Myanmar villagers still
struggle year after storm
The boat's owner points to a
palm-covered bend in the river where dozens of bamboo huts perched
on spindly stilts _ until Cyclone Nargis devastated this remote
region a year ago.
"There were many, many bodies,"
Tin Maung Thein, 57, says through an interpreter, gesturing toward
a lush expanse of green where bloated corpses once gently nudged
the high tide mark.
Nature has concealed the scars in
this tangle of narrow waterways in the Irrawaddy Delta, where most
of the more than 138,000 victims drowned when the storm roared
through during the night last May 2. But behind the lush growth,
tens of thousands of survivors still struggle to eke out a
life.
Many lack clean drinking water.
Rice fields remain bare, even as food handouts wind down. More than
2,000 schools have reopened, but some are short of teachers. A half
million people live in rudimentary shelters.
International relief agencies have
embarked on a three-year recovery plan, but response to a global
appeal for $691 million in funding has been slow, the groups
say.
"Finding that money to help get
people back on their feet is the biggest challenge that we face at
the moment," says Andrew Kirkwood, the country director of Save the
Children Fund.
Worst off are those in remote
areas, such as Tin Maung Thein's village of Oak-kyiut.
Sea water inundated drinking water
wells throughout the delta and turned almost 2 million acres
(800,000 hectares) of Myanmar's most fertile rice paddies into
salt-contaminated wastelands.
Aid coordinators say 240,000
people in remote villages still rely on drinking water delivered in
large rubber bladders by boat. In some places, diesel-powered
filtration plants work around the clock turning brackish estuary
water into drinkable water.
People in Oak-kyiut, a village of
2,000 two hours up the Toe River from the regional hub of Bogalay,
augment the local supply by buying water from vendors. A single
muddy pond is its main source of drinking water, its two former
reservoirs now holding only puddles of brackish rain
water.
"Drinking water is our largest
problem," Tin Maung Thein says through lips red from chewing betel
nut and leaf, a locally grown mild stimulant.
With the rainy season approaching,
Save the Children's Kirkwood expects the most pressing crisis will
shift from water to a shortfall of 130,000 waterproof houses. About
450,000 homes were destroyed by the cyclone and 350,000 others
sustained damage.
"We've got about 500,000 people
currently living in makeshift shelters like tarpaulins that have
been deteriorating in the sun for the past year," says Kirkwood, a
Canadian native who also holds British citizenship.
The xenophobic military regime
that rules Myanmar, also known as Burma, was widely condemned for
denying foreign aid agencies access for the first weeks after the
disaster, almost certainly adding to the death toll.
The government is now working with
the international community through the Tripartite Core Group, made
up of the military junta, the United Nations and the 10-country
Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
A U.N. report in December said a
survey of a few thousand people spread among 100 delta communities
found chronic food shortages and malnourishment, with many people
still living in temporary shelters with plastic
sheeting.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban
Ki-moon, who toured the area several weeks after the storm to
demand better access for aid workers, says he is open to returning.
But first the international community wants to see progress toward
"full democratization," including the release of democracy leader
Aung San Suu Kyi and other political detainees.
Thousands of registered aid
workers now have access, though aid groups worry the government may
arbitrarily evict them at any moment, says aid worker Matt MacCalla
of the Santa Barbara, Calif.-based medical aid charity Direct
Relief International.
"It would be a political decision
on when there was no longer a need for humanitarian aid and a
response to Cyclone Nargis," says MacCalla, who visited the
disaster area in April.
The pace of reconstruction is
frenetic in Bogalay, a bustling community of more than 60,000
people. The cyclone destroyed 95 percent of the houses and killed
10,000 residents.
Awba Ta, a Buddhist monk in the
town, is familiar with the hardships in outlying villages. "The
people need 10 times more rice" than aid groups are providing, Awba
Ta says.
Oak-kyiut's paddy fields are bare,
but village chief Aye Maung Gyi says aid workers told him the April
delivery of donated rice was the village's last monthly
shipment.
The World Food Program initially
provided food for more than 1 million cyclone survivors. While
phasing out food donations proved impossible in the original
six-month timeframe, the number of recipients has been falling, to
250,000.
Chris Kaye, the U.N. World Food
Program's representative in Myanmar, concedes that remote villages
such as Oak-kyiut struggled to receive their share of aid because
of difficulties in reaching them. But he insists aid is getting to
those who need it.
He says the current poor rice
harvest is mostly the result of farmers' inability to borrow money
to buy seeds. "The problem is much more to do with the availability
of credit than it is a problem with salt-affected land," says Kaye,
a Briton.
The fishing industry, the delta's
second most important source of income and food after rice, also
still struggles.
More than 40 percent of fishing
boats and 70 percent of fishing gear were destroyed. The most
recent review available, done in November, found that less than 10
percent of the more than 100,000 boats lost had been
replaced.
The top U.N. representative in
Myanmar, Bishow Parajuli, says more than 2,000 schools have
reopened, though many are in temporary structures and teachers are
needed.
The only teacher in the village of
Gadonkani, who gave her name only as Yaung Ngo, says she struggles
to cope with 200 students.
Ma Myo, a woman in the neighboring
village of Koenginta who lost her husband and two daughters in the
cyclone, says she cannot afford the fees to send her 8-year-old son
to school.
Kirkwood says foreign governments
have been reluctant to fund education, because it is regarded as
the government's responsibility.
"By not doing so, the
international community is basically saying to hundreds of
thousands of children that they're not going to get an education
any time soon," he says.
Despite the shortage of clean
water, feared outbreaks of dengue and cholera never happened. One
reason may be that Myanmar's people have endured harsh conditions
for generations.
"They're tough, their immune
systems are relatively strong, having been drinking not the best
water, eating not the best food and not having the best health
care. So after the last couple of generations, it's the strong that
make it," MacCalla says after visiting villages beyond
Bogalay.
Though many died in Oak-kyiut, Aye
Maung says the population has actually grown from 1,500 before the
cyclone to 2,000 today, as survivors drifted in from abandoned
nearby settlements.
"People came here because they are
scared to live alone," Aye Maung says. Overhead, clouds gather,
heralding perhaps the approaching cyclone season.