အရိုးမ်ားသေလး ေခ်းခါးသေလးလုပ္တဲ့ ဥာဏ္က်ယ္ၾကီးမ်ားဗ်ာ..ေလယာဥ္ ၂စင္းစာ အစာ ေတာ့ယူ မတဲ့..U S စစ္သားေတာ့ ဗမာေျမမနင္းနဲ ့တဲ့။
အစာနဲ့ေရသာ အေရးၾကီးတာမဟုတ္ပါ။ တပတ္ၾကာ ေသပုပ္ေနၾကတဲ ့ အေလာင္းေတြက အန့ံ ကနံ အရည္ေပ်ာ္ ရိရြဲ ။ ယင္ေကာင္ေတြလာ။ ၾကက္ဌက္ ပိုးမြားစား။ ေရေတြထဲမွာ ဘက္တီးရီးယား ေတြပြါး။ ပတ္၀န္း က်င္တခုလံုး ပ်က္စီးေတာ့မွာ။ ေရတပိႆာရွိရင္ သန္ ့တယ္ဆိုတဲ့ အယူနဲ ့ က်ိဳခ်က္ေသာက္ရင္ ေသာက္ရတာဘဲဆိုတဲ့ ဗမာ အေတြးနဲ ့ ေသာက္စရာေရမရွိရင္..က်ိဳခ်က္ေသာက္ၾကမယ္. မ်က္စိနဲ့ မျမင္ရတဲ့ ပိုးမြားေတြ က ၁၀၀ ဒီကရီ စင္တီဂရိတ္ ေရေနြး ပြက္ပြက္ဆူတာေတာင္ မေသနိုင္ၾကတဲ့ ပုိးေတြရွိတယ္။
ၾကြက္ကေလးေသးေသး တစ္ေကာင္ေတာင္ ေသရင္ တအိမ္လံုးနံတဲ့ အခါ..ေသထားတဲ့ လူေပါင္း ၁၀၀,၀၀၀ ဆိုတာ...ဘယ္ေလာက္နံမလဲသာေတြးၾကည့္။ ဘယ္ေလာက္ ၾကာေအာင္ ရွာေဖြသျဂိဳလ္ရမလဲ ဆို တာသာၾကည့္။ေရ၀ပ္ေနတဲ့ လယ္ကြင္းထဲက ေသေနတဲ့လူေတြ. ေရစပ္စပ္ ေနရွိန္ၾကဲၾကဲ.ပုပ္ျပီးဘက္တီးရီးယား တက္ေနတဲ့အခါ..အေလာင္းေကာက္သူ လက္ပလာနဲ့ေကာက္မရပါ။ Coverall ( chemical resistant suits and gloves, air supporting respirators, worker protection standard ( PPE) ေတြသံုးျပီးမွ ေကာက္ရမွာပါ။
ေနပူပူ။ suit ထူထူ။ ဒီလူေတြဟာ ေသသူဟာ သူ ့လူမ်ိဳး မဟူတ္ပါဘဲ ေစတနာနဲ့ လာေရာက္ရွင္းလင္း ေပးတဲ့ သူပါ။ ကိုယ့္ ဗမာလူမ်ိဳးေတြကေရာ..၇ ရက္ ၈ ရက္ၾကာ ပုပ္ေနတဲ့ လူေသေကာင္ကို သတီစြာ ကိုင္ခ်င္ၾကပါရဲ့ လား။ ေက်းဇူးရွင္မ်က္နွာ တံေတြး နဲ့ေထြးတာ..ရွက္စရာေကာင္းတာ..ဗမာမွန္ရင္သိပါတယ္။
ဒီ အေလာင္းေတြက ဘက္တီးရီးယားေတြနဲ့ ျပည့္ေနတဲ့ ျမစ္ေခ်ာင္းေရဟာ ညစ္ညမ္းျပီး အဆိပ္အတိ ျပီးပါ တယ္။ ေသာက္မရ သုံးမရ။ ၀မ္းေရာဂါပိုး။ အသဲေယာင္ အသား၀ါ။ အူေယာင္ငန္းဖ်ား။ ၀မ္းကိုက္၀မ္းေဖာ ေရာဂါနဲ ့ အသားကိုပုတ္ရိေအာင္စားေစတဲ့ "flesh-eating" bacteria ေတြ ေပါက္ဖြား နိူင္ပါတယ္။
ဒါေၾကာင့္လည္း ျမစ္အညွာက ညစ္ညမ္းသမ်ွ ျမစ္ေအာက္ေျခေဒသျဖစ္တဲ့ ဧရာ၀တီျမစ္၀က်ြန္း ေပၚေဒသဟာ.တန္ဆာခံျဖစ္ျပီး စစ္အတြင္းက ကူးစက္ ေရာဂါဇုန္ အျဖစ္ ေက်ာ္ၾကားခဲ့တာပါ.။ ဒါကို..ရွင္းလင္းေအာင္ လုပ္ေပးဖို ့ရာ ျပည္သူ ့အာဏာကို လူယုထားတဲ့ နအဖ မွာ တာ၀န္ရွိပါတယ္။ ကိုယ္တိုင္မလုပ္နိူင္။ တတ္က လည္းမတတ္.။ လာကူမယ္ လက္ကမ္းတာ..ပုတ္ခ်တာဟာ..လာကူသူကိုတင္ ေစာ္ကားတာ မဟုတ္ဘဲ မိသားစုေသကြဲ ပူေဆြး ေသာကေရာက္ အကူုအညီမဲ့ အိုးမဲ့အိမ္မဲ့ ျဖစ္ေနတဲ့ ျပည္သူေတြရဲ့ အသက္ေပါင္း မ်ားစြာကို ေသဒဏ္ ေပးလိုက္တာပါဘဲ။
မိုက္ရိုင္းတယ္ဗ်ာ..အေမရိကန္ေရတပ္က လူေသေတြရွင္း ပတ္၀န္းက်င္သန့္ရွင္းေရး။ ေရသန့္ရရွိေရး လူမွုေရးလုပ္ငန္းေတြ လုပ္ေပးဖို ့ဘဲလာကူတာျဖစ္ျပီး နိူင္ငံေရး လံုး၀မပါဘူုး လို ့ တိတိလင္းလင္း ၀န္ခံ ထားေပမဲ့..ကိုယ့္မဟုတ္တာ လုပ္ထားလို့ေၾကာက္ကန္ကန္ေနတဲ့ နအဖ က..စစ္ျပင္ျပီး မိုက္ခ်င္ေနတာ..ကမၻာမီးေလာင္ သားေကာင္ ခ်နင္းတာပါဘဲ။
မုုန္တိုင္း ၀မ္နင္ကို ဘာျဖစ္ျဖစ္ ေနျပည္ေတာ္ ကုန္းတြင္းပိုင္းတည္ထားတာ..ပင္လယ္နား ေရၾကီးတာဒိူ ့နဲ့မဆိုင္။ လူေသေကာင္ပုပ္ေျမာတဲ့ေရ ေသာက္လို ့၀မ္းေရာဂါျဖစ္တာ.ဒို ့နဲ ့မဆိုင္ဆို တာ
မုန္တိုင္းၾကားေသတာ တသိန္း။ အိုးအိမ္မဲ့က တသန္း။ ၀မ္းေရာဂါထပ္ျဖစ္ရင္..အိမ္ပစ္ေျပး ရြာပစ္ေျပး..တကဲ့ သေရာၾကီးခိုင္းမွာပါ.။ ေနာက္တပ္ ဘယ္ႏွစ္သိန္း ထပ္ေသရဦးမလဲ။
ကဲ...ဗမာ ေယာက်္ားသားမ်ားခင္ဗ်ား..ဒီအတိုင္းၾကည့္ေနေတာ့မွာလား။
ေရြွျပည္ၾကီးမွာ..က်ားေသာင္းက်န္းေနပါတယ္။ ၀ိုင္းဖမ္းၾကရေအာင္ ပါလားခင္ဗ်ာ..
Two Planes With Aid Land, but U.S. Help Still Refused
Myanmar Balks at Giving Visas to Emergency Relief Workers
By NICK SCHIFRIN and KIRIT RADIA, BANGKOK, Thailand May 8, 2008
Frustrated by the Myanmar government's refusal to accept help for the growing humanitarian crisis, the head of America's disaster assistance agency hinted that the United States might ignore the junta and simply air drop food and supplies to desperate survivors.
After days of stalling, the government agrees to allow aid into the country.The U.S. issued the warning as indications grew that the situation was getting worse in the wake of the weekend cyclone, which left as many as 70,000 dead or missing, according to the Myanmar government. A top U.S. diplomat in Myanmar has said the death toll could top 100,000.
The head of humanitarian affairs for the United Nations, John Holmes, said today that 1.5 million people were "severely affected" by Cyclone Nargis, and in the five days since the storm struck they have become "increasingly desperate." "There is a real danger that an even worse tragedy may unfold if we cannot get the aid that's desperately needed in quickly," Holmes warned.
Holmes said he was "disappointed" by the inability to get large amounts of aid or emergency relief teams into the ravaged country.
USAID's Director of Foreign Disaster Assistance Ky Luu spoke in more blunt terms. He complained at a briefing today that the Myanmar regime has not even responded to U.S. requests for visas for its experienced teams of emergency relief specialists who are awaiting approval in Thailand.
The U.S. has helicopters and a C-130 cargo plane in Thailand ready to head into Myanmar if approval is granted.
Myanmar at Risk of Second Death WaveFearing a wave of death by starvation or an outbreak of disease, Luu said, "We don't have time to wait."
Luu said the U.S. is considering airdrops into Myanmar, but he said that is not their first choice and USAID would prefer to be granted permission first.
Simply dropping supplies would not be an efficient way to disperse aid because there would be no coordination on the ground and no way to notify victims that aid was being dropped for them.
For millions of survivors, however, there is no one coming.
"Are there any rescue teams coming here?" asks an interviewer to a victim of Cyclone Nargis.
"No one comes. Who will come?" the woman responds on video provided by the Democratic Voice of Burma, an anti-government group based in Norway. "No one comes and nothing is done. People are starving."
"The government is not helping us. No aid is coming. There is no money, no rice," Mu Sanda told the Associated Press while huddling in a monastery, where she has slept since losing her house in the killer storm.
In the town of Tawkhayanlay, survivors told an ABC News producer they had to swim across the rice fields as the cyclone bore down on them. While they were swimming the water rose. The strong made it to shore, but 43 of the weak drowned. The town's 2,000 survivors are still waiting, having received no aid.
Six days after the storm arrived, the Myanmar government allowed the first major international shipment to land in Yangon today, a United Nations flight carrying high-energy biscuits, medicine, water purification tablets and other aid items.
But for so many of the cyclone's victims, for the million people who are homeless, no help has arrived.
Both U.S. and U.N. officials have made their frustrations clear.
A woman and her children await free rice rations provided by the government following last weekend's devastating cyclone on the outskirts of Yangon, Myanmar, Thursday May 8, 2008. Myanmar's isolationist government blocked United Nations efforts Thursday to airlift urgently needed food aid to survivors of the cyclone that may have killed more than 100,000 people, officials said.
"You look at the images of the people who are suffering there and you know that you have the tools just right here at your fingertips and they are at the fingertips of the Burmese to use and they are not picking the tools up to use them," said U.S. ambassador to Thailand Eric John. "That's incredibly … that's beyond frustrating, it's the level of tragedy that gets worse by the day."
As the aid sits on tarmacs in Dubai and Italy and Dhaka, Bangladesh, aid groups are beginning to hear of outbreaks of disease.
Officials at the U.S. Embassy said they believed people were suffering from diarrhea. And the World Health Organization has received reports of malaria outbreaks.
In the village of Aphyauk, villagers told an ABC News producer that they can't grow any of their crops because they spend their days cleaning up after the storm. "Some people are ill but they are afraid to talk about it," Mae Thiwari said by phone. "At the moment the only two things they want: food and water."
Myanmar's military government continues to refuse to issue visas to aid workers.
"A visa that they get today is worth a lot more lives than it is tomorrow," John said.
John paraded four members of a disaster response team in front of reporters to try and prove Americans were only interested in Myanmar to help. They included a 31-year-old named Anita Malley, from Kalamazoo, Mich., and a 30-year-old named Courtney Brown from Washington.
"These are humanitarian workers. They're ready to go in to help. They're not ready to go in to overthrow the government," John said with the four Americans behind him.
Asked whether aid could enter Myanmar without foreign aid workers, both American and U.N. officials say aid is useless without a team of experts who know how to distribute it.
"We will not, the World Food Program, will not just bring our supplies into an airport, and dump it and take off, and that's one reason why there is a hold up now," Anthony Banbury, the WFP regional director, told the Associated Press. "Because we are going to bring in not just supplies, but a lot of capacity to go with them to make sure the supplies get to the people who need them."
As of right now, those supplies are nowhere near the people who need them.
A farmer who refused to give his name showed an ABC News producer his house. It is flattened, but he still lives there. He has nowhere else to go. "It will take him at least two years to work to try and rebuild," Thiwari said. He earns only $2 a day and "nobody has asked him what he needs."
Myanmar Cyclone Death Toll Up to 22,000 Visa Delays for Myanmar Aid WorkersTeddy Din told the Adventist Development and Relief Agency International that he returned to the town of Piensalu, where he rode out the storm and believes that of 150,000 villagers, up to 50,000 might be dead. The village, he says, is struggling under horrific conditions.
"During the last days they ate and drank coconut juice to survive – which saved them. At most places there is no drinking water, everything salty. There are many coconut trees around. Found some rice and shared among all. People start picking up floating stuff. Immediate after the cyclone ate fresh flesh from dead animals [cows, buffalos], but now they can't eat them anymore."
The woman who spoke with the Democratic Voice of Burma says she survived, but that her daughter-in-law didn't.
"My pregnant daughter-in-law fell into the water and since then disappeared," she said. "We searched, but we did not find her. There are many dead bodies. How can we easily distinguish who is who?"
အစာနဲ့ေရသာ အေရးၾကီးတာမဟုတ္ပါ။ တပတ္ၾကာ ေသပုပ္ေနၾကတဲ ့ အေလာင္းေတြက အန့ံ ကနံ အရည္ေပ်ာ္ ရိရြဲ ။ ယင္ေကာင္ေတြလာ။ ၾကက္ဌက္ ပိုးမြားစား။ ေရေတြထဲမွာ ဘက္တီးရီးယား ေတြပြါး။ ပတ္၀န္း က်င္တခုလံုး ပ်က္စီးေတာ့မွာ။ ေရတပိႆာရွိရင္ သန္ ့တယ္ဆိုတဲ့ အယူနဲ ့ က်ိဳခ်က္ေသာက္ရင္ ေသာက္ရတာဘဲဆိုတဲ့ ဗမာ အေတြးနဲ ့ ေသာက္စရာေရမရွိရင္..က်ိဳခ်က္ေသာက္ၾကမယ္. မ်က္စိနဲ့ မျမင္ရတဲ့ ပိုးမြားေတြ က ၁၀၀ ဒီကရီ စင္တီဂရိတ္ ေရေနြး ပြက္ပြက္ဆူတာေတာင္ မေသနိုင္ၾကတဲ့ ပုိးေတြရွိတယ္။
ၾကြက္ကေလးေသးေသး တစ္ေကာင္ေတာင္ ေသရင္ တအိမ္လံုးနံတဲ့ အခါ..ေသထားတဲ့ လူေပါင္း ၁၀၀,၀၀၀ ဆိုတာ...ဘယ္ေလာက္နံမလဲသာေတြးၾကည့္။ ဘယ္ေလာက္ ၾကာေအာင္ ရွာေဖြသျဂိဳလ္ရမလဲ ဆို တာသာၾကည့္။ေရ၀ပ္ေနတဲ့ လယ္ကြင္းထဲက ေသေနတဲ့လူေတြ. ေရစပ္စပ္ ေနရွိန္ၾကဲၾကဲ.ပုပ္ျပီးဘက္တီးရီးယား တက္ေနတဲ့အခါ..အေလာင္းေကာက္သူ လက္ပလာနဲ့ေကာက္မရပါ။ Coverall ( chemical resistant suits and gloves, air supporting respirators, worker protection standard ( PPE) ေတြသံုးျပီးမွ ေကာက္ရမွာပါ။
ေနပူပူ။ suit ထူထူ။ ဒီလူေတြဟာ ေသသူဟာ သူ ့လူမ်ိဳး မဟူတ္ပါဘဲ ေစတနာနဲ့ လာေရာက္ရွင္းလင္း ေပးတဲ့ သူပါ။ ကိုယ့္ ဗမာလူမ်ိဳးေတြကေရာ..၇ ရက္ ၈ ရက္ၾကာ ပုပ္ေနတဲ့ လူေသေကာင္ကို သတီစြာ ကိုင္ခ်င္ၾကပါရဲ့ လား။ ေက်းဇူးရွင္မ်က္နွာ တံေတြး နဲ့ေထြးတာ..ရွက္စရာေကာင္းတာ..ဗမာမွန္ရင္သိပါတယ္။
ဒီ အေလာင္းေတြက ဘက္တီးရီးယားေတြနဲ့ ျပည့္ေနတဲ့ ျမစ္ေခ်ာင္းေရဟာ ညစ္ညမ္းျပီး အဆိပ္အတိ ျပီးပါ တယ္။ ေသာက္မရ သုံးမရ။ ၀မ္းေရာဂါပိုး။ အသဲေယာင္ အသား၀ါ။ အူေယာင္ငန္းဖ်ား။ ၀မ္းကိုက္၀မ္းေဖာ ေရာဂါနဲ ့ အသားကိုပုတ္ရိေအာင္စားေစတဲ့ "flesh-eating" bacteria ေတြ ေပါက္ဖြား နိူင္ပါတယ္။
ဒါေၾကာင့္လည္း ျမစ္အညွာက ညစ္ညမ္းသမ်ွ ျမစ္ေအာက္ေျခေဒသျဖစ္တဲ့ ဧရာ၀တီျမစ္၀က်ြန္း ေပၚေဒသဟာ.တန္ဆာခံျဖစ္ျပီး စစ္အတြင္းက ကူးစက္ ေရာဂါဇုန္ အျဖစ္ ေက်ာ္ၾကားခဲ့တာပါ.။ ဒါကို..ရွင္းလင္းေအာင္ လုပ္ေပးဖို ့ရာ ျပည္သူ ့အာဏာကို လူယုထားတဲ့ နအဖ မွာ တာ၀န္ရွိပါတယ္။ ကိုယ္တိုင္မလုပ္နိူင္။ တတ္က လည္းမတတ္.။ လာကူမယ္ လက္ကမ္းတာ..ပုတ္ခ်တာဟာ..လာကူသူကိုတင္ ေစာ္ကားတာ မဟုတ္ဘဲ မိသားစုေသကြဲ ပူေဆြး ေသာကေရာက္ အကူုအညီမဲ့ အိုးမဲ့အိမ္မဲ့ ျဖစ္ေနတဲ့ ျပည္သူေတြရဲ့ အသက္ေပါင္း မ်ားစြာကို ေသဒဏ္ ေပးလိုက္တာပါဘဲ။
မိုက္ရိုင္းတယ္ဗ်ာ..အေမရိကန္ေရတပ္က လူေသေတြရွင္း ပတ္၀န္းက်င္သန့္ရွင္းေရး။ ေရသန့္ရရွိေရး လူမွုေရးလုပ္ငန္းေတြ လုပ္ေပးဖို ့ဘဲလာကူတာျဖစ္ျပီး နိူင္ငံေရး လံုး၀မပါဘူုး လို ့ တိတိလင္းလင္း ၀န္ခံ ထားေပမဲ့..ကိုယ့္မဟုတ္တာ လုပ္ထားလို့ေၾကာက္ကန္ကန္ေနတဲ့ နအဖ က..စစ္ျပင္ျပီး မိုက္ခ်င္ေနတာ..ကမၻာမီးေလာင္ သားေကာင္ ခ်နင္းတာပါဘဲ။
မုုန္တိုင္း ၀မ္နင္ကို ဘာျဖစ္ျဖစ္ ေနျပည္ေတာ္ ကုန္းတြင္းပိုင္းတည္ထားတာ..ပင္လယ္နား ေရၾကီးတာဒိူ ့နဲ့မဆိုင္။ လူေသေကာင္ပုပ္ေျမာတဲ့ေရ ေသာက္လို ့၀မ္းေရာဂါျဖစ္တာ.ဒို ့နဲ ့မဆိုင္ဆို တာ
မုန္တိုင္းၾကားေသတာ တသိန္း။ အိုးအိမ္မဲ့က တသန္း။ ၀မ္းေရာဂါထပ္ျဖစ္ရင္..အိမ္ပစ္ေျပး ရြာပစ္ေျပး..တကဲ့ သေရာၾကီးခိုင္းမွာပါ.။ ေနာက္တပ္ ဘယ္ႏွစ္သိန္း ထပ္ေသရဦးမလဲ။
ကဲ...ဗမာ ေယာက်္ားသားမ်ားခင္ဗ်ား..ဒီအတိုင္းၾကည့္ေနေတာ့မွာလား။
ေရြွျပည္ၾကီးမွာ..က်ားေသာင္းက်န္းေနပါတယ္။ ၀ိုင္းဖမ္းၾကရေအာင္ ပါလားခင္ဗ်ာ..
Two Planes With Aid Land, but U.S. Help Still Refused
Myanmar Balks at Giving Visas to Emergency Relief Workers
By NICK SCHIFRIN and KIRIT RADIA, BANGKOK, Thailand May 8, 2008
Frustrated by the Myanmar government's refusal to accept help for the growing humanitarian crisis, the head of America's disaster assistance agency hinted that the United States might ignore the junta and simply air drop food and supplies to desperate survivors.
After days of stalling, the government agrees to allow aid into the country.The U.S. issued the warning as indications grew that the situation was getting worse in the wake of the weekend cyclone, which left as many as 70,000 dead or missing, according to the Myanmar government. A top U.S. diplomat in Myanmar has said the death toll could top 100,000.
The head of humanitarian affairs for the United Nations, John Holmes, said today that 1.5 million people were "severely affected" by Cyclone Nargis, and in the five days since the storm struck they have become "increasingly desperate." "There is a real danger that an even worse tragedy may unfold if we cannot get the aid that's desperately needed in quickly," Holmes warned.
Holmes said he was "disappointed" by the inability to get large amounts of aid or emergency relief teams into the ravaged country.
USAID's Director of Foreign Disaster Assistance Ky Luu spoke in more blunt terms. He complained at a briefing today that the Myanmar regime has not even responded to U.S. requests for visas for its experienced teams of emergency relief specialists who are awaiting approval in Thailand.
The U.S. has helicopters and a C-130 cargo plane in Thailand ready to head into Myanmar if approval is granted.
Myanmar at Risk of Second Death WaveFearing a wave of death by starvation or an outbreak of disease, Luu said, "We don't have time to wait."
Luu said the U.S. is considering airdrops into Myanmar, but he said that is not their first choice and USAID would prefer to be granted permission first.
Simply dropping supplies would not be an efficient way to disperse aid because there would be no coordination on the ground and no way to notify victims that aid was being dropped for them.
For millions of survivors, however, there is no one coming.
"Are there any rescue teams coming here?" asks an interviewer to a victim of Cyclone Nargis.
"No one comes. Who will come?" the woman responds on video provided by the Democratic Voice of Burma, an anti-government group based in Norway. "No one comes and nothing is done. People are starving."
"The government is not helping us. No aid is coming. There is no money, no rice," Mu Sanda told the Associated Press while huddling in a monastery, where she has slept since losing her house in the killer storm.
In the town of Tawkhayanlay, survivors told an ABC News producer they had to swim across the rice fields as the cyclone bore down on them. While they were swimming the water rose. The strong made it to shore, but 43 of the weak drowned. The town's 2,000 survivors are still waiting, having received no aid.
Six days after the storm arrived, the Myanmar government allowed the first major international shipment to land in Yangon today, a United Nations flight carrying high-energy biscuits, medicine, water purification tablets and other aid items.
But for so many of the cyclone's victims, for the million people who are homeless, no help has arrived.
Both U.S. and U.N. officials have made their frustrations clear.
A woman and her children await free rice rations provided by the government following last weekend's devastating cyclone on the outskirts of Yangon, Myanmar, Thursday May 8, 2008. Myanmar's isolationist government blocked United Nations efforts Thursday to airlift urgently needed food aid to survivors of the cyclone that may have killed more than 100,000 people, officials said.
"You look at the images of the people who are suffering there and you know that you have the tools just right here at your fingertips and they are at the fingertips of the Burmese to use and they are not picking the tools up to use them," said U.S. ambassador to Thailand Eric John. "That's incredibly … that's beyond frustrating, it's the level of tragedy that gets worse by the day."
As the aid sits on tarmacs in Dubai and Italy and Dhaka, Bangladesh, aid groups are beginning to hear of outbreaks of disease.
Officials at the U.S. Embassy said they believed people were suffering from diarrhea. And the World Health Organization has received reports of malaria outbreaks.
In the village of Aphyauk, villagers told an ABC News producer that they can't grow any of their crops because they spend their days cleaning up after the storm. "Some people are ill but they are afraid to talk about it," Mae Thiwari said by phone. "At the moment the only two things they want: food and water."
Myanmar's military government continues to refuse to issue visas to aid workers.
"A visa that they get today is worth a lot more lives than it is tomorrow," John said.
John paraded four members of a disaster response team in front of reporters to try and prove Americans were only interested in Myanmar to help. They included a 31-year-old named Anita Malley, from Kalamazoo, Mich., and a 30-year-old named Courtney Brown from Washington.
"These are humanitarian workers. They're ready to go in to help. They're not ready to go in to overthrow the government," John said with the four Americans behind him.
Asked whether aid could enter Myanmar without foreign aid workers, both American and U.N. officials say aid is useless without a team of experts who know how to distribute it.
"We will not, the World Food Program, will not just bring our supplies into an airport, and dump it and take off, and that's one reason why there is a hold up now," Anthony Banbury, the WFP regional director, told the Associated Press. "Because we are going to bring in not just supplies, but a lot of capacity to go with them to make sure the supplies get to the people who need them."
As of right now, those supplies are nowhere near the people who need them.
A farmer who refused to give his name showed an ABC News producer his house. It is flattened, but he still lives there. He has nowhere else to go. "It will take him at least two years to work to try and rebuild," Thiwari said. He earns only $2 a day and "nobody has asked him what he needs."
Myanmar Cyclone Death Toll Up to 22,000 Visa Delays for Myanmar Aid WorkersTeddy Din told the Adventist Development and Relief Agency International that he returned to the town of Piensalu, where he rode out the storm and believes that of 150,000 villagers, up to 50,000 might be dead. The village, he says, is struggling under horrific conditions.
"During the last days they ate and drank coconut juice to survive – which saved them. At most places there is no drinking water, everything salty. There are many coconut trees around. Found some rice and shared among all. People start picking up floating stuff. Immediate after the cyclone ate fresh flesh from dead animals [cows, buffalos], but now they can't eat them anymore."
The woman who spoke with the Democratic Voice of Burma says she survived, but that her daughter-in-law didn't.
"My pregnant daughter-in-law fell into the water and since then disappeared," she said. "We searched, but we did not find her. There are many dead bodies. How can we easily distinguish who is who?"
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