Rangoon, Burma by Emma Larkin

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For the past few days I have been reading articles about the relief operation in response to Cyclone Nargis in the New Light of Myanmar, the Burmese regime's state newspaper. Photographs show cyclone refugees sitting in neat tents, surrounded by supplies and cooking pots. Soldiers are depicted loading boxes of dried noodles onto helicopters. Generals are seen handing out donations to orderly rows of survivors. In the pages of the New Light of Myanmar, at least, the
situation is under control.

Yet, when I talk to Burmese people in Rangoon, the images I see and hear couldn't be more different. A businessman, who has just returned from delivering personal donations by boat in the worst-hit reaches of the Delta south of Laputta, showed me film footage he had taken in one village over ten days after the cyclone hit. Half of the village population had been killed by the storm and there was nothing left of the wooden houses or concrete monastery but shattered planks, rubble, and debris. The images showed blank-faced and ragged survivors, who said they had not yet received aid of any kind. Bloated corpses floated in the flooded paddy fields around their makeshift shelter. Another man, trying to help survivors around Bogalay, talked about canals choked with dead bodies and survivors with horrific injuries succumbing to gangrene. Even around Kungyangon, a more accessible Delta area closer to Rangoon, private individuals driving down to deliver donations of rice and clothes report that the road is lined for 20 miles with thousands of desperate and homeless people begging for food.

Meanwhile, foreign aid workers are being refused visas to enter the country. Authorities have prevented the few international aid agencies already working here before the cyclone from accessing affected areas; instead, they are working from their headquarters in Rangoon with the small, and now exhausted, teams of local Burmese staff given permission to deliver what little international aid the generals have allowed into the country.

I met a highly-experienced disaster relief team from a European country that has managed to sneak into Burma on tourist visas. Unable to travel down to the Delta (the road is now blocked by military
checkpoints and foreigners who are caught are turned back), they are holding low-key, secret meetings to teach the ABCs of an emergency response operation - attempting to create "instant" relief workers out of un-experienced but willing Burmese volunteers.

In the office of one aid agency, there is a white board that is updated with the latest casualty figures as staff frantically try and collate disparate bits of information. Scrawled on the board are the
following figures:

Affected: High 2.5 million - Low 1.5 million
Dead, Missing: High 182,000 - Low 60,000

With numbers like these, the dribs and drabs of aid and expertise that are being allowed through are nowhere near enough. One friend used a Burmese saying to illustrate the huge gap between what is being given and what it is needed: he said, "It is like throwing sesame seeds into the mouth of an elephant."

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