Tom in Burma after the cyclone

Tom went to Burma during the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis with the intention of being of some assistance, particularly in the worst-hit rural areas. Being quite visibly English, he wasn't able to access those areas but spent some time working for a local NGO engaged in relief work in Rangoon. Here is his report, edited by me.

My first foray into Burma has been emotional, to say the least. Initially, I felt that life was ticking along normally; Rangoon seemed to be like many other third world cities, the streets alive with food stalls and child beggars, with rubbish cluttering the gutters. The desecrated landscape and rigid tree branches jutting from sidewalks were the only evidence of an environmental disaster. People in Rangoon were relaxed – to the point of appearing blasé – about the effects of Cyclone Nargis and the encroaching monsoon season. An early chat with a Burmese man revealed that when it rains through his decrepit roof he simply gets out of bed, sits on the floor and drinks hot tea under an umbrella. Perhaps, it seemed to me, people here should be more worried about sleep deprivation than the onslaught of a ‘second wave’ of disaster.

These perceptions have been proven to be grossly miscalculated. The suburbs of Rangoon reveal a darker picture, whilst the storm-affected regions are suffering from starvation and disease.

On a rickety bus ride through Rangoon I met Kyaw Aung Aung, an off-duty shipman heavily involved in aid work. On Friday I met with Aung very early, intending to proceed to a refugee camp to hand out supplies. This ended in disappointment for me. "No Foreigners" is the message drilled into the officers, so despite my cunning disguise in green longjee, a sarong worn by Burmese men for generations, I was politely sent packing along with the bureaucratic formalities.

Disappointed, but not downcast, we returned to Aung's house, from which he proceeded to show me around a neighbouring village in living abject poverty. The dividing line between these polarised habitats was so sudden that this village could conceivably have been someone’s bedraggled garden. Each household we went to delivered the same message: the government are corrupt, terrible human rights abusers and totally inept in this climate of disaster. People want to fight but have no provisions and no training. They are in limbo.

The worst news was painfully obvious to a trained eye. In the markets around downtown Rangoon there are inordinate amounts of warm weather clothing and ponchos, usually spread out over tarpaulins on the ground. These are exactly the same types of donated clothing I saw cluttering the corner of the Myanmar Buddhist Temple in Singapore, from where I flew to Burma. It has been explained to me that supplies sent from abroad have been surreptitiously stolen by soldiers to be sold on the black market. The aid is not reaching the needy. Moreover, corrugated iron sheets are not being administered properly. One small sheet is being sold for 5000 Kyats (five US dollars) a piece – utter corruption. Meanwhile, civilians are receiving only half a litre of water as their ration per day, queuing for hours to receive it. Funerals are further contaminating the water supply around the suburbs, as these traditionally take place in the rivers. All these factors illustrate one common necessity: deliver resources to the right people.

The good news is that local civil society groups, such as Aung's, are allowed to deliver supplies to their people. The other cars in our convoy went in without a problem – it was the foreigner’s vehicle that was held back! Aung says there are 7000 people in his group, but they are not a fully fledged NGO, as this would place them under the scope of the government, effectively making it a GO (Governmental Organisation). They have around 1000 monks on board, but, incidentally, monks are not allowed into the refugee camps. The government are afraid of the blurring of religious and political lines.

Saturday was quite a harrowing ride. My walk with Aung through the destitute village, where we handed water sterilising tablets to a local Red Cross branch, became deeply upsetting. Aung had had too many heartfelt conversations, the longest with some increasingly impassioned monks in a Buddhist monastery, and was clearly shaken by the end. Part of me dre not imagine how horrific conditions in the refugee camp would have been.

Unfortunately, so far as personal endeavours go, there is not much I can accomplish with Aung at the moment, since my foreigner status imposes inevitable limitations. To stay true to my commitment to helping these people, I now work as journalist/editor and website whipping-chief for Nargis Action Group, a local NGO in Rangoon, far from the cyclone-affected Ayeyarwady Delta but close to the present state of affairs. As I am the only native English speaker, my responsibilities have spanned to thank you letters, international requests and yesterday I helped an elderly gentleman down the stairs. It's all go, go, go!

Nargis Action Group has been a reliable presence in the Ayeyarwady Delta. We have a strong infrastructure in the field, with our own Regional Health Centre, clinics, temporary shelters and roaming medics. Swarms of yellow-emblazoned volunteers toil in Pyapon, Bogalay, Dedaye, Labutta and beyond, receiving and distributing supplies every day. Our registered volunteers are accompanied by countless other helpers who are crucial to the relief effort. They have a valuable knowledge of the area and a thirst for work, which we repay with cash-for-work.

The Delta regions are still in a dire state, while aid distribution has struggled to reach some of the remote villages. The news that foreign aid workers had finally been granted access to the disaster-hit areas was met with great enthusiasm (not least by me, as I have thus far been desk-bound), but also scepticism. The latter sentiment has since come to the fore, as General Than Shwe's promise has proved to be another bureaucratic hash-up, even affecting our efforts as a local organisation; the government checkpoints barricading the disaster-zones have become more stringent and time-consuming for our supply-laden trucks.

However, we are not a political organisation! Far from it: since the establishment of Nargis Action Group we have prized the benefits of staying on the right side of the intrusive military force. That is not to say we are pro-government here – no one is pro-government in Burma – but it makes sense to be mindful of our words in this time of urgency. I have had a sentence or two deleted on the grounds that they are too subtly provocative for our website. But I have learnt my lessons – I have to be more subtle! – and have concentrated on writing empathetic pieces to grapple with the conscience of potential donors, seduce their sympathy glands and encourage them to help.

The foreigners, computer geeks and businessmen (I stake a claim to all of these) man our headquarters in Rangoon; maintaining the website and accounts, contacting donors, etc. The office is always a hub of activity, with frequent donors coming by to drop off packages (ranging in size from teeny to titanic), funds, or simply to seek some further information on our organisation. My boss, a German lady named Kerstin, is lovely, brassy and tempestuous all at once. Just what is needed around here, as the Burmese are never shy of a tea break. Perhaps the same would go for me if the tea wasn't so god-awful.

It can be a saddening process at times, and not just because of bad tea. The number of heartbreaking stories that reach my ears and storm-ravaged pictures I must sift through can engender a sorrowful mood. In one instance, I had to choose the 'best' photograph from a whole folder of dead naked figures strewn across landscapes and on riverbanks, leaving me subdued and ponderous for the afternoon. My personality has taken a swift beating, and I have since become a bit of an emotional wreck.

Some of the tales from the night of the storm are nothing short of breathtaking. It is difficult not to enjoy such accounts of daring-do and resourcefulness, although, as with many of these things, they are not devoid of a sombre note. I relish (and simultaneously anguish over) the visual image of an entire village huddling together in a monastery, only to find the next morning that it is the only construction still standing. Meanwhile (I say meanwhile as this was not an isolated case), villagers in a brick nogg building, its roof blown clean off, stood up for almost twelve hours straight, covered up to the neck in water. As the water level rose rapidly in the building, these Burmese people summoned great initiative by placing their children in plastic buckets. The nippers bobbed incessantly through the night, only to emerge the following morning once the water had receded. This image is such a poignant one: babies bobbing in bright buckets around the heads of their grown-up saviours. And all this in the midst of a thunderous cyclone plundering through the sky.

We have had a good deal of success here in the offices of Nargis Action Group, initially with our relief aid distribution, and since with building and reconstruction. This latter initiative is a pressing concern, with both the rains and the postponed first day of school fast approaching. Are lessons to take place in temporary shelters or under individual umbrellas, with students sheltering from the monsoon downpours?

Schools must be rebuilt, especially as village schools in Burma serve many purposes besides education. To any new visitor, they might appear to function as a community hall, kindergarten and hotel all at once; children play, villagers congregate to have meetings, while guests even sleep and eat there in the right circumstances. Unsurprisingly, these villages are desperate to have their schools back, so, for now at least, we are looking to build temporary constructions to function as schools and housing whilst also planning for long-term buildings. We are aiming to construct cyclone shelters like, for example, the ones already existing in Bangladesh, built in the aftermath of their Cyclone Sidr. These would be constructed in areas close to the Bay of Bengal, as that is the area most prone to future storms and flooding.

As for aid relief, we have focused on food distribution, providing shelter materials and water purification measures, and medical care. Rice, noodles, potatoes and oil make up the culinary pongs currently wafting through the delta (Burmese cooking notoriously uses copious amounts of oil - good for killing bugs in the pan but a danger for romantic dinners..). For shelter, we distribute plastic tarpaulins and corrugated galvanised iron sheets to help build temporary shelters, while handing out blankets, candles, flip flops, mosquito nets, etc. Flip flops might seem a curious one, but the number of patients turning up at our clinics with wounded feet created the necessity, as it was further burdening the over-worked nurses and doctors who are busy with tetanus vaccinations, first aid and ad hoc psychological support. Meanwhile, our volunteers have been working with villagers to clean and clear water ponds (large tanks for harvesting rainwater) and also provide for a future chlorinated water supply. As most of the water had been contaminated by flooding and disease, the need for renovation of water purification procedures and a distribution of Aluminium Sulphate tablets was paramount.

A lot of our work in the delta focuses on needs assessment, since it is important to identify the most desperate villages whilst, as much as possible, helping everyone. Some of the more remote villages are extremely difficult to reach in the current climate of destruction so are in grave need of attention. Once our roaming volunteers have allocated a spot, they then determine to whom they should give the food and other supplies for distribution within the village; should it be a monk, the chief or a teacher? We then send out a monitor, who scurries from village to village, making sure that everything is being administered justly. What a lot to think about!

Frustratingly, although we have the most personnel in the delta, plus countless local volunteers, we lack sufficient funding for our substantial plans. We receive donations in kind at all times of the day, but, thus far, hard cash has been thin on the ground. UNICEF and Oxfam, among others, have since sent us supplies, while Action Aid, an international non-governmental fellowship programme, has channelled funds through us from the offset, providing their own volunteers to accompany ours in the field.

This has been a thoroughly interesting and enlightening experience for me so far. It illustrates the necessity of carefully researching where to send aid contributions. A case in point: the reconstruction of new schools is imperative in lieu of the destruction caused by Cyclone Nargis. The new term was due to begin on June 2nd but this has been postponed because most villages in the Ayeyarwady Delta lack temporary shelters, let alone school buildings, to conduct classes. Corrupt construction businesses have grasped a unique opportunity here, and are charging unreasonable prices for building works. The experienced local businessmen here scream, 'Foul Play!', and use their grassroots know-how and connections to seek out cheaper, but equally effectual, options. We have alerted other NGOs to more realistic prices and companies, while continuing our own initiatives.

The future for cyclone-affected families looks bleak. Millions of people have been displaced from their homes, squeezing under flailing plastic tarpaulins in alien villages, their possessions and loved ones nowhere to be found. Households and livelihoods have been shattered. While these people beg for food and plead for work to repair their lives, the desecration of their countryside is visible all around. Paddy fields and farm land are a mess, with contorted water lilies and decaying animal carcasses dotted around the landscape. Most of the Delta’s buffalos and cows were slaughtered by Cyclone Nargis, machinery damaged beyond repair, while stockpiles of seeds were cleared and scattered by the storm and flooding. Even if the resources were still available to toil the land, there would only be a fifty-fifty per cent chance of a decent harvest due to the contaminated, salted water supply. The circumstances look desperate; farmers could toil for months with sub-standard resources and eventually yield an unusable harvest of rice. Farmers have two weeks – the situation is urgent.

The international community seems to have forgotten about Burma. Cyclone Nargis is not news anymore, displaced in peoples’ consciousnesses by earthquakes, typhoons and European football, but it is still news out here. It is still big news. Money is needed, and needed fast, because we can help these people to survive and repair their lives.

See for yourself at www.nargisaction.org. (It's probably still under construction – some of these computer buffs have no appreciation of aesthetics – but if you read any flowery puff pieces with the occasional empathetic detail, it's most likely to be written by me.)