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The cyclone that battered the coast of Bangladesh on the night of 29 April and killed more than 130 000 people has left an army of destitute survivors, homeless and desperate for work, but with little prospect of permanent shelter or employment.

Once they have collected the day’s supply of food from the relief camps there is nothing to do but wander through the remains of their villages. There is little to take their minds off the catastrophe that robbed them of their relatives, friends, houses and belongings.

‘These people have had a huge shock,’ said Saidur Rahman, director of Oxfam in Bangladesh. ‘After a disaster like this people need psychological rehabilitation but I have seen no efforts in this area as yet.’

Winds reaching 225 kilometres per hour swept through the villages of eight coastal districts in the Bay of Bengal. It was the people’s misfortune that it happened at high tide. The winds created waves up to 7 metres high that razed more than 860 000 houses, drowned 440 000 head of cattle and destroyed hundreds of thousands of trees. The latest government figures estimate that the cyclone killed 132 000 people and injured 458 000.

The water tore down 434 kilometres of earth embankments that used to protect coastal paddy fields from sea water. Another 858 kilometres of embankments are now in dire need of repair. The Water Development Board (WDB), responsible for building and maintaining the embankments, estimates that it will cost 1630 million taka (£26 million) to rebuild and repair the embankments. Relief agencies, at the same time, realise that the long term consequences of the disaster are only now becoming apparent.

Those that can afford to, have bought materials to begin rebuilding their homes. A few have salvaged or scavenged bamboo and thatch. Still, many survivors of the cyclone are living under the open sky without even the few belongings that once rooted them to their villages. They want to rebuild their houses, but materials are slow to arrive. Fishermen want replacement boats and nets, because the main fishing season is about to begin. Smallholders are anxious to rebuild the embankments and replant their fields. The constant refrain is: ‘We want work, not relief.’

Despite this the government claims a labour shortage. ‘The people who died in the cyclone are the labourers who would have been employed for such work,’ says Majidul Haque, who is minister for both agriculture and irrigation, and water development and flood control.

Even if Haque was satisfied with the workforce and materials, persistent wet weather has dashed hopes of rebuilding the embankments before next month’s monsoon rains make any such work impossible.

Nurul Alam, the engineer in charge of Chittagong WDB, had hoped for a dry three or four weeks. That would have been long enough to rebuild ‘dwarf’ embankments, just high enough to protect against the usual, twice-monthly high tides. Alam claims that the government has begun a food-for-work programme with 20 000 tonnes of donated wheat which, he says, is sufficient to do the job. ‘But the rains are getting stronger every day and it looks as though we are having an early monsoon,’ says Alam.

Farmers have already lost the spring rice crop, which was almost ready for harvesting when the disaster struck. The relief coordinator’s office estimates that the country has lost £734 000 in crops that once covered 63 000 hectares.

In Chittagong district alone, farmers have lost about 58 000 hectares of land to sea water. Tests show that six days after the cyclone, the salt in Chittagong soils had increased tenfold. However, Emdadul Haque, deputy director of Chittagong Department of Agricultural Extension, is confident that the salt content will drop quickly if the soils are well drained and protected from the sea. It usually takes only a few hard rains to wash the salt away, making them ready for replanting.

Many islands and areas on the mainland will remain prone to flooding until November brings weather dry enough to resume work. In all, the sea will continue to flood more than a million hectares of coastal land at each high tide, according to Muhammad Abdul Malek, secretary of the Ministry of Water Development and Flood Control. In those areas there is now little hope either for the summer crop, normally planted in early June, or for the main crop of the year, which is normally planted in August and September.

Protected by embankments, the 1 million hectares of affected land would have produced a main crop of about 2 tonnes of the salt-tolerant rice, Rajashail.

The farmers may still attempt to raise seedlings in inland plots for transplanting to their coastal fields, ‘But the yields will be less and the risk of loss will be higher,’ says Muhammad Shahidul Islam, director-general of the Department of Agriculture Extension. Islam estimates that about 3.5 million people may lose two or three crops because of destroyed and damaged embankments.

Farmers have the lost seeds that they would have planted for the next crop. Emdadul Haque says that the agriculture extension department can supply rice and vegetable seed to, at most, a quarter of those farmers affected by the cyclone. Help is available from some private organisations. The charity, the Mennonite Central Committee, for example, has already distributed 50 000 packets of vegetable seeds which will provide food for at least three months.

But crops are not the only economic casualty of the cyclone. In the southeastern coastal belt, a new prawn culture industry was devastated, just as it was beginning to take root. The government estimates that about 16 000 hectares of prawn farms have been lost. Also, the cyclone destroyed £6.6 million worth of produce from salt manufacturers working in the same region.

Chittagong port, which deals with 80 per cent of the country’s foreign trade, was brought to a standstill. The 15-kilometre channel that connects it to the Bay of Bengal is still clogged by 23 sunken vessels. It now takes an hour and a half to navigate the channel instead of the usual half an hour.

The Chittagong Port Authority lost seven shore cranes which will cost £5 million to replace. The violent winds drove the country’s only floating crane 6.5 km upriver. The crane rammed right through the Karnaphuli Bridge and buried itself beneath a 400-tonne segment of the bridge.

The evacuation of 10 000 people in the port and surrounding low-lying areas began at midnight on 28 May. All the vessels were secured and the area made safe according to a pre-existing plan. Abul Khair Mannan, Secretary of the port authority, remembers the night the cyclone struck the port. ‘I sat in my office and thought the building would fall,’ he recalls. ‘Some ships called in to say they were out of anchor, ropes were breaking, ships were smashing into each other. They could not say where they were. It was beyond human intervention.’

Despite damage to the port, estimated at £25 million, Mannan claims no lives were lost and the port is working at 80 per cent of its normal capacity. Several countries are interested in salvaging wrecks in the channel, particularly Japan. Mannan says the operation will cost about £6.5 million.

Coastal people are now as dependent on the shipping warnings as the ships in Chittagong port. But this is a mixed blessing, says the Meteorological Office in Dhaka. The shipping warnings range from signals 1 to 10 but represent only three levels of severity. Signals 1 to 4 are cautionary warnings; 5, 6 and 7 warn of a storm of ‘light to moderate intensity’ whose centre is moving south, north or through a given area respectively. Danger signals 8, 9 and 10 similarly predict the direction the storm will travel but warn of a storm of ‘great intensity’.

According to the Meteorological Office, people are confused by the system; they believe storm severity increases with number. This could mean, for example, that people who would normally leave their houses on signal 7 might not do so on signal 5, even though signal 5 warns that the storm is heading towards them and is of the same severity as signal 7.

Despite this the Meteorological Office is adamant that it will continue to broadcast the warnings on national radio. In the cyclone of 1970 the government omitted signal numbers from public broadcasts and replaced them with warnings in plain language; people refused to act on them.

This year, people were given at least five days’ warning of the approaching cyclone. They had 24 hours to move when the warnings rose from 6 to 10. Many of those who knew where to shelter survived. The problem is a lack of suitable shelters.

After the 1985 cyclone a UN resolution called for more cyclone shelters. The government planned to build 3000 but the programme fizzled out. This year’s cyclone affected 10 million people in seven coastal districts. The country needs about 3500 shelters but has only 302. Because of the accretion of silt around the coast some shelters were too far inland to be usable.

But it is clear that the usable shelters did save lives. The government and development groups have praised the Red Crescent’s Cyclone Preparedness Programme for the work of its 21 000 volunteers in educating people and motivating them. ‘Our volunteers managed to move 350 000 people to safety,’ says Ali Hassan Quoreshi, secretary-general of the Red Crescent. ‘But three-and-a-half million people needed shelter so only 10 per cent were assured of safety. The rest were left to the mercy of God,’ he says.

The Red Crescent has built 62 of the country’s shelters. Unlike some of the early government versions, Red Crescent shelters are within villages and double as schools. They are designed to accommodate 800 people but as many as 1500 crammed into each shelter during this cyclone. The government built much larger shelters, to hold 2000 people, but it is now considering building smaller, multipurpose shelters.

Foreign aid continues to pour in. The government claims to have spent £2 million of the £14 million that foreign donors have committed to Bangladesh. But the amount flowing in is likely to be much more, considering that about 100 foreign non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and another 70 Bangladeshi NGOs are working in the area, many with funds from foreign donors.

The newcomers, who rushed in after the cyclone, failed to take advantage of the 20 or so NGOs with existing programmes in the affected region. Communication between groups could have been better, according to a meeting late in May of 23 NGOs led by the Private Rural Initiatives Program (PRIP), an American agency that aims to support developmental NGOs in Bangladesh. No one at the meeting talked about a longer term process in which villagers could express their own needs for the future.

Richard Holloway, director of PRIP, stresses the need after a disaster to move quickly away from ‘providing things we think victims need’ towards ‘appreciating that the ‘victims’ are people and that it is important to rebuild their capacity to look after themselves’.

Once the NGOs had analysed their proposed rehabilitation plans it soon became apparent how important such consultation is. For example, many government and private groups were set to rebuild houses with corrugated metal sheeting. Yet many villagers reported that these ‘tin roofs’ were lethal in high winds. Hanging onto a thatched roof, in contrast, saved many lives during the cyclone because they doubled as rafts.

Whether the NGOs and government in Dhaka have learnt anything from this cyclone will probably only be discovered when the next one strikes. But the theme of self-sufficiency for the poor who live constantly with the threat of disaster is emphasised by Saidur Rahman of Oxfam. Only education and self-motivation for a better life, he says, will bring about dramatic changes.

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Clean water and medicines hold death at bay

Bamboo sticks on either side of the road to Baharchara village mark the mass graves of cyclone victims. Across Bangladesh, the army supervised the gruesome task of burying tens of thousands of human corpses.

Like most of the roads in rural Bangladesh, the one that leads to Baharchara, south of Chittagong, is built 2 to 3 metres higher than the surrounding paddy fields. The monsoon rains will soon flood the graveyards. Many of the dead, carried by tidal waves miles from their home villages, were buried by strangers.

To the left, a little way from the road, a group of men chant as they sink a deep tube well to provide the area with clean drinking water. The tube well is simplya pipe covered at the lower end with mesh which acts as a primitive filter. The chanting men are mechanics from the government Department of Public Health Engineering (DPHE) who have worked from dawn to dusk, and then by torchlight, to repair damaged tube wells and sink new ones in affected areas.

The government has had a tube well programme for more than 20 years, supported by UNICEF. But after the disaster, the DPHE immediately send hundreds of its mechanics to regions hit by the cyclone. Banshkali, in the south of Chittagong district, normally has four mechanics. By the second day after the storm it had another 68. The same was true for all the affected districts – the army of mechanics have repaired more than 14 000 tube wells and sunk 600 new ones.

Their efforts have helped to control diarrhoea, but in some areas the incidence is still high. Government figures show that new cases of diarrhoea on the island of Sandwip, for example, have not yet begun to fall. But they also show that few are now dying from the disease.

That decrease in deaths on the island coincided with an influx of relief supplies and numerous relief workers and may represent better health care. ‘If true it could be the single most dramatic evidence of the effectiveness of the relief effort’, says Flora Sibanda, a UNICEF health programme officer working in diarrhoea disease control.

Baharchara’s ponds and fields are full of sea water. In the village beyond the marketplace, the damage wrought by the cyclone is blatant. Uprooted trees and flattened bamboo groves separate small clusters of houses.

There are some squares of very flat and compacted earth, the plinths of former houses. Sometimes all that remains of the house is a thatched roof, the family sitting on top of it as if to reaffirm that the patch of land beneath them is their own.

Farida Akhter, working for a non-governmental organisation called Ubinig, went back to the village her group had worked in before the cyclone and asked people why some of their friends and relatives had refused to leave their houses, despite the storm warnings. Akhter found that women particularly were as concerned about saving the lives of their animals as they were about saving themselves and their families.

The atmosphere is close, as if another thunderstorm is brewing, but apparently it is often like this. People here say the flies and mosquitoes are twice their normal size since the disaster. The nauseating smell of decay fills the air.

A few miles away, at the hamlet of Ratnapur, the sea is almost visible. Many houses here were simply washed away. No house remained undamaged, and all families lost at least one member. Hysteria seems very close to the surface.

Mesbahur Rahman, a 15-year-old schoolboy, heard the warnings on the radio. ‘The nearest cyclone shelter is three miles away,’ he says. ‘Our house was made of brick and stood on a raised platform, I felt safe there.

‘At about midnight the wind ripped the roof off the house. The wind was howling from all around. It was blisteringly hot. When it turned round to reach the sea the water came with a booming sound. A giant wave lifted us up and we grabbed hold of the branch of a tree.

‘Waves crashed into each other and soared upwards. The water sounded like cannons firing. My two sisters and my mother hung onto a branch of the same tree but the branch broke. I saw them taken away by the wind and fall into the swirling water. Whoever could not keep hold fell into the eddy and drowned.’

For two or three days the village was littered with floating corpses of people and animals. Mesbahur lost his younger brother in the cyclone too. He managed to find the body of only one of his sisters.

At the only concrete building in the village, a local official tallies up the damage. In 35 households in west Baharchara, more than 700 people died. The official lives in a concrete building. It saved his life and the life of his brother, Zainul Abedin. They even had time to carry a few of their precious belongings to the safety of the roof.

I asked whether the villagers had, as a community, mourned their dead. Abedin’s reply was stark. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We have forgotten everything of our previous lives. We still don’t know what to do.’