Word: relief
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...long experience of emergencies and I've never seen anything like this," says Julio Sosa Calo, head of mission in Laputta for the German relief group Malteser International. "We need a huge humanitarian response. What we're doing now is too little compared to the need." There are now 58 camps in town, most of them set up in temples, monasteries and schools. More survivors arrive every day. "To be honest, we're all a bit lost when it comes to numbers," confesses Sosa Calo. "People know that this is the place where they can get assistance, so they...
Laputta should be the center for a gargantuan relief effort. Should be, but isn't. Trucks carrying food and water ply the rough road leading to this isolated town, but not in the large convoys associated with a disaster of this scale. Laputta's buildings are collapsed or roofless, its streets clogged with fallen trees, smashed boats, and the rain-soaked debris of thousands of desperate families. Local aid workers estimate that 12,000 people have died and 3,000 are missing in Laputta town and its immediate surroundings...
...Disaster scenes, no matter where they are, tend to take on a terrible similarity. There is the keening for lost family members, the frantic jostling for relief supplies and mounting anger as diseases stalk refugee camps and medicine is in short supply. But Burma has been different. There are third-hand stories of food riots, but in four days of visiting villages in the affected Irrawaddy Delta, the dominant emotional themes are fear and resignation. It is a remarkable accomplishment by the junta to have set the bar so low for competence that weariness reigns; few people express any frustration...
...what other options exist? Retired General William Nash of the Council on Foreign Relations says the U.S. should first pressure China to use its influence over the junta to get them to open up and then supply support to the Thai and Indonesian militaries to carry out relief missions. "We can pay for it - we can provide repair parts to the Indonesians so they can get their Air Force up. We can lend the them two C-130s and let them paint the Indonesian flag on them," Nash says. "We have to get the stuff to people who can deliver...
...upcoming vote. Government officials standing on the back of the truck had another message as well: free transportation in trucks would be provided to villagers who didn't live within walking distance of the nearest polling station. Imagine if those trucks had been redeployed instead for the cyclone relief effort. Or if foreign NGOs were given permission to enter the country and coordinate aid work-something that is happening at a glacial pace. One of the few foreign shipments allowed in was quickly relabeled to say that the goods had been donated courtesy of the junta. "With each passing...