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Storm Survivors Await Aid As Disease Threat Looms

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By SAM DOLNICK, The Associated Press

Published: November 22, 2007

TAFALBARI, Bangladesh - International donors pledged hundreds of millions of dollars Wednesday to rebuild Bangladesh's cyclone-ravaged coast, but help wasn't coming fast enough for thousands of homeless survivors who fought over meager rice handouts.

The government said it had promises of $390 million in international aid, much of it a $250 million pledge from the World Bank. Relief officials were struggling to get desperately needed rice, drinking water and tents to people in remote villages.

In Tafalbari, a dusty collection of crushed tin huts and flooded fields, fistfights erupted in a crowd of villagers who had spent fruitless hours waiting for food outside a relief center.

Several thousand people surrounded the small aid station set up by a local humanitarian group. Workers had to shut the gates against the tide, admitting just a few people at a time.

"I didn't have enough food before the storm hit. We have hardly eaten at all since the storm," said one frustrated villager, Juddistir Chandar Das, 45, who lost the home he shared with his wife and three children.

In the nearby village of Purba Saralia, relief officials used clubs to fend off a crush of hungry people pleading for rice.

"I've been waiting since dawn. I have nothing to eat and my children are hungry," said Kabir Howlader, 25, one of thousands who gathered at a fire station that had been converted into a relief center.

Officials at the center said the government had provided only enough rice to feed 1,200 registered residents, but there were far more than that outside the gates.

Abdul Bashar, 62, was not on the government list and would likely not get any rice. "I have nothing to eat; I will have to beg to Allah," he said.

With most wells of safe drinking water ruined by the cyclone, the need for clean drinking water was becoming critical to ward off deadly waterborne diseases.

"We are concerned about diarrhea," said Renata Dessallien, the top U.N. official in Bangladesh. "There is no question this will be a problem."

Health workers were distributing water purification tablets to people as they handed out bottled water, said Mohammad Abdul Baset, a government health official in the town of Barisal.

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