'To Be Busy Helps Them Forget'
Burma's Storm Survivors Cobble Together a Meager Future

Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 6, 2008

BOGALAY, Burma -- Two months after a cyclone savaged the fertile Irrawaddy Delta, in Burma's southwest, the bones of drowning victims still clutter the muddy banks of waterways.

One bamboo stick at a time, survivors in hundreds of flattened villages are struggling to rebuild their lives. For shelter, they squeeze several families into a single tent. For drinking water, they collect monsoon rains that trickle off tarpaulin roof coverings into buckets or salvaged ceramic vases. For food, they cook communal meals with rice, beans and oil from handouts. Sometimes it is spoiled.

On a recent visit, one village looked as if it had been carpet-bombed, a cratered landscape of muddy pools, debris and the remains of water buffaloes. A few hundred feet away, villagers sawed and hammered at planks salvaged from the wreckage. A teenage boy in an oversize shirt donated by a Buddhist monastery picked through piles of smashed wood.

"To work is to be busy, and to be busy helps them forget," said Soe, the village leader.

Nine hundred forty-three people used to live here, he said. In the storm that came ashore the night of May 2, 660 of them disappeared. Across the vast, mazelike delta, an estimated 130,000 people were killed and 2.4 million affected.

Persistent obstruction by the country's military rulers has kept aid at tragically meager levels. International efforts to quickly dispatch emergency assistance were delayed as the country's xenophobic military rulers rebuffed offers of help, denied visas to foreign aid workers and required permits for travel within the country.

Aid workers say that the majority of survivors of Tropical Cyclone Nargis have received at least some help but that few are even remotely equipped to make their way in coming months. Some communities have only recently been reached by aid teams, who had journeyed for hours on foot, by motorcycle and by boat.

Many of the restrictions have been eased, but relief workers say they still operate under erratic and constantly shifting constraints. The logistical challenges remain formidable as they scramble to dispatch seed, tractors and tillers to farmers before the rice-planting season ends this month.

"We have time to farm, but no tractors, no buffaloes and no seed," Soe said.

To reach his village required a seven-hour drive along a potholed, tire-shredding road from Rangoon to the rural hub of Bogalay, past four police checkpoints where documents were rigorously scanned. Against a backdrop of peaceful rice paddies, strange touches stood out: a patchwork of blue and red tarpaulins stretched across delicate palm-thatched huts; decapitated golden pagodas; and peaked iron roofs blown like dead leaves onto the roadside.

From Bogalay, where electricity has barely crackled back to life, the journey continued aboard a motorized boat loaded with supplies. The riverbanks form a cemetery for cyclone victims whose bodies floated for weeks along the waterways and whose remains, at low tide, now whiten in the mud.

A boatman pointed to an empty stretch of riverbank interspersed with bare-branched betel and coconut trees. "That used to be a village," he said. "There, too," he said minutes later, gesturing at the opposite bank.

In Soe's village, about four hours south of Bogalay, survivors gathered to greet a rare foreign visitor. About 30 crowded into a newly built hut to hear the headman tell their story.

During the storm, 26 entire families vanished, he said. None of their bodies has been recovered.

The rest of the villagers clutched floating wreckage or grasped at tree trunks or piled into a leaking boat and fled to a monastery in a distant village. Days later, local authorities told them to leave, handed them the equivalent of $10 per household and ferried them in military boats to another village hours upriver. Almost 300 have now made it back.

"We used to sing every day," Soe said. "We used to sing as we marched to work." They were songs filled with joy, songs to carry them to the fields and out into the yellow waters to catch shrimp and river fish.

No one was supposed to be living here. The village is located in an area marked as uninhabited, a forest reserve, on the government map used by aid agencies. But field workers have discovered about 12,000 survivors in 60 villages across the area, all of them almost entirely wiped out. An estimated 20,000 people died.

The region was among the worst-hit because it lay directly along the path of the cyclone. But environmental experts say a more significant reason for the high death toll, here and elsewhere in the delta, was the systematic destruction of mangrove forests. In the December 2004 tsunami that devastated South Asia, dense mangrove coverage in Sri Lanka was shown to have helped save lives.

According to a study published last month by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, decades of illegal encroachment and government-sanctioned neglect had seriously degraded the mangrove forests in the Irrawaddy Delta. "If there had been decent mangrove on the shorelines, the death toll would have been cut in half," said Lucas Riegger, a U.N. vulnerability analyst and mapping specialist.

One-third of survivors around Bogalay suffer from psychological stress, according to Doctors Without Borders. Field workers from other groups reported meeting survivors who refused food or wouldn't speak. One man, found on a roadside, repeatedly hugged the invisible coconut tree to which he had clung when the waters rose. Others told relief workers that they were unable to sleep or could still feel the hands of sons and daughters slipping from their grasp.

"It's like being born again every day. I am learning to live again like a child," said Hla Dwe, 36, a farmer and fisherman who lost his mother, wife and both children.

The village's five remaining water buffaloes lolled about together neck-deep in a pool of mud. Even if ownership of the animals could be sorted out, they were too sick and weak to work the fields for more than a few hours a day, villagers said. New buffaloes would take too long to train.

Local authorities in Bogalay offered to sell the people tractors under special terms, but buyers needed to prove they had owned more than 50 acres, with a photograph and a form signed by the village leader. Two farmers here were rich enough to qualify; the rest had worked plots of from five to 20 acres each.

"We are victims. So how can we buy this?" said Chau, 32, a stone-faced farmer who said his sister, mother and nephew had died in the storm.

Tents in the village and passing boats bore the logo of the Htoo trading company, which is owned by Tay Za, a businessman targeted by U.S. sanctions because of his closeness to the ruling junta.

At least 30 big Burmese companies that locals refer to as "cronies" of the junta were assigned to the reconstruction and relief efforts in the delta's townships. This has raised concerns in Rangoon, the largest city, that the companies will eventually collect payback in the form of land concessions in the delta or elsewhere in the country.

But Western diplomats and aid workers say that so far, the companies have often proved helpful. Some aid agencies, including Save the Children, have turned to businessmen such as Serge Pun, whose holdings include Yoma Bank, to obtain boats and warehouse space and to speed deliveries to the affected areas.

Working with the company has "absolutely helped cut through the red tape," said Andrew Kirkwood, Save the Children's Burma director. "I think all of us were frustrated with not being able to do more sooner."

His agency's deal with the company came at a time when U.N. officials were still locked in negotiations with military authorities to allow in 10 helicopters. Now those aircraft are flying. And visa applications for foreign staffers can be turned around in 24 hours, while before they took 10 days or more.

But access to the delta remains a concern. In past weeks, aid agencies have had to seek approval for their activities from an ever-changing combination of ministries and local authorities. Trips into the field are systematically monitored. A World Food Program helicopter shipment was canceled by an onboard military agent because flight coordinates submitted by U.N. workers weren't clear, according to a staffer.

Last week, one ministry canceled a program by the agency to give cash to survivors around Rangoon, even though another ministry had approved the plan days earlier. "It seems like the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing," said Hakan Tongul, the World Food Program's deputy country director.

Workers with a Burmese aid agency in Bogalay said they were repeatedly prevented from reaching the devastated villages of the distant natural reserve by military boats that were patrolling the area. Troops told them they were taking care of the villagers. The area has at least three military bases, according to three agencies that have worked there.

"Everywhere we went, we were met by soldiers or navy," said an aid worker with the Noble Compassionate Volunteer Group, which has partnered with UNICEF in the area.

Aid workers and diplomats say the problem at the lower levels is sometimes less willful neglect than incompetence. According to several U.N. officials, there is only one fax machine in the Ministry of Social Welfare, which at times has been largely responsible for processing applications for visits to the delta. But in some places, local authorities have defied their superiors to help in the relief efforts. One Western diplomat said officials in the remote rural hub of Pathein had built a road for supplies, defying senior military officers.

Aid workers praise villagers' resilience, which they said had helped stave off further deaths and disease.

In one village, farmers who own five to 10 acres apiece said they joined together to buy a tractor from officials in Bogalay. They will have to pay in installments over three years, using rice seed and funds they don't yet have, they said.

Still, said village elder Tan as he leaned on a bamboo cane, going into debt to grow their own food seemed a better option to the villagers than sitting idle and eating the rotten yellow rice they received as aid.

They have to rely on themselves, he said. "Everyone else has their problems, too."