14/05/08. Six new international MSF staff, including an emergency coordinator, a logistics expert and water and sanitation experts, arrived in Yangon yesterday. The arrival of the water and sanitation specialists is particularly important. “We have a pool of people who are very skilled at setting up water purification equipment in a very short space of time, and then making sure that it runs correctly,” says Michel Beck, an MSF water and sanitation specialist in Amsterdam. “When people are living in crowded conditions and do not have access to safe drinking water and toilet facilities then disease can spread very fast”.
People sheltering in the Irrawaddy delta are still in desperate need of aid. “In the villages affected by the storm we see widespread material damage; and in the villages more affected by flooding we’re seeing many more dead bodies,” explains MSF emergency coordinator Juli Niebuhr in Yangon. “Some villages have been completely wiped out. The rainy season has just begun and there are frequent heavy rainstorms. Given the fact that massive numbers of people have no shelter this is of great concern to us”.
But getting aid to the worst affected areas is extremely hard. “Navigation is very challenging on the delta. Yesterday one of our contracted boats capsized – fortunately no-one was hurt,” explains Juli Niebuhr.
Despite these difficulties, the scale of MSF’s relief operation is increasing daily. Four MSF cargo planes have now arrived in Yangon delivering 140 tons of medical supplies, water and sanitation equipment, plastic sheeting for building shelters, therapeutic food and a zodiac boat. Further cargo planes are being prepared.
MSF now has more than 250 staff working in the delta area. But getting material from our warehouses in Yangon to the worst affected areas is a logistics challenge. We now have ten boats for distributing aid in the delta and ten trucks are ferrying aid from Yangon to Pathein, a town in the north of the delta. So far MSF teams have managed to distribute 275 tons of aid to victims of the cyclone, made up of MSF’s previously existing stocks in Myanmar and the new cargo arrivals.
Yesterday four teams returned from outlying villages. They had distributed aid to around 15,000 people and had distributed 6,000 plastic sheets for building temporary shelters. Given that MSF has over 20 teams working in the region, this gives an idea of the scale of the distribution effort. The medics in our teams have now carried out several thousand consultations. The majority of health problems we have seen are infected wounds, fevers and diarrhoea.
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