Cyclone Victims Turn to Towns for Handouts

A woman walks amongst the debris of homes still being occupied in the Irrawaddy Delta. (Photo: AFP)

By AUNG THET WINE
The Irrawaddy News

RANGOON — Economic hardships have forced a growing number of survivors of Cyclone Nargis to leave their homes in rural parts of the Irrawaddy delta to seek assistance in Rangoon and other urban centers, according to local sources.

“I came to Rangoon to look for donors,” said a 50-year-old man from Kyone Chin, a village in Dedaye Township. “We don’t have enough food in our village, and our farming and fishing businesses have still not recovered. We need assistance badly.”

Kyone Chin village lost 50 of its 1,400 inhabitants and ninety percent of its structures in the deadly cyclone, according to the man. He added that food supplies and other assistance from UN agencies and the government have been dwindling over time.

“The whole village was terribly destroyed. The worst thing is that now we are facing hunger,” he said, explaining why he had come to Rangoon to find support for his village.

Private donors played an important role in the early stages of the relief effort, but nearly four months later, their numbers have fallen. Due in part to government efforts to control movements in the cyclone-stricken region, few trucks carrying privately donated relief supplies are now reaching remote villages, say local people.

Other cyclone-hit villages in Dedaye Township, including Leik Kyun, Hmae Bi, Lay Ywa, Mae Kanan, Taw Pone and Yae Pu Wa, are also facing severe shortages of foodstuffs and other basic supplies, according to local residents.

They are not alone in waiting for aid. A volunteer from Rangoon who has been involved in relief and rebuilding efforts in the delta said that many villages in Kungyangone Township, including Taw Kha Yan Gyi, Taw Kha Yan Kalay, Mayan, Maezali and Hti Pha, are also desperate for additional assistance.

“The situation is hard to say,” said the volunteer. “They do get a little assistance from the government and they have received some from UN agencies. But it’s not enough.

“There are still many people living under make-shift temporary shelters constructed with bamboo posts and tarpaulins sheets. Some can’t get rice to eat, so they are just surviving on what little food is available to them,” the volunteer added.

A local journalist who recently returned from Laputta Township said that farmers there were also struggling, as seeds planted late in the season have not been growing well. Fishermen are also worried about their future food security, as poor-quality nets and boats provided by the government have proven to be almost useless.

“In Laputta, there is no immediate concern about rice, since it is mainly provided by the UN,” said the journalist. “The problem is with rebuilding livelihoods. The farmers are not doing well because the tillers provided by the government are often broken, and seeds are not growing properly. Fishermen also have trouble because the boats they received after the cyclone often need fixing, and the nets are useless for fishing.”

The journalist added that much of the aid that does reach some of the more remote villages soon ends up in the hands of village officials, as little effort has been made to rein in widespread corruption.

Meanwhile, in Mawlamyainggyun Township, there are also reports of severe food shortages in the villages of Yae Twin Kone, Pet Pyae, Ta Zaung, Alae Yae Kyaw, Myit Kyi Toe and Pya Leik.

According to a resident of Alae Yae Kyaw, some local villages have sent small groups to Laputta to appeal for aid from local relief organizations based there. The results of their efforts have been disappointing, however.

“When we asked an NGO in Laputta for assistance, they provided just 3 pyi (about 750 ml) of rice per person for the whole month.”

Little aid ever reaches the villages of Mawlamyainggyun Township because of their inaccessibility. Villages located on the boundary of Mawlamyainggyun and Laputta townships, such as Yae Twin Kone, Pet Pyae, Ta Zaung, Alae Yae Kyaw, Myit Kyi Toe and Pya Leik, are especially deprived because they can only be reached by chartered boats and are reportedly not on the government’s list of villages eligible for support.

If villagers in these areas do not receive aid to rebuild their lives soon, the hunger and destitution they face now could result in more severe problems in the future, said a local volunteer who has witnessed the situation.

“Unless they receive some means of surviving, the hunger of these villagers could lead to killings and robbing. If we can’t heal a small sore now, we may face more serious harm in the long run,” said the volunteer.

Ghosts amid the wreckage in Myanmar

By Seth Mydans
August 25, 2008

BANGKOK (IHT): Nearly four months after the cyclone, the Irrawaddy Delta in Myanmar is a flat, dark expanse of ruin populated by dazed survivors, unburied bodies and visions of wandering, moaning ghosts.

The region seems to have avoided mass starvation and epidemic, and people are rebuilding their precarious lives in this vast and often flooded marshland where the margin between survival and death has always been thin.

Within that thin margin, recent visitors say, many of the survivors seem to have lost their spark of life, and some of the dead seem not yet to have disappeared as they haunt the minds of those they left behind.

"There is a weariness in people's eyes here," said a photographer who has been chronicling the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis, which struck on May 3. He spoke on condition of anonymity because access to the region is forbidden to foreign journalists.

"There's a lost feeling that you get," he said. "People are physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted. Some of them don't have the strength to start over."

After an international furor over the government's refusal to admit foreign relief workers, a tightly controlled system has been put in place, and aid is reaching much of the area, where the United Nations says 2.4 million people were affected.

The cyclone left 138,000 people dead or missing and 800,000 homeless, according to UN figures, after tremendous winds and a storm surge that resembled a tsunami.

It leveled most of the fragile thatch homes in its path, uprooted trees, swept away the livestock and fishing boats that provided a livelihood and polluted many rice fields with salt.

For those fields that survived, this year's planting season has now passed, and experts say it may be more than a year before many people see their next decent harvest.

Although some houses are being rebuilt and some fields are being worked, the delta remains a vista of ruin and debris, where human and animal bones and the last decomposing bodies still cluster at the edges of waterways.

Fantastical tales circulate among the survivors, the photographer said, weaving a tapestry of stories from this world and the next.

There is the tale of the boy who survived by clinging to the back of a crocodile, and the story of the boatload of people stranded at low tide who sat waiting on the silt for the water to rise, surrounded by stranded corpses.

There is the story of the mother who was reunited with her baby after it was swept away in a washtub, and the story of the woman who gave birth as the cyclone hit and pulled her baby from the water by its umbilical cord.

And there are the stories of wandering ghosts, whose cries for help can be heard at night in haunted places that no villager dares to enter.

Among these phantoms and traumas, international relief workers have become the survivors' lifeline, delivering aid to all but the most remote parts of the delta.

More than 1,800 visas have been issued to these workers, aid officials say, though access to the hard-hit delta is slowed by an ever-more-complicated process of permissions and paperwork.

By now, most survivors have received aid, said Andrew Kirkwood, country director for the aid group Save the Children. "But very few people have received enough assistance to get them through the next three months, and almost no one has received enough assistance to enable them to rebuild their lives."

He said the reconstruction of schools, clinics and other infrastructure, which should be well under way by now, still lagged because of delays in delivering basic emergency assistance.

The xenophobic military junta that holds Myanmar in its grip prevented large-scale foreign aid deliveries for the first three crucial weeks after the cyclone, then loosened its controls only gradually and partially. It never did allow U.S. and French naval vessels to bring in tons of aid and equipment.

But despite the early demands from around the world that the government permit open deliveries of aid, the United Nations says that nearly half the assistance pledged by foreign donors has yet to appear. Recently it said it had received $339 million in international donations, a shortfall of $300 million.

But life has always been bitter for the people of the Irrawaddy Delta, with 8 out of 10 families living in poverty even before the cyclone, according to Save the Children.

For many people, the harshness of life today may not be so very different from the harshness of the life they have always known.

"They live on a thin line, every day of every year of every decade," the photographer said. "And that is what they are doing now. They just keep going, day by day by day."

Cyclone Orphans Take Low-Paid Work to Survive

Using a small oil lamp to seal the ends, a woman and

two children pack cheroots in to plastic bags in a small factory in Pegu,
58 kilometers (36 miles) north of Rangoon.
Sources said children orphaned by Cyclone Nargis
had migrated to the cities to find work. (Photo: AFP)

By VIOLET CHO
The Irrawaddy News

Many children orphaned by Cyclone Nargis are being employed in low-paid jobs in the Irrawaddy delta and Rangoon, according to monks in the region.

Monasteries throughout the region opened their doors to orphans, but a monk in Mawlamyinegyunn Township said children who lost their parents in the storm often preferred to live with adult survivors in their own communities, where they found work in the paddy fields and fish farms.

Other children who had lost their parents had migrated to the cities to find work in tea shops, small businesses and households, often encouraged by family members, the monk said. Some were as young as 10.

A senior monk in Mawlamyinegyunn said his monastery had sent 20 orphaned children to Phaungdawoo monastery in Mandalay, where they were being educated.

“There are so many children who desperately need care, and we are now trying to collect information and data about orphans so we can help them,” he said.

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said on Monday that 428 children had been separated from their parents by the cyclone. More than 50 centers had been established to help them, said UNICEF spokesman Zafrin Chowdhury.

According to government figures, more than 84,000 people died in the cyclone and 54,000 are missing. The most vulnerable victims of the disaster were children, UNICEF said.

The International Labour Organization has expressed concern about the possibility that children may be forced to help in reconstruction work, and has warned UN agencies and relief workers of “the increased risk of incidences of forced labor, child labor, human trafficking and migrant labor as the authorities and individuals come to grips with the sheer size of the tragedy.”

Rangoon-based journalist Aung Thet Wyine contributed to this report.
--Read More: here

Meet the ‘Handy Youths’ of the Irrawaddy Delta

Members of the Handy Myanmar Youths
help build “budget huts”
for homeless survivors of Cyclone Nargis.

A group of young people led by a well-known Burmese Internet blogger, Nyi Lynn Seck, is at the forefront of reconstruction efforts in the cyclone-devastated Irrawaddy delta, helping to build simple shelters for the homeless.

Nyi Lynn Seck calls his group the Handy Myanmar Youths—and they’re certainly proving to be handymen in the flattened villages of the delta.

Using bamboo and tarpaulin,
members of the Handy Myanmar Youths
help build “budget huts”
for homeless survivors of Cyclone Nargis.

--Read More: here

Cyclone Victims Migrating to Thailand

Cyclone survivors travel on a fishing boat from the cyclone devastated city of Bogalay, 125 km (78 miles) southwest of Rangoon in the Irrawaddy delta. (Photo: AP /Myanmar NGO Group)

“I came to Thailand because the situation back in the Irrawaddy delta was becoming critical,” said cyclone survivor Ma Win. “We had received no aid. My child was seriously sick and suffering from diarrhea. I was ill too; we only had boiled rice to eat for three days.”

As soon as he heard about the disaster, Ma Win’s husband left Thailand where he was working and headed home to Laputta to look for his wife and six-month-old son. They had survived the cyclone, but their house was destroyed. He immediately decided to take them back with him to Mae Sot on the Thai-Burmese border.

--Read More: here

In Rural Villages, Life is Desperate

Residents squat by a river at their village near Bogalay.
Villagers continue to fish, wash and bathe in the river
where rotting corpses can still be sighted tangled in the scrubs.
(Photo: Reuters)

The shoreline of this island in the Bogalay River is filled with cyclone debris—fallen trees, pieces of houses, thatch and other household rubble.

I saw a yellow shape and then recognized it—the body of a man—devastated by sun and water: yellowish-white and bloated, hands across the branches of a bush.

--Read More: here

The two faces of Burmese aid: a starving village and a state lie

It will be years before the Irrawaddy delta recovers from Cyclone Nargis - but the visitor to the Sinkan refugee camp could be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss was about. Its 39 blue tents are neat and evenly spaced and their occupants look clean and contented. A team of white-uniformed doctors and nurses tends to their medical needs, white Toyota Land Cruisers of the United Nations stand in attendance and a group of Japanese diplomats inspects the camp, snapping photographs as they go.


--Read More: here

U.N. chief: Myanmar OKs foreign helicopters

A boy takes shelter at a makeshift tent prior to leaving with his family
to find shelter in Shwepoughkan township,
some 32 kilometers from Myanmar's biggest city, Yangon, on Tuesday.
Khin Maung Win / AFP - Getty Images

Aid agencies, residents frustrated with junta’s response after cyclone

"We have received government permission to operate nine WFP (World Food Program) helicopters, which will allow us to reach areas that have so far been largely inaccessible," Ban told reporters in New York before departing on a mission to Myanmar.

--Read More: here

'It's difficult in there. It's like walking a tightrope'

Tim Costello describes the guilt he felt coming home,
and the devastation he left behind in Burma.
Photo: Melanie Faith Dove

TIM Costello has dealt with devastation before. Too many times, he has stood among the ruins of people's homes and lives, among scores of bodies rotting in the streets.

But in Burma, while human suffering in the wake of cyclone Nargis was all around, it was a sense of frustration at being unable to help, at being hampered at every turn in trying to bring in aid, that overwhelmed the World Vision Australia chief.

In his first in-depth interview since returning to Melbourne on Saturday, Mr Costello broke down yesterday as he detailed the infuriating hurdles he faced in a country that seemed more focused on its elections than saving its people's lives.

--Read More: here

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Kick out victims, monks ordered

The monks who spearheaded an uprising last fall against Burma's military rulers are back on the front lines, this time providing food, shelter and spiritual solace to cyclone victims.

But the junta has moved to curb the Buddhist clerics' efforts, even as it fails to deliver adequate aid itself.

Authorities have given some monasteries deadlines to clear out refugees, many of whom have no homes to return to, monks and survivors say.

"There is no aid. We haven't seen anyone from the government," said an abbot of the Kyi Bui Kha monastery sharing almost depleted rice stocks and precious rainwater with some 100 homeless villagers in its compound.

--Read More: here

Regime Seals Off the Irrawaddy Delta to Foreigners

Survivors of the cyclone Nargis are seen in Laputta, in the Irrawaddy delta of southern Burma. (Photo: AFP)

Local staff for international relief agencies are stretched to breaking point and facing tighter restrictions on their ability to deliver the trickle of foreign aid flowing in to 1.5 million survivors facing hunger and disease.

Read More...

'Clock Ticking' As Burma Aid Trickles In

The first planeload of British aid is to arrive in Burma today more than a week after the Cyclone Nargis left swathes of the country underwater.

A consignment of bales of plastic sheeting were sent last night from a government store in Dubai - the first of four such flights as part of a £5 million UK aid package.

It also emerged that the Queen had made a "significant" personal donation to the relief effort.

Read More...

Burma need your help!

PLEASE HELP & SAVE BURMA NOW !!!!!!

Australian Red Cross: Burma Cyclone Appeal today in THE WEST

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10,000 reported dead in Bogalay township

As the scale of the devastation caused by Cyclone Nargis in Burma becomes clearer, government figures say that 10,000 people were killed in Bogalay township alone.
The Burmese military regime has estimated the overall death toll to be more than 15,000, though this figure is being constantly revised as new information becomes available.U Myint Aye of the Human Rights Defenders and Promoters network said his sources in Bogalay had confirmed the extent of the devastation in the Irrawaddy town.He told DVB the cyclone had begun to hit the town at around 5.30pm on 2 May, and was at its strongest between 8.30pm until 4am on 3 May.“Houses in wards 2, 4, 6, 7, 8 and 9 of the Bogalay town were completely destroyed by the wind,” Myint Aye said.“Strong buildings in ward 1, 3 and 5 had their roofs ripped off by the cyclone while the small houses collapsed.”Myint Aye said all the villages around Bogalay were now under water, leaving many people stranded."

In 4 April, I was informed by a resident of Mondine Gyi village, located south of Bogalay town, that all the houses there were under water and people were forced to stay on top of their roofs,” he said.“He said some people even died after falling of their roofs due to the strong tide."Myint Aye also criticised the lack of government response to the crisis."Authorities have so far provided no assistance to the villagers and they have no food, no shelter and no clean water,” he said.“Monasteries have also had their roofs blown off and so have been unable to provide shelter to the victims."