Three months after Cyclone Nargis devastated Burma's Irrawaddy Delta and killed 140,000, many survivors have yet to receive help and some have been thrown off their land by the military junta.
Thein Hlaing wasted no time lamenting his family's misfortune when their home and village were wrecked by Cyclone Nargis in May. At least he, his wife and two young children had survived the savage storm that ravaged Burma and killed at least 140,000 people.
With his neighbours, the 28-year-old labourer plunged into the nearby swamp to retrieve pieces of corrugated tin and lengths of wood from where the winds had blown them, and set about rebuilding his hut on a scrap of land above the floodwater.
But it was not until last week that the first Burmese government official arrived, flanked by uniformed policemen. Joyful at first, Mr Hlaing thought he would get some help at last.
Instead, the official shouted at him, ordering him and his family to dismantle their new home or be thrown into jail. The higher ground had been earmarked for a building development, the official said. It was no longer permitted for anyone to live there.
Burma is not a country where you argue with anyone in authority and Mr Hlaing knew better than to do so. But inside he was furious.
"I would like a better life for my children but how can we hope for that now?" he said. "This government does nothing for us. It leaves us to struggle with our fate." This week he will have to move to the spot where he previously lived and rebuild his shelter again, spending the rest of the rainy season in a hut built on stilts above the fetid green swamp water which gives his children fevers.
There are growing signs that Burma's repressive military regime, headed by General Than Shwe, is helping its supporters to profiteer from the disaster. "A lot of government-appointed village headmen seem to be doing very well out of the rebuilding effort," said a Western aid worker who asked not to be named.
Villagers fear that businessmen allied with the government are being allowed to seize the land they have lived on and farmed for years. The price of rice has soared, both in Burma and abroad, and with it the value of the fields in which it is grown. But under Burma's archaic socialist system, the land is government-owned and farmers can be moved off it if they are not productive, as most cannot be at present.
Not far from Mr Hlaing's village south of the capital, Rangoon, are thousands of devastated communities in the Irrawaddy Delta. They have held funerals for their dead and rebuilt their flimsy homes. Now they are starting to think about the future – and some fear they may not have one.
Nearly three months after Nargis roared ashore on May 2, the initial emergency phase of the disaster relief is being wound down.
With road and river travel resuming, foreign helicopters brought in to deliver emergency food supplies are going home. The World Food Programme scaled back flights bringing aid from Thailand last week, judging that the worst is now over. But the United Nations says a further £500 million aid is now needed for long-term rebuilding and to kick-start the delta's farming and industry. There is a question mark over how much of that will be forthcoming from donor countries.
It will take years to finish rebuilding the 800,000 homes and 4,000 schools destroyed by the typhoon. Although nobody is dying of starvation, paddy fields are still inundated with salty water, making it impossible for many farmers to grow the rice that is needed. About half of the area's cattle, pigs and poultry died and 70 per cent of its fishing boats sank.
It didn't take long to find other villages suffering like Mr Hlaing's. The chain of extra police checkpoints thrown around the delta in the immediate aftermath of the cyclone is still in place, some now housed in what appear to be new buildings. But by dodging around them and using back roads into the swampy land just an hour's drive south of Rangoon, we found communities still struggling to get back on their feet – and yet to receive any government help.
Last week Surin Pitsuwan, the secretary-general of Asean, the body that represents south-east Asian nations, described the situation in the delta as "a tragedy of immense proportions", adding: "The task ahead is clearly enormous and will take a lot of time, a lot of effort."
UN statisticians say privately that the number of deaths may reach 180,000, far above the official 140,000 dead and missing. More women and children are believed to have died than men, who were stronger and able to cling longer to treetops as the floodwaters raged beneath them.
Near Mr Hlaing's shack was a teahouse where his neighbours, mostly landless labourers with no crops to tend, while away their days under a giant poster of Manchester United, the favourite team of Burma's football fans who crowd into tea shops to watch matches on satellite television. As flies crawled over their shirts the men complained quietly about the government's indifference, their eyes constantly darting around to see who might be listening.
Since last year's anti-regime protests led by the country's monks, and then the cyclone, security has been tightened to unprecedented levels. Rangoon is now a fearful city full of informers.
"When there was an earthquake in China their government quickly organised an aid effort and saved thousands of lives," one man in the tea shop said. "Our government didn't even warn people that the cyclone was coming, and then it did hardly anything to help victims. This government is our misfortune."
A few miles away in another settlement of thatched huts, 83 out of 87 homes were destroyed. Most of the villagers had managed to shelter from the storm in a factory, but two drowned as the waters surged to head height and three more died of their injuries in the chaotic days afterwards.
The 440lb of rice and bottles of cooking oil which The Sunday Telegraph took to the village was the first help it had received – and the only help it is now likely to get.
The shortage of rice is the most serious immediate problem, said Myint Tunoo, the village headman. Its price has doubled since the cyclone, reducing villagers to one meal a day, and the paddy fields where they had just begun harvesting when the storm struck are still a muddy mess.
Prices are now high enough for anyone with a crop to make a good profit, but there is no seed for replanting, which they should be doing for the next harvest, in November.
"I fear we will never really recover," Mr Myint said. "We are too busy just surviving, and we can't even feed ourselves." Despite that, the village has taken in refugees from the devastated town of Bogale, farther into the delta. Myint Myint Swe, who has a two-year-old child, saw her husband die in agony in front of her, from a stomach wound caused by flying debris.
"Normally it would have been treated easily in the hospital, but the roads were blocked and we couldn't find a doctor anywhere," she said.
Since then, she said, she has lived from day to day, not daring to look ahead for fear of what the future may hold for her and her child.
In some villages, away from the police, people were willing to talk openly, but there is so much fear in Rangoon that merely buying rice in the markets has become an awkward undertaking for a foreigner. We had to leave quickly after we were warned that a man had been listening intently to our conversation.
At many villages, anxious-looking headmen waved us away, and at one checkpoint which we could not avoid, our driver was hauled from the car by armed police, returning white-faced after 30 minutes, having paid a large bribe to avoid jail.
The influx of foreign aid workers –many of whom are permitted to enter the delta – has created work for Burma's feared Military Intelligence, which has driven most of last year's protesters underground or caught and jailed them. Agencies complain of having informers planted among their staff. Humanitarian workers describe scenes of terrible suffering in the delta, although most grudgingly admit that the regime has opened up more access to the region than during the first fortnight after the disaster, when it was almost completely closed.
"Eventually they got out of the way. Now they leave us to get on with it," said one aid worker. Another British veteran of disaster zones who has just returned from several weeks in the devastated town of Labutta described hellish scenes and spoke of government discrimination against unpopular minority groups.
She said: "Only a couple of weeks ago you could still see rotting bodies scattered around. People were just too traumatised to clear them up.
"There is rebuilding going on, you have to give the government credit for that. But villages with Karen or Muslim ethnic minorities don't seem to be getting any help at all."
Some Burmese are also critical of what they say is at best a patchy foreign aid effort. "These UN staff driving around in their white Landcruisers, what good are they doing?" one man asked. "Why are they working with the government? It would be better for us if they were working with the monasteries."
Guy Cave, country director of Save the Children, warned that the delta could now face a second disaster which may endure for decades.
"Conditions are incredibly grim," he said. "Our assessment is that three more years of assistance are needed. We hope that the world will continue to help the survivors of Nargis, but there is a real risk of this becoming a forgotten disaster."
Thousands of people whose lives were wrecked know that it will take them years to recover, and many fear they never will.
At a pottery near Rangoon, Tin Moe Aung surveyed the wreckage of his small factory, his family's livelihood. Tall trees fell into the building, much of his stock was smashed, the kiln was wrecked and he has neither money for repairs nor any prospect of government help.
"Our roof was gone with the wind," he sighed, gesturing at a tarpaulin pulled over the remains of his pots inside his four bare walls. He had searched in vain for the tin roof. "If only the cyclone had blown away our government too."
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