BURMA:An army of young Burmese desperately need support as they carry out ad hoc rescue missions, writes a special correspondent in Rangoon
TUCKED INSIDE a muddy, garbage-strewn street in north Rangoon, a small arts school is an unlikely-looking hub for emergency disaster relief operations.
Forgetting the broken roofs, upended trees and lack of electricity in their own homes, young Burmese volunteers are carrying out aid missions into the devastated Irrawaddy delta to the south.
Galvanised by the desperate living conditions of huge numbers of survivors still receiving little or no help, the volunteers are trucking in food and medical supplies bought with money raised by expatriate teachers and others. Foreigners are still forbidden to enter the affected areas without ministry of foreign affairs passes, which very few have received.
A Burmese woman doctor tells the assembled students, teachers, and expatriates that one group of 3,700 people gathered in eight shelters in Na-U-Bin outside the city appears to have sufficient food and water "for the moment".
But a frazzled Rangoon businessman reports that his self-funded relief mission to outlying villages near the devastated town of Bogalay pushed through waterways clogged with corpses before encountering isolated, unaided, and ill bands of villagers "fending for themselves" almost two weeks after Cyclone Nargis hit on May 3rd.
"We saw people with broken bones, severe skin wounds, and diarrhoea. It was highly disturbing," he said before hurrying away to organise a return visit with $40,000 (€26,000) worth of supplies and medical support.
In another part of Rangoon, a 37-year-old former civil servant has just returned from Kyunkadone, due south of the former capital.
His two-vehicle relief truck sponsored by a foreign relief organisation and manned by local volunteers drove along a slippery mud road lined with "thousands upon thousands of people, who didn't look like they used to be poor, begging for food, money, anything". "We didn't know what to do. It got scary. In the end we sometimes resorted to just throwing packets of bread and clothes, out the window."
They passed the bulk of their supplies to refugees staying in a storm-wrecked monastery where the air around was suffused with "a terrible stench of barely-buried bodies." Last week he had the impression that his home city of Rangoon had been nearly destroyed by the storm. "But after visiting the delta I thought how lucky we were to have escaped with such little damage." Whole towns are flattened or gone and remaining trees are "just stalks".
There was a desperate need for the international aid organisations to set up independent co-ordinated operations working out of bases throughout the vast former rice-bowl, he said. Ad hoc missions such as his own were utterly insufficient, he felt.
There was a Burmese phrase for it. "It is like throwing sesame seeds to a hungry elephant." Though organisations such as Unicef, Merlin, WHO, Malteser, MSF and Save the Children, along with Burmese religious charities, are getting through to more locations, the amount of aid reaching people and the numbers being helped are still nowhere near enough.
The aid organisations reckon that perhaps 400,000, or 20-30 per cent of the roughly two million affected people, have been reached in some form, said Heinke Veit, a spokesperson at the European Commission's humanitarian office in Rangoon.
But even of the people reached there are few indications that many are yet receiving the kind of complete supplies of clean water, food, shelter and sanitation facilities that are needed to fend off the spread of disease.
The need for helicopters, trucks and boats laden with essential supplies remains desperate.
Aid agency local staff who are bearing the brunt of the delivery and outreach work are in danger of exhaustion and burn-out.
Visas for the foreign experts waiting outside who could provide much-needed support are still not being issued. Some of those who did get into the country remain stuck in Rangoon offices, unable to get to the affected areas.
A local Burmese reporter who had just returned from a 14-hour journey on a muddy road to the town of Labutta in the far southeast said there was a desperate shortage of shelter and blankets as refugees struggle to find protection against rain and cold.
"We visited a mosque and four monasteries that are housing thousands of people. But the monasteries have no roofs. People are just huddling together in the rain under whatever bits of plastic or other materials they can find." He talked to a Labutta man who had lost seven members of his family and he was taken to see a baby rescued alive from bushes two days after it was born during the storm and abandoned for dead.
Mother and child had been reunited and the infant was breastfeeding.
Another mother was incoherent and had "lost her mind" over the deaths of her three children, he said. A suicidal refugee had been prevented by fellow survivors from slashing a knife through his throat.
The traumatic stories emerging from the delta are a chilling echo of the 2004 Asian tsunami and the suffering is on a similar scale.
In both disasters, children and women died in greater numbers, this time for lack of sufficient strength to hold on long enough to a tree or other structure. There are reports of remote villages past Labutta where private donors found only men - not a single woman or child survived.
But the tsunami's aftermath brought a deluge of aid, logistical support and co-operation that has yet to be allowed here.
Aid staff, business persons, private donors, monks and young Burmese volunteers push on regardless as best they can. More than a million people in the delta shiver and wait.