The elderly and children are beginning to die of dysentery because of a lack of clean drinking water, a Christian Aid partner said on Sunday 18 May.
‘Our staff members who are working in remote villages have seen a four-year-old child and a 70-year-old man with severe diarrhea. They were wasting away and they died,’ said a spokesman for the organisation, which cannot be named for security reasons.
‘There will be another wave of deaths from cholera from drinking dirty water – people are telling us it is already starting to strike.’
The partner is providing clean water for 25,000 people a day in cyclone-hit areas of Burma with huge water containers and water purification liquids.
‘We often arrive in a village and we are the first ones there – that is when we see people who are very ill and who have injuries from the cyclone,’ he said.
‘Before we get there the people are drinking contaminated water from ponds or rivers.’
The 975-litre water baskets are made of plastic and are easy to make and transport. Each one filled with purified water or rainwater can provide enough drinking water for 450 people each day.
‘They can be made very easily, but the problem now is sourcing the materials, as we cannot now get the plastic sheets we need,’ he said. ‘This is the biggest bottleneck to our work now. We urgently need to get more supplies.’
The organisation is working in hundreds of the hardest-hit villages in the Irrawaddy Delta, but said it was a logistical nightmare.
‘Our staff had to walk five miles through the mud to get to one village. They estimate that in a week they do three days of work and the rest of the time is spent travelling or dealing with logistics. They are having to wear life jackets because they are travelling by boat and many of them do not know how to swim.
‘Only if you have worked on the moon, will you know what it is like to work in Burma. It is a totally different context here. It is very difficult as the country has been so isolated for so long.
‘The Delta area was already very vulnerable as people were so much on the edge. Most of the people living there were landless labourers and lived in flimsy shacks in the fields. They were the worst hit. People have so little expectations that they will even get any help.
‘The military have no experience of a crisis on this scale and they are not working in the villages. They are afraid that people desperate for food will attack them.’
He said that air drops of aid could be counter-productive as it could lead to rioting, but transporting aid by ship could work.
His colleague who has just returned from some of the hardest-hit areas said people were not even able to bury the dead because the ground was still so waterlogged.
‘We cannot believe that the government is saying the relief phase is over,’ he said. ‘There is still so much to do to provide people with the basics. After that there will be a huge job of rebuilding needed, not only of people’s homes, but also of their ways of earning a living. They are farmers and they have lost their cattle, seeds, tools and their land is covered in seawater up to their knees, so they are going to need huge amounts of help for a long time to come.’