Special to In Asia, by an on-the-ground contributor in Burma to The Asia Foundation.

There is a phrase I hear over and over as I travel around the Irrawaddy delta in Burma (also known as Myanmar): “We have nothing left.”

Six months ago, Cyclone Nargis made landfall in this region and roared across the flat and vulnerable lands of the delta, bringing with it a massive storm surge of sea water. The wind and the water combined into a fatal and catastrophic force that wiped entire villages off the map. People drowned. Houses were demolished by the storm. Personal possessions washed away. Farms animals were killed. Fishing boats sank or were smashed to pieces in the waves. Survivors in the worst-hit areas were left with nothing.
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Special to In Asia, by an on-the-ground contributor in Burma to The Asia Foundation.

Rangoon, Burma - One month has passed since Cyclone Nargis hit Rangoon and the Delta region of Burma. Electricity is back on at the house where I am staying in Rangoon, though the phone-line is still down. Monsoon season has begun and it rains heavily almost every day – dark and angry storms that threaten to drown the city in a daily deluge as murky waters rise up from the overburdened sewage systems.

Solid information about the situation in the Delta area is still frustratingly hard to come by due to restricted access.
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Special to In Asia and Give2Asia, by an on-the-ground contributor in Burma to The Asia Foundation.

Rangoon, May 20. I am staying in a house without electricity, and at night I write by candlelight, the battery on my laptop dwindling, draining. In the mornings, I go to one of the city’s high-end hotels for the Internet connection. I want reliable information about the ravaged fishing villages and rice farming communities in the Delta. I seek people out for their stories—executives, aid workers, doctors.

A businessman who has just returned from the worst-hit south-western part of the Delta in a private boat loaded with supplies, shows me film footage of villages that are nothing more than piles of water-logged timber. Shocked survivors huddle under make-shift shelters, with no access to relief supplies or medicine. Pointing to villages further south, in areas not yet reached by any aid two weeks after the storm, they say blankly into the camera, “Down there, it is even worse.”
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Ten days ago, Cyclone Nargis hit Burma. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies recently estimated that the resultant death toll is between 68,833 and 127,990. The surviving Burmese citizens have been deeply affected by widespread destruction including power and telecommunication breakdowns, with some villages being completely destroyed. According to the World Food Program, vast acres of standing rice crops have been wiped out and flooding and road damages have cut off food supplies. More than a million people have become homeless and are suffering from an acute shortage of food and water.

On May 6, 2008 the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued a general license to help facilitate the flow of funds for humanitarian assistance to the Burmese people in the wake of the cyclone.

With your support, the Give2Asia Burma Cyclone Relief Fund will work with organizations based in Southeast Asia to facilitate recovery programs. So far, Give2Asia’s partners include
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