Jemilah Mahmood: "Worse than the tsunami"

Children from an isolated Irrawaddy Delta village, which is accessible
only by boat, waiting on Friday to receive donated food.

On a road near Pyapon, in an area of Myanmar ravaged by a cyclone,
people waited on Sunday for aid from Burmese civilians.

"Arriving in Yangon, you don't really see the full extent of the destruction. Of course there are damaged buildings and uprooted trees, but it's not until you reach the delta that you see the true scale of the disaster.

"Flying over the affected area, I couldn't help but think this is worse than the 2004 Asian tsunami; so many deaths and displacement over such a large area. The flood surge was certainly much wider - up to 35km in some areas compared with 5km or 6km in the tsunami.

"But a lot of the areas I could visit in the delta, including Labutta and Mawlamyinegyun townships, were obviously not the worst.

"Although hospitals were badly affected, the hospitals I visited in both areas were up and running.

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"We are definitely used to hardship"

"Both Labutta and Mawlamyinegyun were badly hit and you could see a lot of damaged homes and displaced people in camps, but the worst affected areas were farther south.

"It's here in the rural and more isolated parts of the delta - much of which remains inaccessible - that the real challenge lies."

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Weeks After Cyclone in Myanmar, Even Farmers Wait for Food

After lifetimes living off the land, poor farmers have abandoned their ruined rice paddies, setting up makeshift bamboo shelters, waiting for carloads of Burmese civilians who have taken it on themselves to feed those who lost everything to Cyclone Nargis.

Few of those who wait say they have received anything from the government, other than threats.

“They said if we don’t break our huts and disappear, they will shoot us,” one man in the village of Thee Kone said over the weekend before a police jeep approached. “But as you can see, it’s raining now. We are pleading to the police to give us one more day and we will be gone far, far from the road, as they wish.”

A red sign on a stake along one road read:

“Don’t throw food on the roads. It ruins the people’s good habits.” :The New York Times - Asia Pacific