Houses with tarpaulin sheets for roofs at a village in Mrauk-U Township.
Exactly one month after Cyclone Mocha ripped through northwestern Myanmar, towns and villages across the hardest-hit Rakhine State are still in dire need of food, supplies, shelter and assistance.
Their suffering deepened this week when the country’s military regime suspended humanitarian access, in what the United Nations called “yet another devastating setback for more than a million people”.
Cyclone Mocha slammed into Rakhine on May 14, killing at least 148 people and destroying homes, livelihoods, farmland, power lines and infrastructure across the north of the state. Neighboring Chin State and Magwe and Sagaing regions were also badly hit.
In the Rakhine State capital of Sittwe, electricity supplies are not yet fully restored and residents are expressing growing frustration over the blackout.
“We have now been without electricity for one month. We are having to spend extra money to recharge our phones. The power outage also deprives us of water [via pumps],” a resident of Sittwe’s Min Gan Ward 10 said.
Meanwhile, schools across Sittwe Township are still undergoing repairs, forcing students to take classes in temporary shelters, according to local sources.
The picture is even bleaker in storm-hit rural pockets of the state.
Communities in remote and impoverished areas are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance and supplies after losing homes and livelihoods to the cyclone, according to local volunteers.
Thura, a Rakhine resident and leader of a local volunteer group, said villagers across Rathedaung Township are in desperate need of materials to repair their houses. He said many houses were still roofless when he visited villages last week.
“Most of the rural communities are poor and it will be difficult for them to recover on their own,” he commented.
An ethnic Kahmee farmer from Maung Nha Ma village in Mrauk-U Township further inland said it would take up to three years for poor families in his village to rebuild safe homes.
“I will have to take out a loan to grow rice next month after spending all my savings to repair my house. At least we have a roof over our heads, but it will take two or three years to rebuild a proper house,” he said.
He added that some families in the village could not afford to rebuild their homes, since a small bamboo-and-palm leaf hut costs nearly 800,000 kyat (about US$ 380).
In neighboring Ma Kyar Se village, the Mro ethnic community is pleading for donations to reconstruct the local school, worried for the education of their children.
Currently, 180 students from five villages are overflowing from the small community hall, which is being used as a makeshift classroom.
“Most of us are poor and we barely get by selling bamboo shoots and vegetables, but we just want our children to receive a good education,” one villager said.
The wooden school building, donated by the United Nations Development Program in 1998, was destroyed during the storm, according to villagers.
“Our children could not go to school after 2019 due to clashes between junta troops and the Arakan Army. After that, schools were closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Now, the school has been destroyed by the storm,” he explained.
According to multiple sources, thousands of people across northern Rakhine need humanitarian aid for long-term recovery, with help from the junta nowhere close to the level required.
“So far, we have received two packets of instant noodles per household from the junta, plus some rice. We need more help,” one villager said. Many local families were going hungry for lack of food, he added.
Local volunteer groups that have been providing urgent food supplies in the storm-hit areas said they cannot handle the situation in the long term as they rely on public donations.
“We are calling for cooperation between all sides to work together for long-term recovery,” a local volunteer said.
The UN’s humanitarian affairs office announced last week that it has provided shelter and other relief items for 110,000 people while its food aid has reached 300,000 people in Rakhine state.
However, junta has since suspended aid access to the region, hitting rehabilitation efforts in storm-hit areas, the UN said on Tuesday.
“This decision is yet another devastating setback for more than a million people whom humanitarians had planned to reach with life-saving assistance in cyclone-hit Rakhine state over the weeks and months ahead. Just when vulnerable communities need our help the most, we have been forced to stop distributions of food, drinking water, and shelter supplies,” UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator Ramanathan Balakrishnan said in a statement.