Thousands of people lined up patiently for food as a navy ship arrived at a remote Bangladesh island, bringing the first aid since last week's devastating cyclone.
Cyclone Sidr left this lonely outpost in the Bay of Bengal in ruins and villagers had received no assistance at all until now.
"We did not receive any food or relief from the government," said Rasana Begum, on a sandy beach where fishermen used to work drying fish.
Now everything is lost, she said.
RICE STORES GONE
"Dried fish worth millions of taka [tens of thousands of dollars] is gone. The rice that we stored for the few next months is gone and we have lost hundreds of family members," resident Abdul Gafur, 50, said.
Ashar Char, on a southern tip of Bangladesh's coastline with the Bay of Bengal, took the full force of the storm and suffered heavy casualties.
Some 241 people have already been buried and more than 500 are still missing feared dead, local government official Jahandir Alam said.
Despite the huge loss of life, five days after the disaster the people are no longer in mourning.
Instead, basic day to day needs have taken over as they wait for desperately-needed food. Now they are worried about their own survival.
"The last six days we spent cooking rotten rice," Gafur said, showing rice that was damaged by salt water during the tidal surge triggered by the cyclone.
NO HELP
"No boat came to us as most of them had been damaged or washed away. Even our market which before was full of food items has been wiped out," fishermen Ripon Molla said.
Along a 100km stretch of Bangladesh's coastline, where cyclone Sidr wiped out thousands of villages leaving countless families homeless, the fear of starvation now looms large.
"Our top-most concern is to keep these hundreds of thousands of poor people alive in the next couple of weeks," said Navy commander Bashir Ahmed, who is supervising the relief and rescue operation in the worst-hit Barguna district.
"These people are in desperate need of dried food, drinking water and clothes. If we fail it will be a catastrophe," he said.
"They have now become permanently dependent on food aid. And a majority of them don't even have utensils to cook food," he said.
VIOLENT STANDOFFS: The government said 215 students have been injured since the start of the movement last month, including a teenager who lost a hand on Monday Thousands of demonstrators yesterday massed under heavy police surveillance in Paris and cities across France, as unions and teachers joined high-school students who for days have been demanding better conditions in protests punctuated by violent clashes. Students have blocked the entrances to hundreds of high schools for 15-to-17-year-olds since late last month, complaining of missing teachers, overloaded schedules, dilapidated classrooms and buildings that cannot cope with rising temperatures. In the Paris suburb of Creteil, where the protests started last month, students piled barriers outside the Saint-Exupery high school. “We are here to make our voice heard, all too often forgotten,” student Abderrahmane Abdelkader
As shark attack survivor Mel Ismail fought the predator that severed his leg, he noticed something odd. “I saw its eye ... a big black eye,” Ismail said. “But it was winking back at me — I was trying to get my fingers in its eye and just pushing its eye as I was being dragged.” When the shark swam off, he managed to struggle back to shore, the surfer and professional firefighter said in an Australian Broadcasting Corp interview broadcast on Thursday. He was surfing at Glenfield Beach near Geraldton on Australia’s west coast when he was attacked on Sept. 14. He
A Tuvalu government adviser yesterday said it felt like Australia had “taken over” the tiny country’s sovereignty during a visit by leaders to the Pacific island. The official — a senior government adviser who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak to the media — said they were disappointed in Australia’s handling of the visit. The comments came during a visit by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and other leaders to Tuvalu, which has become a symbol of the existential threat posed by rising seas and is a key partner in Canberra’s Pacific strategy. “Just because we signed the
Halfway around the world from Russia, in a Caribbean tourism hot spot, men young and old are being lured by Moscow with tantalizing job offers, only to find themselves en route to the front lines in Ukraine. Moscow and Kyiv have recruited thousands of foreign nationals into their armies since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Moscow is accused, in some cases, of using fake job ads to hoodwink men from deprived backgrounds in Africa, Asia and Latin America into traveling to Russia and then forcing them to fight on arrival. From countries such as India, Kenya, Equatorial Guinea, Colombia and
RSS