YAWAR THAR YAR, MYANMAR — The search for food begins just after dawn.
Each day, men, women and children fan out into paddies flooded by seawater, littered with corpses. Like prospectors working claims, they scoop up the muck in their bare hands and finger through it for grains of unmilled rice swept away by the cyclone.
When their luck is good, they discover red chile peppers or small onions in mud reeking of the dead. Then, they can have condiments with their next meal of rotten rice and coconut meat.
For more than three weeks now, the 149 survivors of Tropical Cyclone Nargis in this village have been living like stranded scavengers among the ruins of their own homes and the decomposing remains of their relatives. Ninety-one of them died in the storm.
Myanmar's military government, which has a relief hub just 10 miles north in the town of Bogalay, has not delivered aid to scores of remote villages like this across some of the most devastated areas of the Irrawaddy River delta. For now, the villagers' only hope is goods that arrive from time to time in an underground supply chain operated by Buddhist monks in Bogalay, who are defying the ban on private relief operations in the delta.
Monks say the government has loaded some of the villagers into trucks and shipped them off to work on forced labor projects.
Those who remain, once proudly self-sufficient rice farmers, have become desperate hunter-gatherers, scrounging in the dirt and debris.
"Now the only job for everyone in the village is searching for something to eat," said Ko Sein Lwin, 45, who before the cyclone hit was able to keep three daughters in a university, at $500 each per year.
"We're starting out life again, not from the first step, but from zero," he added grimly. "It's like going back to the Stone Age."
The death toll has continued to rise, to an official count of about 78,000, as this Southeast Asian nation struggles with the effects of the May 2-3 storm. An additional 56,000 people are missing.
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Senior Gen. Than Shwe had assured him Friday that relief workers from any country would be welcome. But the regime has made no announcement itself.
It has said it needs $11 billion for reconstruction. But about 50 donor nations, including the United States, have made firm commitments for only $100 million, in part because of widespread distrust of the generals.
