Sayako Nogiwa arrived in Yangon on May 8, less than a week after cyclone Nargis devastated Myanmar’s coastal areas. The Association for Aid and Relief program director was among the first foreign aid workers to enter this reclusive Southeast Asian country after its worst natural disaster in recent memory, and she remains concerned about the ongoing relief efforts.
Nargis killed 70,000 people and left more than 2 million homeless. Some 60,000 Burmese were still missing two weeks after the cyclone made landfall on May 2, according to the United Nations and Myanmar’s military junta.
“I mean, if they are still missing,” Nogiwa said shortly after she returned from her six-day Myanmar trip to Tokyo, AAR’s headquarters. “I think they died.”
AAR is a Japanese nongovernmental organization that runs emergency assistance projects and supports people with disabilities. In Yangon, it operates foster programs and a vocational training center for the disabled.
After the cyclone, Nogiwa visited the area surrounding Yangon, the country’s capital, for six days. The area’s townships had been home to 300,000 among the city’s poorest dwellers.
“When I arrived, I was very shocked,” Nogiwa said.
Electricity cables were cut. Fallen trees blocked the roads, bridges had collapsed. Fires lit up the night sky. Often, mobile phones provided the only way for residents to get in touch with loved ones. But mobile phones are luxury goods only few in Myanmar can afford, Nogiwa said.
The fury of the cyclone blew away huts made of bamboo and leaves.
“They were very fragile,” Nogiwa said, “and everything is gone with the cyclone.”
The cyclone left behind ponds of stagnant water, and with it a smell of garbage and rotten food. The air was hot and humid, and every day for up to two hours strong tropical rain fell and was collected by thirsty locals.
Survivors sought shelter in schools, temples or with relatives and friends. Nogiwa heard of schools that housed 200-300 people despite a lack of food.
There was no refugee camp in the area Nogiwa monitored, and Nogiwa didn’t meet other aid workers. Many residents had not eaten for days; none had received emergency aid. But residents were rebuilding their own huts.
A family of eight members showed her one dish of beans with a small fish. That was all of their food for the day.
“Right after I entered Myanmar,” Nogiwa said, “so many people asked me: ‘Please, give me food.’”
Nogiwa pointed at the photo of a girl with cerebral palsy. Her father died three weeks before the cyclone hit and left the family with nothing to eat.
“Her mother cried and asked her neighbors to borrow rice,” Nogiwa remembered. “Then they ate little by little, borrowing rice.”
In the villages, she heard countless similar stories from local families.
Distributing aid
Once in Yangon, Nogiwa exchanged her U.S. dollars into Myanmar kyats. At shops in Yangon, she purchased the goods needed by cyclone victims, especially rice, salt, oil, beans and cooking pans. Charcoal and lighters were to make up for the lack of electricity and plastic sheets were to replace destroyed roofs.
Nogiwa and her 20 local colleagues packed these items into emergency bags. Each package contained 11 kilograms of rice and another one in beans - an estimated one-month supply for the average family of four to six people.
Nogiwa went to three villages and distributed 500 packages to as many families. Each emergency package was worth US$30, equivalent to the average Burmese monthly salary.
Local recipients did not expect emergency aid, Nogiwa said.
“I didn’t see anybody distributing food,” she remembered. “I stayed in Yangon for one week and I saw nobody distributing food.”
The cyclone had wracked most factories, destroyed cultivation land and killed livestock. Locals found themselves out of work as food prices soared. The price of rice doubled within days, for instance, and rice cost 10 times its usual price after Nargis made landfall, according to Nogiwa.
Few villagers could afford to buy clean water and other goods.
Dealing with local authorities
AAR has built good working relationships with residents and local authorities since starting its Myanmar operations in 1999. This proved crucial in Nargis’s aftermath.
Nogiwa’s multientry one-year visa, issued in February, allowed her to enter Myanmar without difficulty, even after the cyclone hit.
Once in Yangon, she discussed her emergency assistance plans with officials from the Ministry of Social Welfare.
“They said: ‘Please, distribute,’” she recalled.
With the government’s permission, AAR began dispatching food with no interference from local authorities.
“We are very independent and had no problem” managing the relief effort, Nogiwa said. “They didn’t take our emergency packages at all, they let us distribute.”
Not only did the military junta not intervene in AAR’s emergency operations. Government officials urged Nogiwa to distribute aid to another area southwest of Yangon called Ayeyarwaddy.
Nogiwa and her staff teamed up with two local NGOs: the Myanmar Disabled People Association and the Eden Center for Disabled Children. AAR had already worked with them in the past and their extensive network in the territory helped them reach out to victims.
Villages rarely consisted of more than several hundred families. No accurate maps were available. Many roads were blocked, and aid workers often had to use “cycle taxis” to reach villagers.
“They are very very slow,” Nogiwa said of these rides. “So we asked many people to distribute at the same time.”
In some areas, aid workers used a combination of trucks and boats to get aid to remote areas. For instance, it took AAR staff eight hours to arrive in Bogalay, a village in the Ayeyarwaddy division that lies just 90 miles outside Yangon - six hours by car and two by motor boat.
Fighting hopelessness
Nogiwa talked with dozens of cyclone victims in the Yangon division.
“‘Hopeless’ is the word I have heard the most often,” Nogiwa said. “Each time we distributed those goods to families, they said they were hopeless before we arrived, because they lost their job, money and food.”
At the same time, cyclone victims were eager to rebuild their lives, Nogiwa observed.
“I didn’t see people doing nothing and just sitting around,” she said.
Men sought work on construction sites, but these jobs hardly enabled them to purchase food for their families, let alone their children’s education. Women sold snacks or offered to wash other people’s clothes in the dirty river. Parents with disabled children were particularly struggling.
When she left Myanmar on May 14, there was still no electricity, phone service or food, Nogiwa said. She worries about the continuing shortage of food, shelter, medicines and drinking water. June marks the beginning of Myanmar’s five-month rainy season.
“The situation is very serious,” she sighed.
Memories of a tsunami
Nogiwa went to Sri Lanka three times after a tsunami ravaged Indian Ocean coastal regions in December 2004, and Myanmar’s destruction reminded her of what she saw then. But there was one key difference.
“The situation is most severe in Myanmar,” Nogiwa said, “because in Myanmar there is not enough aid. In Sri Lanka, I could see there was enough aid.”
Early in June 2008, Myanmar’s military rulers declared an end to the national emergency - a decision Nogiwa calls premature.
“According to the report of our staff, the situation is very serious,” she said. “But according to the government, the situation is not very serious. Now they say it is time to do rehabilitation.”
Meanwhile, diarrhea and coughs have become rampant. Nogiwa has heard of at least two cases of dengue fever in Yangon, and fears diseases will spread..
“Food and clean water are the most needed items,” Nogiwa said.
But that is just the beginning.
“Emergency aid is just to extend their life for a short period, but after one month we need to do something else,” she said. “The [poverty] situation is too serious in Myanmar.”
Nogiwa said international news coverage on the cyclone’s aftermath was lacking, even more so after an earthquake hit China’s Sichuan province and diverted worldwide attention.
“I think China is very important economically and politically so maybe that is why they don’t show much about Myanmar,” Nogiwa said. “But so many people are suffering, and the importance of life is no difference between Myanmar and Chinese people.”
Nogiwa plans to return to Myanmar at the end of June to expand AAR emergency assistance projects and oversee rehabilitation activities.