Burmese villagers line roads waiting for aid

People waiting for outside aid along the road to Pyapon, a major Irrawaddy Delta town that is about 100 kilometers, or 62 miles, southwest of Yangon. (International Herald Tribune)

In village after village of the Irrawaddy Delta in southern Myanmar, people line the roads. They endure the sweltering morning sun, the afternoon monsoon rains and the storm-pregnant evening skies, under which their ghostly figures are illuminated by thunderbolts.

When an occasional car carrying donations approaches, children swarm toward it holding out their hands. Mothers hugging babies, too ashamed or shocked to ask for help, just stare into the eyes of any visitors. Fathers and grandmothers stand by, watching the scene with eyes filled with humiliation.

Every family has tales of horror to tell about Cyclone Nargis, which struck the delta on May 3. But for now, a powerful instinct for survival has driven these Burmese peasants to leave their once-fertile but now ruined rice paddies and migrate toward the nearest roads. Neither government nor international aid is coming quickly enough, if at all, to these roads. For many, the only hope of survival is aid being brought through by private donors.

"I don't know how the government is helping us," said Ko Htay Oo, 40, in Kunyangon, a delta town 50 kilometers, or 30 miles, south of Yangon, Myanmar's main city. "There are cars coming with private donations. Some get donations, some don't.
"I am no beggar, so I didn't eat anything in the past two days," he said, leaning against a roadside palm tree. "Besides, you shouldn't compete with kids for begged food."

On the roads going through the storm-hit area, the ruling military junta, which has driven Myanmar's people into squalor but keeps them docile with terror, has put up this sign: "Don't throw food on the roads. It ruins the people's good habits."

Of the nearly two dozen people interviewed this past weekend along the roads, all said they got little, if any, relief from their government. All said they did not expect any because they are not used to that kind of help from the junta. Few have heard about foreign aid flowing in. None have seen any.

The most visible government presence appeared in the form of the occasional police jeep.
With the roads, not the rice paddies, having become a source of food, villagers are building their lives along them with whatever they have left. Pigs are tied to roadside palm trees. Ducks swim in the nearby ditches. Roads are lined with the flimsy A-frame huts built with a few sticks of bamboo and "dani" leaves for roofing. One man found shelter in a large bamboo basket he had salvaged from the floodwater. Another lived in a tent built with a plastic Tiger Beer advertising banner that a truck driver had thrown to him.

The roads are littered with plastic garbage, from the packaging of donated food.

"I have no dish, no cup, no blanket, no pillow. I have received nothing from the government," said Daw San Mar Oo, 31, a farmer in the hamlet of Nyin Kone near Daedaya, a delta town southwest of Kunyangon. "I have nothing in my hands."
U Min Lwin, 37, said his family had received a government ration only twice in the three weeks since the storm, each time seven cups of rice.
Farther down the road, a 51-year-old woman who gave her name as Daw San said that she received potatoes and a small amount of beans from the government the other day but that she had no utensils for cooking.

The most helpless victims of Nargis, which sent monstrous walls of saltwater over the low-lying delta, were the poorest of Burmese farmers - those who rent rice paddies from landlords. Before the storm, they and their buffaloes, ducks and pigs had moved from field to field, living in huts beside their paddies.

In contrast to the obvious physical devastation of the Chinese earthquake, which left piles of concrete or natural debris behind, here in the Irrawaddy Delta's vast rice fields, after the sea water had subsided, it might appear to visitors that nothing had happened. But the survivors lining the roads tell a different story.

"My neighbors, their houses, their buffaloes - they are all gone," said Ma Aye Swe, 48. "They are gone with the water."
In their isolation, these farmers rely on news from static-filled radio broadcasts to link them to the outside world, and many appeared to have little notion of international aid or what a government could do for them at times of national disaster. Private aid runners say that when they hand out cakes of soap, some of the farmers do not even know what they are for.

The authorities are, in the wake of the storm, a source of intimidation.

In the hamlet of Thee Kone near Pyapon, a major delta town 100 kilometers southwest of Yangon, victims said that the village had received four tents from the government, each accommodating 20 people. Those families lucky enough to find space in government tents, built in a neat row on the side of the road, received 16 cups of rice in the past week.

"There are many other families who want to move into the tents, but there is not enough space," said a villager. "So people complain. They complain not to the government or to the village administrator, but to each other, arguing, 'why you are in the tent and I am not."

"People who can't get into the government tents are building our huts along the road, but police don't want to see us here anymore," he said, pointing to 15 roadside huts. "They said if we don't break our huts and disappear, they will shoot us. 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."

With the government offering little help, private citizens from big cities like Yangon ply the roads with urgently needed supplies.

One of them was U Khin Mg Thein, a 47-year-old construction material salesman in Yangon, who was distributing 15 bags of rice to lines of villagers squatting on both sides of the road holding out bowls and bamboo hats in supplication.

"You just need to imagine and put myself in their shoes to realize what you should do," he said. "These are Burmese, my people. I am helping my people."

The government is not making it easy for those wishing to offer private charity. Police officers armed with rifles stopped cars at checkpoints. Foreigners without government permits to enter the disaster zone were turned back after their passports were copied. Those Burmese who are allowed to pass through were given a warning: any donation, a yellow handout notice said, must be distributed through government-controlled village leaders.

However grim the conditions, there was no report of outbreaks of disease among roadside people.

The storm survivors on the roads, not used to begging, simply accepted donations with a faint smile or no display of emotion. No looting or rioting was seen or reported. The most aggressive behavior displayed came from children, who stuck their hands into the windows of passing cars. Most just silently waited for any help to come their way.

In Pyapon, a commercial hub in the delta renowned for its "hpaya" grass mats, people maintained a semblance of traditional Burmese hospitality despite the disaster. When outside visitors asked for directions at dusk, a man offered them food and lodging at his home.
Pyapon is a trading center for rice, dried fish and fish paste and is the hometown of many rich Burmese tradesmen. But in this town, too, tales of horror were told over evening tea.

"Dead bodies floating down the Pyapon River are no longer strangers to us," said Daw Khin Kyi, a town resident. "Some of these bodies still wear gold necklaces and bracelets, so some people went out to collect them in the first few days. But now, after many days, nobody goes near. Fish are nibbling at the bodies."

Ma Ye Ye Tan, a 17-year-old girl from a hamlet down the river, survived the cyclone. She arrived at the home of a Pyapon relative, with virtually nothing on, shivering in monsoon rain.
She said that she did want to go back to her native village, now filled with death.

"After the cyclone came and went, we continued to hear people shouting in the darkness, but when village men went to search for them, they could find no one," she said.