 Print Article
|
By Our Correspondent
Phapon, Irrawaddy delta
On both sides of the road, sparse groups of people stand, watching every passing vehicle expectantly.
As quickly as the four-wheel drives and trucks whizz past, children leap and scramble to catch candy and instant noodles tossed down from wound-down windows.
'Help us,' they call out, even as we ride by on a rattling motorbike.
A step back from one of the two main roads snaking through the cyclone-ravaged Irrawaddy delta, men and women look on, shame burning in their eyes.
Almost one month on from torrid Cyclone Nargis, the salty, pungent smell of the dead rises from some spots in the brackish stream, and victims who lost everything but their lives to nature's wrath are still waiting for something of a miracle.
Soldiers and patchy aid are reaching the towns, but in this soggy land, help seems as arbitrary as the winds and waters of May3 which left more than 134,000 dead or missing and wrecked thousands of people's livelihoods in the country's rice basket.
Wood and zinc houses, reduced to skeletal frames, lie defeated on their sides. Just a few hundred metres away, bamboo shacks stand strangely erect, an animal's dried jaw lodged in the swampy soil out front.
If the ways of nature are difficult to explain, those of man may be equally puzzling.
Locals speak of villages in which some 400 people are asked to share donations of one egg, one cooking pot, two skirts and one long-sleeve blouse, and of villagers who wait by the helipads next to their padi fields, praying for aid to be dropped from the sky. At times, they reportedly wave out madly at passing aircraft, hoping for help that does not always arrive.
Villagers are receiving limited aid items by 'lucky draw'. Families fortunate enough to receive a new mosquito net take turns to sleep under it.
Along the road to the Irrawaddy delta on Tuesday and Wednesday, frustrated victims were heard shouting at monks, traditionally revered in this society, complaining that aid was being handed out unfairly.
For a regime that for weeks refused foreign help and banned foreign aid workers out of a proclaimed fear that there were 'strings attached' - even as its own people lay dying - the Myanmar government's aid to its own people is, perhaps, not so ironically, laced with politics.
The once-thick queues of victims waiting for donations along the delta's trunk roads have thinned last week, not because they do not need help anymore but because the authorities warned the previous week that they were 'causing negative impact to Myanmar's national image'.
With no other option, farmers and fishermen had left their villages and pitched shacks by the roadside, for it was there, or at the nearest monastery, that they could get an occasional supply of rice, cooking oil, instant noodles and drinkable water.
The ramshackle colony which fringed the roads up until last weekend was all but forcibly removed this week. A few shacks remain, with time bought via pleas to the authorities.
Like most, Mr Ye Lwin, 39, and his wife Madam Ma San, 29, and their four children aged between four months and 11 years, lost everything to the cyclone.
'The authorities have told us we have two or three days to clear out, but we have nowhere to go,' said Mr Ye Lwin, rocking his baby in a sarong hanging in his shack on Tuesday evening.
Other victims in camps and monasteries are also being sent home, with little to restart their lives. The local authorities are logging declining refugee numbers - something which is sure to please their political masters who have already announced that the disaster relief period is over and who are asking for US$11billion (S$15billion) for the reconstruction it says it has now started.
Early last week, Mr Kyaw Htoo Lwin, 45, who fetches water for a living, was sent home from the monastery at which he had stayed since the storm in the delta town of Dedaye.
'I was given a tarpaulin sheet, a basket of rice, some used clothes and told to go home,' he said, sitting in a friend's living room since he has not been able to rebuild his own home.
Even though image and politics should not get in the way in these desperate times, they do.
On the outskirts of Kungyangon, a 11/2-hour ferry and car ride south-west of Yangon, villagers like Madam Khin San Lwin said local leaders had promised they would get 'every kind of help' in return for voting in last Saturday's referendum on a new Constitution, passed last week.
The 40-year-old, who lost two of her three daughters and her mother-in-law to the cyclone, said: 'Now, after voting, we still have nothing.'
Fellow villager Thin Thin Kyi, 28, wondered why they had been receiving only occasional rations of rice, cooking oil and potatoes when stocks of food and tarpaulin could be seen at a warehouse guarded by soldiers in the heart of town - a trishaw ride away.
In any case, even for the modest amount of help she had received, she worried that 'the authorities might come up with reasons to get money from us later'.
Apparently shelving its own mistrust of the outside world for now, the reclusive junta promised to be more open to foreign aid and relief workers at last Sunday's 52-nation donor conference organised by Asean and the United Nations.
While some large international NGOs were last week reporting trouble-free visa approvals and travel to the delta for their foreign staff, others said they were still facing roadblocks in getting out into the field.
Word in the local aid community is that the state is tightening the security screws, turning back convoys of trucks with relief goods on suspicion that they are from the political opposition or that they are smuggling foreign journalists.
The UN has already warned of a 'second wave' of deaths but state media insists the situation is 'not serious' and that 'the people of Irrawaddy can survive with self-reliant efforts, even if they are not given chocolate bars from the international community'.
But, even in Yangon, in a slum a mere 15-minute walk away from where international donors pledged millions in aid at last Sunday's conference, Madam Htwe Htwe, 31, has not been able to find the means to repair her storm-wrecked wooden home.
Local intellectuals are eager to point out the contrast between the steadfast response of China's government to the massive earthquake in Sichuan 10 days after Nargis struck, and their own government's lumbering ways.
On the washed-out delta, victims fight ever-present rumours of another impending storm. Madam Aye Lwin, 40, who discovered the deformed, underwear-clad body of her husband 18 days after the cyclone, said: 'When the next storm comes in five days, I have to run away quickly.'
While there is anger, there is also a sense of fatalism.
Religiously listening to BBC and Voice of America broadcasts on their handheld shortwave radios, residents are well aware of what others say about their government and the help it has turned away.
Said villager Khin San Lwin: 'We are really in trouble. And it's like the government doesn't know our real situation.'
A small crowd quickly built around us, each bedraggled person eager for the outside world to hear their stories.
Clearly, out on the devastated delta, the victims of Cyclone Nargis are not bothered from where or whom the help hails. They just want it to arrive.
