Emergency medical supplies and food are still only trickling into Burma in the wake of Tropical Cyclone Nargis, which has left 1.5 million people in the worst-hit Irrawaddy delta in urgent need of humanitarian aid.
Amid mounting calls from abroad for the junta to permit a full-scale emergency
aid operation in Burma,
U.N. spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs warned of “a second catastrophe” facing the
homeless, as disease and starvation began to take their toll on already
stunned cyclone survivors.
As survivors run out of clean water for drinking and bathing and as food grows
scarce, the Burmese people themselves are providing as much relief as they
can through donations, according to interviews with RFA’s Burmese service.
“The group went to Myaung-mya to donate a total of 300 rice bags, 20,000
clothes, and an uncountable number of dried-noodle packets,” a worker with a
charitable group in Rangoon
said by telephone.
“They went to donate these things...We went to Kungyan-gone, Hlaing Thaya, and
South Dagon,” said U Thuya, a prominent comedian also known as Zargana, referring to three districts in the former capital,
Rangoon.
Trouble from authorities
But even
meager donations from Burma
and overseas that did get through are running into problems with the
authorities, according to residents of Rangoon.
“We were told not to distribute uncooked rice. We’ve been harassed. So we
distributed cooked rice instead,” U Thuya added.
An eyewitness at a makeshift refugee camp in Bogalay township at the heart of
the disaster said no one had seen any sign of foreign aid in the area—and authorities
had ordered refugees to leave schools and monasteries by Wednesday, regardless
whether they had homes to return to.
“In Thakayta and Kyauk-tan...people from the refugee camps were crying [after
being told] that by the 14th the victims will have to leave the
monasteries and schools,” the woman said. “That’s for the entire country. That’s
for sure.”
“In Bogalay township, there are a total of over 8,000 refugees. They are in
monasteries. There are 54 monasteries in the town of Bogalay,” she added.
She said refugees in Bogalay, who were desperate for clean water, had yet
to receive any foreign aid at all.
“I saw only rice at the refugee camps. That was donated by private donors,” she
said. “What we urgently need now is medicine to purify water. We can’t get that
in Burma
at all. So, if we go to Bogalay, we have to buy many water bottles. That’s a
problem for us. We urgently need that medicine to purify water.”
Vast aid needed
So far, only 361 tonnes of food has been flown into the country by the World
Food Programme (WFP), and only 175 tonnes of that has been distributed.
“We distributed cooked rice instead. Also we distributed raincoats. We donated
warm clothes donated by [movie star] Ko Lwin Moe. The most effective thing was
donating medicine—various medicines donated by [pharmacy company] Htet Lin. We
were able to give them various medicines,” U Thuya said from Rangoon.
He said outbreaks of diarrhea and cholera were now common among refugees.
“Everyone has an upset stomach and many people are getting cholera—and some
rashes. I don’t know what they are, but they have tiny bumps that are itchy,”
he said.
“That’s on both adults and children. So we have started to donate medicine for those
itchy bumps. Then I think the stomach problems are caused by the water. So we
are donating water-purifying medicine,” he said, adding that the group would be
joined by 12 doctors who planned to test for cholera among refugee populations.
U.N. surveillance
A U.N.
plane arrived in Rangoon
on Monday, after several days of bureaucratic delays on the part of government
officials, with a cargo of food aid and medical supplies, including a Diarrheal
Disease Kit, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a statement.
The WHO said it had deployed 11 surveillance officers to affected townships in
the low-lying Irrawaddy delta, which was devastated by a 12-meter storm surge
when Nargis made landfall in Burma.
A further five officers have been assigned to Rangoon district for the next two weeks to
assess the situation and to deliver health relief items.
Burmese survivors and those trying to donate supplies to them have repeatedly
complained that the quasi-government USDA group has appropriated supplies, preventing
volunteers from delivering food, water, and medicines directly to those who
need them, saying they would take charge of distribution.
USDA denotes the Union Solidarity Development Association, ostensibly a semi-official civic group comprising backers of the junta. USDA members are routinely dispatched by the authorities to perform various tasks.
U Thuya
said: “Whenever we tried to donate uncooked rice, they started looting. So we
could no longer donate uncooked rice.”
“We now have to cook the rice and distribute it. If you take bags of rice, they’d
loot from us. We don’t know who these people are. They’d just loot from us,” he
said.
Zinc sheets given to junta
Another
sought-after commodity, zinc sheets for repairs to houses devastated by the storm,
was also being monopolized by the military, a source close to the junta said.
A person close to high-ranking military families in the Air Force at Mingaladon, Rangoon, said such families were being well looked after with large numbers of zinc sheets being handed out free to those whose houses were destroyed.
“Only those houses that suffered a lot of damage got 10 sheets of zinc roofing.
Those houses that were damaged slightly, losing four or five or 10 sheets, got
only about two sheets. Even then they had to pay. One sheet of zinc is 4,000 kyat,” the woman said.
U.N. health kits
WHO said it had delivered another two Inter-Agency Emergency Health Kits to the worst-hit cities of Bogalay and Labutta.
It will send
four more kits to Pyapon, Ngaputaw, Myaungmya, and Ma U Bin townships, where
tens of thousands of refugees, many of them with infections in untreated
injuries, are sheltering in makeshift camps in schools and other public
buildings with no little or no medical care.
Health officials have requested a list of the essential supplies and medicines
that need to be replenished urgently. WHO said it would work with the health
ministry to establish a revolving stock of drugs to ensure the continuing
availability of essential medicines and supplies.
Long-term trauma
In
addition to their increasingly urgent physical needs, cyclone victims must
also contend with extreme psychological trauma, which often hits the youngest victims hardest, according to U.S.-based trauma expert
Elizabeth Carll.
“For the children, it’s very difficult—especially if they’re orphaned and have lost their family,” said Carll, a clinical psychologist in New York and author of Trauma Psychology: Issues in Violence, Disaster, Health and Illness.
“The long-term effects are especially difficult for something like this kind of cyclone, because it impacts not only on the individual family but the whole socio-economic structure,” Carll said.
Involving victims of the 2004 Asian tsunami in
rebuilding their communities helped alleviate trauma, she
said, but poverty and deprivation will make that process
longer and more difficult in Burma.
Original reporting by RFA’s Burmese service and by Richard Finney. Translation by Than Than Win. Burmese service director: Nancy Shwe. Executive producer: Susan Lavery. Written and produced in English by Luisetta Mudie and Sarah Jackson-Han.