fuel, we may as well use it to buy water.”
Respite in the form of the rainy season may be some way off yet.
Myanmar’s weather office has forecast that the monsoon, which usually begins around May, is likely to arrive late this year, state media reported this week.
Until then, water will be priceless in the camp, said Augusta.
“Sometimes we say to each other: ‘I haven’t got any water left, have you got any? Please could you give me some?'” she said.
“Our life has come to this, where we have to borrow water.”

A Sumatran orangutan named Rakus was seen using a plant to treat a facial wound possibly sustained during a fight.

An orangutan in Indonesia has been observed appearing to treat a wound with a medicinal tropical plant – the latest example of how some animals attempt to soothe their own ills with remedies found in the wild.

Scientists saw the Sumatran orangutan named Rakus pluck and chew up leaves of a medicinal plant used by people throughout Southeast Asia to treat pain and inflammation. The adult male then used his fingers to apply the plant juices to an injury on the right cheek. Afterwards, he pressed the chewed plant to cover the open wound like a makeshift bandage, according to a study in Scientific Reports that was released on Thursday.

Previous research has documented several species of great ape foraging for medicines in forests to heal themselves, but scientists had not previously seen an animal treat itself in this way.

“This is the first time that we have observed a wild animal applying a quite potent medicinal plant directly to a wound,” said co-author Isabelle Laumer, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour in Konstanz, Germany.

The observations took place in the Gunung Leuser National Park on the Indonesian island of Sumatra when the researchers spotted Rakus had an injury in June 2022. They believe he had been hurt while fighting with rival male orangutans.

The team then saw Rakus chewing the leaves of a plant with the scientific name Fibraurea tinctoria “without swallowing them and using his fingers to apply the plant juice from his mouth directly”.

The plant, known as Akar Kuning in Indonesia, is rarely eaten by orangutans in the peat swamp forest area, which is home to about 150 critically endangered Sumatran orangutans.

Photographs showed the animal’s wound closed within a month without any problems.

Rakus, believed to have been born in 1989, is a flanged male, with large cheek pads on both sides of the face – secondary male sexual characteristics. He is one of the area’s dominant males.

‘Very likely it’s self-medication’

Scientists have been observing orangutans in Indonesia’s Gunung Leuser National Park since 1994.

“It’s a single observation,” said Emory University biologist Jacobus de Roode, who was not involved in the study. “But often we learn about new behaviours by starting with a single observation.

“Very likely it’s self-medication,” de Roode added, noting that the orangutan applied the plant only to the wound and no other body part.

The study’s co-author, Caroline Schuppli at Max Planck, said it was possible Rakus had learned the technique from other orangutans living outside the park and away from researchers’ daily scrutiny.

Scientists have previously recorded other primates using plants to treat themselves.

Orangutans in Borneo, the island shared between Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia, have been known to rub themselves with juices from a medicinal plant, possibly to reduce body pains or chase away parasites.

Chimpanzees in multiple locations have been observed chewing on the shoots of bitter-tasting plants to soothe their stomachs. Gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos swallow certain rough leaves whole to get rid of stomach parasites.

“If this behaviour exists in some of our closest living relatives, what could that tell us about how medicine first evolved?” said Tara Stoinski, president and chief scientific officer of the nonprofit Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, who had no role in the study.

LYPIVKA, Ukraine (AP) — This Orthodox Easter season, an extraordinary new church is bringing spiritual comfort to war-weary residents of the Ukrainian village of Lypivka. Two years ago, it also provided physical refuge from the horrors outside.

Almost 100 residents sheltered in a basement chapel at the Church of the Intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary while Russian troops occupied the village in March 2022 as they closed in on Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, 40 miles (60 kilometers) to the east.

“The fighting was right here,” the Rev. Hennadii Kharkivskyi said. He pointed to the churchyard, where a memorial stone commemorates six Ukrainian soldiers killed in the battle for Lypivka.

“They were injured and then the Russians came and shot each one, finished them off,” he said.

The two-week Russian occupation left the village shattered and the church itself — a modern replacement for an older structure — damaged while still under construction. It’s one of 129 war-damaged Ukrainian religious sites recorded by UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural organization.

“It’s solid concrete,” the priest said. “But it was pierced easily” by Russian shells, which blasted holes in the church and left a wall inside pockmarked with shrapnel scars. At the bottom of the basement staircase, a black scorch mark shows where a grenade was lobbed down.

But within weeks, workers were starting to repair the damage and work to finish the solid building topped by red domes that towers over the village, with its scarred and damaged buildings, blooming fruit trees and fields that the Russians left littered with land mines.

For many of those involved — including a tenacious priest, a wealthy philanthropist, a famous artist and a team of craftspeople — rebuilding this church plays a part in Ukraine’s struggle for culture, identity and its very existence. The building, a striking fusion of the ancient and the modern, reflects a country determined to express its soul even in wartime.

The building’s austere exterior masks a blaze of color inside. The vibrant red, blue, orange and gold panels decorating walls and ceiling are the work of Anatoliy Kryvolap, an artist whose bold, modernist images of saints and angels make this church unique in Ukraine.

The 77-year-old Kryvolap, whose abstract paintings sell for tens of thousands of dollars at auction, said that he wanted to eschew the severe-looking icons he’d seen in many Orthodox churches.

“It seems to me that going to church to meet God should be a celebration,” he said.

There has been a church on this site for more than 300 years. An earlier building was destroyed by shelling during World War II. The small wooden church that replaced it was put to more workaday uses in Soviet times, when religion was suppressed.

Kharkivskyi reopened the parish in 1992 following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and set about rebuilding the church, spiritually and physically, with funding from Bohdan Batrukh, a Ukrainian film producer and distributor.

Work stopped when Russian troops launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. Moscow’s forces reached the fringes of Kyiv before being driven back. Lypivka was liberated by the start of April.

Since then, fighting has been concentrated in the east and south of Ukraine, though aerial attacks with rockets, missiles and drones are a constant threat across the country.

By May 2022, workers had resumed work on the church. It has been slow going. Millions of Ukrainians fled the country when war erupted, including builders and craftspeople. Hundreds of thousands of others have joined the military.

Inside the church, a tower of wooden scaffolding climbs up to the dome, where a red and gold image of Christ raises a hand in blessing

For now, services take place in the smaller basement, where the priest, in white and gold robes, recently conducted a service for a couple of dozen parishioners as the smell of incense wafted through the candlelit room.

He is expecting a large crowd for Easter, which falls on Sunday. Eastern Orthodox Christians usually celebrate Easter later than Catholic and Protestant churches, because they use a different method of calculating the date for the holy day that marks Christ’s resurrection.

A majority of Ukrainians identify as Orthodox Christians, though the church is divided. Many belong to the independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine, with which the Lypivka church is affiliated. The rival Ukrainian Orthodox Church was loyal to the patriarch in Moscow until splitting from Russia after the 2022 invasion and is viewed with suspicion by many Ukrainians.

Kharkivskyi says the size of his congregation has remained stable even though the population of the village has shrunk dramatically since the war began. In tough times, he says, people turn to religion.

“Like people say: ‘Air raid alert — go see God,’” the priest said wryly.

Liudmyla Havryliuk, who has a summer home in Lypivka, found herself drawn back to the village and its church even before the fighting stopped. When Russia invaded, she drove to Poland with her daughters, then 16 and 18 years old. But within weeks she came back to the village she loves, still besieged by the Russians.

The family hunkered down in their home, cooking on firewood, drawing water from a well, sometimes under Russian fire. Havryliuk said that when they saw Russian helicopters, they held hands and prayed.

“Not prayer in strict order, like in the book,” she said. “It was from my heart, from my soul, about what should we do? How can I save myself and especially my daughters?”

She goes to Lypivka’s church regularly, saying it’s a “place you can shelter mentally, within yourself.”

As Ukraine marks its third Easter at war, the church is nearing completion. Only a few of Kryvolap’s interior panels remain to be installed. He said that the shell holes will be left unrepaired as a reminder to future generations.

“(It’s) so that they will know what kind of ‘brothers’ we have, that these are just fascists,” he said, referring to the Russians.

“We are Orthodox, just like them, but destroying churches is something inhumane.”

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Vasilisa Stepanenko and Yehor Konovalov contributed to this story.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

NEW DELHI: Movement restrictions have now been placed on Chinese nationals in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) region, as per a report by Dawn. The KP government has mandated that Chinese citizens must travel accompanied by armoured vehicles while in the area.
This directive was announced by a senior police official during a meeting held on Wednesday. Tahir Ayub Khan, deputy inspector general of police in Hazara range said, “As we’re adopting all possible measures for the safety of Chinese nationals, they shouldn’t travel in the province without armoured vehicles in line with the government’s directions”.
The meeting, convened to address security concerns for the Suki Kinari hydropower project in the Malkandi area of Kaghan Valley, brought together various stakeholders, including security personnel, Chinese engineers, and project managers.Discussions centered on the implementation of stringent security measures to safeguard the lives of individuals involved in critical infrastructure projects, as reported by Dawn.
During site inspections of the Suki Kinari and Balakot hydropower projects, DIG Tahir Ayub Khan reiterated the government’s commitment to maintaining high-security standards. He highlighted plans to fortify residential colonies housing Chinese engineers and workers with boundary walls of at least eight feet in height, potentially reinforced with barbed wire for additional protection.
These enhanced security measures follow a recent incident where a convoy of Chinese engineers working on the Dasu hydropower project in Shangla district was targeted in a suicide attack, resulting in casualties. The attack had raised significant security concerns, prompting authorities to take steps to mitigate risks and ensure the safety of foreign nationals in Pakistan.
(With agency inputs)