In village after village of the Irrawaddy Delta in southern Myanmar, people line the roads. They endure the sweltering morning sun, the afternoon monsoon rains and the storm-pregnant evening skies, under which their ghostly figures are illuminated by thunderbolts.
When an occasional car carrying donations approaches, children swarm toward it holding out their hands. Mothers hugging babies, too ashamed or shocked to ask for help, just stare into the eyes of any visitors. Fathers and grandmothers stand by, watching the scene with eyes filled with humiliation.
Every family has tales of horror to tell about Cyclone Nargis, which struck the delta on May 3. But for now, a powerful instinct for survival has driven these Burmese peasants to leave their once-fertile but now ruined rice paddies and migrate toward the nearest roads. Neither government nor international aid is coming quickly enough, if at all, to these roads. For many, the only hope of survival is aid being brought through by private donors.
"I don't know how the government is helping us," said Ko Htay Oo, 40, in Kunyangon, a delta town 50 kilometers, or 30 miles, south of Yangon, Myanmar's main city. "There are cars coming with private donations. Some get donations, some don't.
"I am no beggar, so I didn't eat anything in the past two days," he said, leaning against a roadside palm tree. "Besides, you shouldn't compete with kids for begged food."
On the roads going through the storm-hit area, the ruling military junta, which has driven Myanmar's people into squalor but keeps them docile with terror, has put up this sign: "Don't throw food on the roads. It ruins the people's good habits."
Of the nearly two dozen people interviewed this past weekend along the roads, all said they got little, if any, relief from their government. All said they did not expect any because they are not used to that kind of help from the junta. Few have heard about foreign aid flowing in. None have seen any.
The most visible government presence appeared in the form of the occasional police jeep.
With the roads, not the rice paddies, having become a source of food, villagers are building their lives along them with whatever they have left. Pigs are tied to roadside palm trees. Ducks swim in the nearby ditches. Roads are lined with the flimsy A-frame huts built with a few sticks of bamboo and "dani" leaves for roofing. One man found shelter in a large bamboo basket he had salvaged from the floodwater. Another lived in a tent built with a plastic Tiger Beer advertising banner that a truck driver had thrown to him.
The roads are littered with plastic garbage, from the packaging of donated food.
"I have no dish, no cup, no blanket, no pillow. I have received nothing from the government," said Daw San Mar Oo, 31, a farmer in the hamlet of Nyin Kone near Daedaya, a delta town southwest of Kunyangon. "I have nothing in my hands."
U Min Lwin, 37, said his family had received a government ration only twice in the three weeks since the storm, each time seven cups of rice.
Farther down the road, a 51-year-old woman who gave her name as Daw San said that she received potatoes and a small amount of beans from the government the other day but that she had no utensils for cooking.
The most helpless victims of Nargis, which sent monstrous walls of saltwater over the low-lying delta, were the poorest of Burmese farmers - those who rent rice paddies from landlords. Before the storm, they and their buffaloes, ducks and pigs had moved from field to field, living in huts beside their paddies.
In contrast to the obvious physical devastation of the Chinese earthquake, which left piles of concrete or natural debris behind, here in the Irrawaddy Delta's vast rice fields, after the sea water had subsided, it might appear to visitors that nothing had happened. But the survivors lining the roads tell a different story.
"My neighbors, their houses, their buffaloes - they are all gone," said Ma Aye Swe, 48. "They are gone with the water."
In their isolation, these farmers rely on news from static-filled radio broadcasts to link them to the outside world, and many appeared to have little notion of international aid or what a government could do for them at times of national disaster. Private aid runners say that when they hand out cakes of soap, some of the farmers do not even know what they are for.
The authorities are, in the wake of the storm, a source of intimidation.
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