Better material than cash aid for Myanmar
We may have forgotten that Cyclone Nargis took tens of thousand of lives in the Irrawaddy Delta just weeks ago. With the season finale of American Idol, Akademi Fantasi and the loss of sovereignty over a rock or two to Singapore a few days ago, who can blame us? There are far more important things going on with our lives than anything that happens in the delta.
But if we actually cared a little about the victims of Nargis, we would remember that the junta placed restrictions on foreign aid. The junta even refused aid from relief groups, stating that they preferred government-to-government transactions.
The junta of Myanmar must be the luckiest government in the world because it can afford to become a chooser in a time when it really should be a beggar. Unbelievably, it took some coaxing by governments of other countries before the junta actually relented and allowed its own people to be helped. Even then, aid workers were barred from entering the country.
To think that other governments cared more about a person than the person's government really reflects badly on a government.
Aid eventually crept in but as the blankets, medicine, food and cash got into Myanmar, there were reports that the junta packaged the aid as if it were provided by the junta. But I suppose, if the aid gets to the victims, it does not matter. Black cat, white cat: whichever catches the mouse is a good cat.
There were also reports that some of the aid was redirected to the family members of those within the junta. The French had foreseen this by initially offering a small amount of aid and said they did not believe the junta had the trustworthiness to manage the aid. I share the skepticism of the French government.
In many cases, money transfer is a superior method of giving aid when compared to transfer in kind. Money transfer has the potential of improving the receivers' welfare much more than what material goods can ever do. This is especially so when the receivers know exactly what they need while donors are unfamiliar with the local environment.
Money, after all, is the most generally accepted medium of exchange. It is usually harder for a person to barter blanket for food because the double coincidence of wants has to occur first before that transaction can take place. This is true for many situations, including the one involving fuel subsidy in Malaysia. Money transferred to those the authority wishes to help is a better policy in enhancing welfare than material transfer.
Money or cash transfer, however, does suffer from a problem called moral hazard. In the case of Myanmar, the donors may want to help cyclone victims buy food, blanket and rebuild their livelihood. But with little ability to oversee how it is actually spent, the victims may use the money to buy cigarettes or something less useful in improving their welfare.
Money transfer may also not be as useful in Myanmar as in other places in peaceful times. Disasters, especially the major ones, tend to push prices up as distribution channels suffer damage, causing supply problems. Add to the increased demand, prices will rocket, hence reducing its purchasing power.
Prices shot up in Florida in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and it surely is happening in the Irrawaddy. Some people derisively called it scalping but I call it economics. Regardless, donation in kind overcomes the problem of weaker purchasing power that money donation will suffer.
And, just as how the French had expressed their skepticism, the junta cannot be trusted with money.
Now, there are caring Malaysian organisations out there that seek to alleviate the suffering of those in Myanmar by sending money over directly. Noble but their actions could prove unhelpful.
Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams is a young participant of the local labour market.
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Aid groups prepare to test Myanmar access
The Associated PressMay 26, 2008
YANGON, Myanmar: International aid agencies prepared Monday to test the Myanmar junta's promises to allow their workers greater access to the estimated 2.4 million people affected by Cyclone Nargis.
Myanmar's leaders have virtually barred foreign relief workers and international agencies from the delta since the storm struck May 3. But the UN secretary general, Ban Ki Moon, said Friday that the junta chief, Senior General Than Shwe, had agreed that international aid workers would be able "to freely reach the needy people."
Aid organizations immediately began planning to send foreign teams into the Irrawaddy Delta and to resubmit visa applications for staffers who had previously been rejected.
Official estimates put the death toll at about 78,000, with another 56,000 missing, though international aid agencies say the toll could be much higher, especially if aid continues to be blocked.
"Now, if we can get these experts out, we can start putting in place the water purification machines, warehousing and the other things that we need, and this operation can quickly scale up," Richard Horsey, a spokesman for the UN humanitarian operation, said in Bangkok. "By quickly scale up, I mean that in the coming days we can start to reach all of those that need to be reached."
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said it had started negotiations with the government on allowing three teams with a total of six aid workers into the delta.
"We're hoping to get those teams in the field to start providing fresh water to the people," said France Hurtubise, the group's spokeswoman.
The UN has estimated about 42 percent of the 2.4 million people affected by the storm had received some kind of emergency assistance. But only 23 percent of the two million people living in the 15 worst-affected townships had been reached. The International Red Cross said Monday that at least 1.5 million people, many of them hungry and ailing, remained homeless in the delta.
Ban's mission to knock down Myanmar's barriers yielded some results Sunday, when 51 donor nations meeting in Yangon offered more than $100 million to help the country recover from the cyclone. But the donors warned the ruling generals that the aid is contingent on access to the hardest-hit areas.
Myanmar's leaders and potential donors continued to take a guarded tone Monday. The Myanmar prime minister, Lieutenant General Thein Sein, said that only civilian vessels could take part in the aid operation and that they would have to go through Yangon.
That seemed to nullify plans for U.S., British and French warships that have been waiting for more than a week off Myanmar's coast to join in the relief operation. The French government said it planned to unload 1,000 tons of humanitarian supplies aboard its vessel in Thailand and turn it over to the United Nations for transfer to Myanmar.
Myanmar has estimated economic damage from the storm at about $11 billion. Ban has said that the relief operation would last at least six months.
THAT KYAR VILLAGE, Myanmar: Sitting dejectedly in a hut surrounded by the debris and stench that are the aftermath of the powerful cyclone that struck here three weeks ago, Then Khin, 70, reflected on the grim task of rebuilding what is left of her family and their home.
Since Cyclone Nargis devastated the area May 3, this isolated village in the Irrawaddy Delta has been all but ignored by the junta. As of this past weekend, it had yet to be reached by international relief workers.
Then Khin lost 15 family members when Nargis swept through. For those in the family who survived, life is a litany of woes and the recovery has only just begun.
A 29-year-old grandson of Then Khin has gone insane, wandering day and night through the fields looking for his wife and son, both of them swept away by the furious floodwaters that came with the cyclone.
Her eldest granddaughter, Thit Khine, 31, who lost her husband and both her children, remains haunted by the memory of her 2-year-old daughter, Thwe Tar, who was clinging to her mother's neck when the storm snatched her away.
Still another grandchild of Then Khin, a 14-year-old girl named Myint Myint Kyi, lost her ability to speak for two days after losing all of her immediate family: both her parents and her 7-year-old twin brothers. When she finally came to, she was a different girl, no longer interested in school.
"I am sad," the girl said, with tears streaming down her cheeks, while her grandmother wiped away her own tears. "Come next month, I was supposed to take my twin brothers to school with me."
For people like Then Khin's family, for those who live in the isolated, outlying hamlets of the delta, putting their lives back together after Nargis has been a sad affair - and a struggle that international aid workers have largely been unable to help ease. The Myanmar government, critics say, is distrustful of outsiders and does not want the villagers to meet foreigners. Meanwhile, the ruling junta is unable or unwilling to provide adequate help on its own.
"I don't expect anything from the government. I never have and I don't now," Then Khin said. "I heard on the radio about foreign help on its way, but I haven't seen any in the past 20 days. It's the same as before, nothing changed."
The only government help Then Khin has received was a small packet of rice, which she won by the luck of the draw. The village authorities came only once, with some rice, blankets and other relief from the central government. The supplies were distributed by lottery because there was so little. The rice packet was not enough for even one meal for the 20 surviving family members who now crowd her hut.
The village of That Kyar lies near the mouth of the delta's Pyapon River, downstream from Pyapon, a major delta trading town about 100 kilometers, or 60 miles, southwest of the principal city of Yangon.
A motorboat that left Pyapon carrying several visitors to That Kyar reached the village after more than two hours on the river, navigating around capsized ships and broken jetties.
Upon reaching a point in the river where the sea air finally smelled of salt and where gulls could be seen, the boat moved into a tributary and chugged upstream for another 40 minutes. Once a picturesque hamlet lined with coconut trees, That Kyar is now little more than a heap of rotting debris.
Unlike the cyclone victims who live near roads and receive help from private donors bringing supplies from the bigger cities, villages like That Kyar have been left to fend for themselves.
Three weeks after the cyclone came and went, the United Nations said that aid had reached less than one-fourth of the two million survivors in the hardest hit areas of the delta.
In what many observers hope will be a breakthrough, Myanmar's generals finally told the United Nations last week that they would allow workers of all nationalities to go into the devastated areas to assess the damage. So far, virtually all foreign aid workers have been banned from the delta.
And it remained unclear how much access relief workers and aid agencies will have to those areas.
Many people there did not even know that Saturday was the day they were supposed to vote on a new Constitution, a document designed to prolong the junta's grip on power.
In That Kyar, a village of 300 families, a thin blue tent donated by the Russian government was the only obvious sign of foreign help. Amid the debris, the Myanmar government had put up a freshly painted sign telling the villagers to vote last weekend.
"Government and international assistance hasn't reached this village, not yet," said a Myanmar volunteer who began shipping plastic roofing sheets and food by ferry to That Kyar and four neighboring villages early last week.
Young Burmese like him, who navigate the delta tributaries to bring aid to the outlying hamlets, appeared to be providing the only substantive help reaching people here.
But across those tributaries, bloated human bodies are still a common sight.
"After the cyclone, so many bodies floated by that we had to push them away from our shore," said Tin Swe, 69, a neighbor of Then Khin.
Tin Swe's family had lost no one to the cyclone; a son paralyzed by a childhood illness survived by hanging onto a tree. But looking over a pile of contaminated seed rice rotting in the sun, Tin Swe wondered how he was going to regenerate his damaged field and replace the paddle-boat, two water buffaloes and seeds he had lost, especially since prices for everything have soared since the storm.
"This year's harvest is gone," he said.
Despite the growing despondency of their own people in the delta and the continued international outrage over their callousness, Myanmar's military rulers appear to count on one thing to prolong their hold on power: People in the Irrawaddy Delta will eventually go back to lives of poverty and political disenfranchisement.
Amid the despair, life was trying to return to something like normalcy. Along the tributaries, for example, men were busy putting up bamboo frames for new huts.
When a boat docked at one jetty, villagers rushed out to help the visitors ashore. Elderly men invited them for tea, while women tried to sell them eggs.
As the evening sun dipped behind the coconut trees of the village of Naut Pyan Toe, Htat Ei Linn, 16, and her friends were out on the jetty, bathing. They scooped water from the river and poured it over their hair. They gargled with the same dark-brown water in which so many of their friends and neighbors had perished.
"I am still looking for the bodies of my grandmother and 8-year-old brother," Htat Ei Linn said, matter of factly, as she brushed her hair.
For Then Khin, the grandmother who had lost 15 of her family members, the struggle remains overwhelming. Before the storm she had ducks, chickens, pigs and goats - 200 in all - and all of them are gone.
Two of her five buffaloes survived the storm, but both are sick and soon may die.
For most delta villagers, recovering the bodies of lost relatives in the stormy and sweltering weather had at first been an urgent task. Urgent, but largely futile. So far, Then Khin said, she has found only two.
In the Burmese belief system, the spirits of the dead stay around their bodies for seven days. During this period, the bereaved family must pray to Buddha and make donations to monasteries and the needy on behalf of the dead, the better to ensure better fates in their next lives.
But with most of the bodies missing, that time-honored ritual cannot be performed.
Another of Then Khin's granddaughters, Cho Mar, who is 19, said that at night, some villagers hear the voices of unblessed ghosts in the forest and fields. The voices are singing strange songs.
Cho Mar survived the storm by hanging on to the top of a tree for a day, and she could only watch as neighbors were swept away by the walls of water brought by the cyclone.
She lost both parents and her 8-year-old brother.
"We were hopeless before, we are hopeless now," she said. "This river, this delta, is our world. We will live and die in the same place where my parents lived and died."
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