Viewed as a curse by those who lost their homes and loved ones to Cyclone Nargis, heavy rain in recent weeks is proving a saviour of sorts to thousands of cyclone survivors in need of safe drinking water.“When it rains, I feel it is a blessing,” Daw Khin, a woman in her early fifties in the village of Pawin outside Bogale Township at the far tip of the delta, said. “Now what I have to do when it rains is ensure it drains into a ceramic pot.”
But Daw Khin - struggling to provide for her five-member family more than two months after the worst natural disaster in recent times to strike Myanmar - is still worried.
Should the heavy rains that continue to pummel her roofless home stop, so too would her one source of clean drinking water.
“The thought of no more rain kills me,” she said.
An estimated 2.4 million people were severely affected by the category four storm that struck Yangon Division and parts of the Ayeyarwady Delta in southern Myanmar in early May, leaving nearly 140,000 people either dead or missing.
Inadequate access to water
A Post-Nargis Joint Assessment (PONJA) in June by the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), the UN and the Myanmar government, revealed a significant number of households reporting inadequate access to clean drinking water.
On 10 July the UN reported that 74 percent of people in the cyclone areas had inadequate access to clean water, with rainwater collection viewed as critical in reducing the risk of disease outbreaks.
Most people in the delta today find themselves reliant on rainwater as their primary source of safe drinking water.
Ponds, the traditional source of drinking water in the area, became heavily salinated when a three-metre tidal surge inundated much of the low-lying area, devastating homes and crops across a 23,500 square kilometre area (almost twice the size of Lebanon).
Today those same ponds are avoided by area residents for fear of water-borne diseases like diarrhoea - prompting them to look to the sky for help, which so far has delivered as part of this year’s rainy season.
To harness what nature provides, residents, particularly in more remote areas, make do with what they can find - including bamboo, or plastic sheeting donated by the government or non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to funnel the water, while others use handmade drains made of zinc.
“My drain is made of plastic. But it's good enough for three households,” Hla Htay, a Pawin resident who shares her water with her neighbours, told IRIN.
“It'd be a disaster, if we have no more rain,” she said.
Water purification
International organisations and UN agencies, including the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), are working to provide water purification tablets and kits, as well as water filters, to ensure the water is clean.
Various water purification systems in the storm-affected area have also been put in place - in an effort to mitigate the risk of water-borne diseases - an approach that so far appears to be working.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), to date there have been no reported outbreaks of water-borne disease.
Moreover, significant efforts are now under way to pump contaminated water out of ponds so that they can be replenished with this year’s monsoon rains.
Keeping traditional water ponds for drinking and household needs is the best way to mitigate the problem of water shortages, according to Waldemar Pickardt, chief of water and environmental sanitation for UNICEF/Myanmar in Yangon, the former Burmese capital.
Time running out
Most of the pumps used to drain the ponds are small. This allows for greater mobility into more remote areas by boat, but the pumps’ capacity is limited.
Pumping out the ponds is a race against time. In some places, local volunteers are stepping forward to clean them up. However, many ponds have yet to be touched, even though the heaviest rains normally end in August.
“I'm afraid we won't finish cleaning all the water ponds before the rainy season goes out,” UNICEF’s Pickardt told IRIN, pointing out that they now had only one month to make the ponds ready to fill with rainwater for the year ahead.
“I'm afraid the next hardship will be to get safe water,” Pickardt warned. “Water shortages would be more likely to happen in those areas [the storm-affected Ayeyarwaddy Delta] when the rain stops,” the UNICEF official said, adding that a water shortage was likely in the dry season around January and February.
Disclaimer:This material comes to you via IRIN, the humanitarian news and analysis service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the United Nations or its Member States.
Photo: Copyright IRIN
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