Children stand in front of a temporary school established by UNICEF in the village of Shwe Pyi Aye in Ayeyarwady Division. Pic: Aye Zaw Myo

SHWE PYI AYE village, located deep in the southern Ayeyarwady delta, was devastated by cyclone Nargis. Virtually all structures on the ground were destroyed and half the population were killed.

Despite the massive loss of life and property, three months after the disaster most of the village’s 473 survivors are either back at work or are seeking sufficient financial support to resume their pre-cyclone economic activities.

As in many parts of the delta, the scale of destruction in Shwe Pyi Aye has not dampened the residents’ enthusiasm for returning to work and getting on with their lives as quickly as possible. The only thing stopping many of them is lack of resources.

When a team of senior experts from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) visited the village on July 29, residents had no shortage of ideas on how aid could best be used to restore livelihoods.

Among the ideas expressed at a meeting between villagers and UN experts was a suggestion to provide more assistance to large-scale farmers so that landless workers could earn daily wages.

Others said that locals should be supplied with boats and nets because fishing was the easiest way to earn a living in the area, and many were also keen for UNDP to resume a micro-credit scheme it had sponsored in the past.
“I don’t want to live on assistance. I can still work to earn my living,” said U Kyin Maung, 65, the lone survivor of a family of eight. His adult children had been running a grocery store in the village before the cyclone struck.

As an elderly person and the sole survivor of his family, U Kyin Maung was classified by UNDP as one of the most vulnerable of the village’s survivors. He was granted K40,000 when the organisation started its assistance project in Shwe Pyi Aye six weeks after the cyclone.

U Kyin Maung used the money to open his own grocery store in a hut built on the site of his former house.

He said he buys food for his shop in Bogale, the nearest town to the village, but business has been slow because most locals have been left destitute by cyclone and therefore have little money to spend at his shop.

For now U Kyin Maung sells on credit to lure customers, most of whom live on small daily wages they get from their involvement in UNDP-sponsored cash-for-work schemes. He said he now earns about K500 a day, which he uses to pay living expenses.

“I feel lucky just to be alive,” U Kyin Maung told The Myanmar Times last week. “I’m thankful to the government and aid agencies for providing emergency supplies of food and other relief items after the cyclone, otherwise we would all be dead of starvation.”

“But we can’t expect that to continue forever. We’re not living in the desert. We have sufficient food resources all around us. We just need the tools to resume our work,” he said.

Another Shwe Pyi Aye resident, 39-year-old U Kyaw Htoo, was also the sole survivor of a family of eight.

“I have tried to overcome the loss of my young children and elderly parents so I can resume my work,” he said. “I’ve already finished planting paddy on 6 of the 9 acres on my farm.”

A local social group called Ayeyarwady Thitsar helped U Kyaw Htoo plough his fields, and he used seeds and a power tiller provided by the government and UNDP for paddy growing.

“But a lack of sufficient fertilisers and the salinity conditions of the farmland could lead to lower paddy production than in previous years,” he said, adding that he normally earns K2 million a year from his fields.

UNDP said it has given K7.1 million in cash assistance since the cyclone, including grants for rebuilding destroyed houses, daily wages for community work and fuel to operate power tillers.

Many locals have said they are afraid of similar disasters in the future and want at least one sturdy concrete building in the village where people can take shelter during storms.

The only building that survived the storm was the village monastery, where 110 people took refuge during the cyclone and survived.

UNDP categorised the work of rebuilding the infrastructure in Shwe Pyi Aye and other parts of the delta as a long-term initiative that will help locals build a better life than they had before the storm.

Mr Bishow Parajuli, the UNDP resident representative in Myanmar, pointed out in an interview with The Myanmar Times last week that his organisation has been involved for the past 14 years in human development initiatives supporting the improvement of life for rural residents.

“We have offices in many parts of the country and these have been our strength. We are applying that strength to the post-Nargis situation, principally by helping people regain their livelihoods and stand on their own feet, and by helping them increase their incomes and maintain their human dignity,” he said.

He said UNDP also wants to resume offering micro-credit for poor rural residents in the delta, a project that was disrupted by the cyclone.
UNDP intends to write off nearly US$3 million in loans taken out by 50,000 borrowers, and refund US$1.25 million to the surviving 75,000 participants in the scheme living in cyclone-affected areas.

“All these efforts require extra resources,” Mr Parajuli said, adding that his agency is seeking $52 million to help cyclone victims through next April.
The funding requirement – which is part of the appeal made by the UN last month for $482 million to help cyclone survivors – includes $8 million to restore the micro-credit scheme and expand it to increase the numbers of beneficiaries, he said.

“In the past several years UNDP has put $23 million into its micro-credit scheme and an very large number of these programs in the delta were affected by Nargis, so we are trying to renew that support by injecting additional money,” Mr Parajuli said.

“Micro-credit is important because it helps individuals start small-scale activities and employment-generating schemes, whether they involve trade, land cultivation, animal husbandry or poultry,” he said, adding that the expended micro-credit scheme in the delta will directly benefit 500,000 people.
“This will obviously have a big impact in terms of food security, families being able to get their kids back to school and establishing health facilities,” Mr Parajuli said.

“Our goal is to complement various efforts by the government, the many national players and other UN agencies,” he added.

Mr Parajuli, who is also the UN’s resident coordinator in Myanmar, said he guaranteed that donor money would be put to the best possible use by providing benefits to the intended beneficiaries.

“The good part of the UNDP program is that our agency works directly with the communities, our resources are directly delivered to communities and we have a good understanding and cooperation with the government,” he said
“We have full accountability of resources and we help communities to help themselves,” he said.