2009 Photo Contest, General News, 3rd prize
Photographer

Olivier Laban-Mattei

Agence France-Presse

23 May, 2008

Children in an isolated village jump to receive food thrown from a boat. Cyclone Nargis hit southern Burma (Myanmar) on May 2, wiping away entire villages and flooding swathes of land, in the country's worst natural disaster in recorded history. Many areas were extremely isolated, reachable only by boat. Local relief efforts were slow in starting, and the Burmese authorities were at first resistant to help from outside.

About the photographer

Olivier Laban-Mattei

French photojournalist and Agence France Presse (AFP) Paris photo staff member, Olivier Laban-Mattei was born in 1977 and grew up in Paris, where he studied geography and sociolo...

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