A year after the devastating cyclone that laid waste to large swaths of Myanmar, more than half a million people are still living in makeshift shacks that are unlikely to withstand the imminent monsoons, aid agencies working in the region said.
Sea water has inundated wells throughout the Irrawaddy delta and turned almost 800,000 hectares of Myanmar’s most fertile paddy fields into salt-contaminated wastelands.
Aid coordinators say 240,000 people in remote villages still rely on drinking water that is delivered by boat in large rubber bladders. In some places diesel-powered filtration plants work around the clock, rendering brackish estuary water drinkable.
DEVASTATION
When Cylone Nargis hit Myanmar on May 2 last year, killing at least 138,000 people and devastating the lives of millions more, the refusal of the ruling junta to allow foreign aid into the affected area left observers pessimistic about the future of those living there.
For more than three weeks after the disaster Myanmar’s generals refused to grant visas to foreign relief workers and blocked aid from reaching the delta, the worst-hit region.
The government eventually agreed to allow emergency teams into the delta after intervention by the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, but skepticism remained about whether aid really would reach the 2.4 million people severely affected by the cyclone.
Nevertheless, a year on from the disaster, foreign NGOs working on the ground say the relief effort has gone far better than they dared hope.
ACHIEVEMENTS
“What has been achieved over the last year has exceeded what anybody predicted would be possible,” said Paul Sender, Merlin’s country director for Myanmar, based in Yangon.
“There was initially a lot of concern about whether anybody would be able to work here, or monitor where the aid was going, but we have found that the aid has been getting through to the people who need it,” he said.
Sender, who is also head of the UN’s “health cluster” in Myanmar, said the predicted outbreak of malnutrition and disease had not happened.
“Figures from the clinics show there hasn’t been a significant increase either in the past year, which reflects the fact that there are health provisions in place,” he said.
Dan Collison, director of Save the Children’s emergency program in Myanmar, said: “Not one Save the Children truck was stopped from reaching its destination, and in those first few weeks we reached 160,000 people, even when we weren’t supposed to.”
“We have no evidence at all that the regime confiscated or misappropriated aid, even in the early days,” Collison said.
OBSTRUCTION
This optimistic view is not shared by everyone.
A report by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in the US this year, which collated information from interviews by local researchers working undercover in the delta, found “systematic obstruction of aid, willful acts of theft and sale of relief supplies, forced relocation, and the use of forced labor for reconstruction projects, including forced child labor.”
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