Cyclone survivors say life only gets harder

updated 4:28 p.m. ET May 28, 2008

PYAPON, Myanmar - It's not much, but the flimsy bamboo lean-to on the side of the road is all Aye Shwe has to keep his family dry. They lost their home to the cyclone and may soon be uprooted again — this time by soldiers ordering them to leave.

Three weeks after the storm, survivors say they are being victimized again, by a military regime that has forced some to return to flooded, collapsed homes and others to labor on reconstruction projects.

Even Myanmar volunteers making the difficult trip into the Irrawaddy delta to deliver food and supplies to survivors are being stopped and detained for hours, and the government has started impounding cars.

"Where my house used to be is still filled with water up to my waist," said Aye Shwe, pointing to fields of rice paddies in the distance, under water as far as the eye could see. "How can I build a new house there?"

The 52-year-old rice farmer's mother was killed in the cyclone that left more than 134,000 people dead or missing, and the water buffaloes that were a mainstay of his livelihood drowned in the fierce storm surges.

Still, until this week he had more than many: He managed to fashion a shelter from bamboo poles lashed together with palm fronds laid over one side as a crude roof. His wife and six children huddled together Monday on its raised bamboo floor, sheltering from the searing heat and the downpours that now come daily as monsoon season gets under way.

It's location on the roadside outside the hard-hit delta town of Pyapon, a four-hour drive from Yangon, had given his family access to the Myanmar volunteers ferrying donated food, water and other aid from the country's biggest city.

Then the soldiers came and ordered the family and the hundreds of others camped out on the roadside to leave.

Sea of despair
Myanmar's reclusive government has opened up slightly to the world in the past week, allowing U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to meet with some survivors living in tents in a refugee camp the military showed off as a model of its efficient handling of the relief effort.

But the U.N. says as many as 2.5 million people are homeless, facing hunger and potential outbreaks of disease, especially in the low-lying areas of the Irrawaddy delta close to the sea, and only a fraction of them have received any aid.

Hundreds lined the road outside Pyapon this week, squatting in the midday heat with only propped-up palm leaves or tree branches with pieces of cloth flung over them as shelter, hoping for handouts from the occasional passing car.

The government has ordered them not to beg, the refugees said, so only children rushed up to a stopped car with their hands out; the adults just waited, looking beseechingly. Military trucks passed by daily shouting orders over bull horns to leave the road and return home, these people said, though they have nowhere else to go.

"We live from hand to mouth. We have no buffaloes," said Aye Shwe, adding that he hoped to get permission to remain with his family in their lean-to for the next three months until the monsoon rains end. Asked if he thought that was likely, he looked down and did not reply.

Survivors put to work
The military junta has declared the emergency relief phase of the disaster over and announced reconstruction has begun, ordering able-bodied cyclone survivors to work details, according to aid workers and delta residents.

In the nearby town of Bogalay, where 120 refugees were crammed into the Sankyaung monastery, filled with the sound of rattling coughs and wailing children, the abbot said some survivors had been ordered to construction sites by soldiers.

"Some of the survivors were sent to Ma-ubin last week to build roads now that reconstruction has started," said the monk, Kawvida, adding he'd heard they were being paid a day wage of about 1,000 kyats — or $1. "They have told me that they are being exploited by some generals."

He said survivors were given picks and ordered to break up large boulders into pieces of rock for road construction.

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