Can you talk about the situation on the ground since the cyclone struck Rangoon and the Irrawaddy delta? We started our (volunteer) emergency relief work on May 7, and we are still working. I have been to all the townships struck by the disaster, except Nga Pu Taw. There are 420 volunteers in our group. We divided our volunteers in groups to work more effectively. The places we go to are usually places nobody has been to yet. We have been to 42 such villages, most under the administrative area of Dedaye Township. Three of these villages are large village tracts where the paddy (rice) purchasing center was located. We went to three large village tracts in Bogalay Township. They hadn’t received aid not only from the government, but also from UN agencies. No NGOs had reached there yet.
What did you see there? What do they need at this moment? I can give you an example. There was a large village tract called Ma Ngay Gyi, where 1,000 families used to live and 700 houses were demolished totally. The other 300 houses left remnants of house-poles and floors. In total, 221 people died in the village and 300 are missing. Nobody knows where they are.We arrived there on May 22 and until that day, and we saw bodies floating in streams. Survivors there received 7 tins (measurement with condensed-milk-tin) of rice from authorities and an instant noodle pack from some independent donors. Apart from that, they received nothing else. That was the scene we saw 20 days after the cyclone. On May 28, we went from Bogalay to Tin Maung Chaung, Kyein Su, Hteik Chaung Kyi, Kan Su and Shwe Bo Su villages. The villagers there had received no assistance as well. They had almost no clothing and almost all the children were virtually naked. In numbers, there were 542 households there and all the houses were heavily damaged. There was a small pagoda left on high-ground. The villagers gathered themselves on the platform of the pagoda and sleep together. There were no UN or NGOs there yet, and they had received nothing. Our private group gave them what we had. The most horrible thing was that they had no water to drink and collected water when it rained. We gave them 10,000 bottles of drinking water.
What is the UN able to do? I am not happy with the UN. It doesn’t seem able to reach many of our people. The UN and NGO staff must work under the eye of the regime. That’s a problem. Why are they so concerned with the government's endorsement of their relief work? They should have taken more risks. Even if they can't go without permission, they could assist volunteers like us who are willing to go to the villages. There are a lot of groups like us assisting refugees. Many people have received nothing from the UN and NGOs. The UN and a lot of professional organizations send their aid to the compounds of the local township authorities.