When a cyclone kills 130,000 people in a few hours, the world recognises a catastrophe, but in the history of a woman such as Daw Aye it was just one low point in a lifetime of misfortune. There was the disaster of her fisherman son, drowned at sea in a storm that was never noticed outside Burma. There was the disaster of widowhood: her husband died six years ago of an illness to which Daw Aye cannot even put a name.

Cyclone Nargis at least spared the rest of her family, although it destroyed her newly built wooden house along with 300 of the 500 dwellings in the village of Thaungche, on the Rangoon River. Having survived bereavement, flood and homelessness, Daw Aye is now facing a potent and more insidious enemy: crippling debt.

She has six surviving children, and in the month since the cyclone she has had only two handouts from the Burmese authorities, a total of no more than a few pounds of rice.

Her oldest surviving son works as a farmhand for 20,000 kyat — about £10 — a month; her adult daughter earns an even more meagre sum mending fishing nets. To feed them, and to build the open-fronted shelter of bamboo and palm leaves in which they now live, she was forced to go to a moneylender.

The loan sounds paltry for a woman who has lost everything — the equivalent of £150. But the interest rate demanded by the village lender is 10 per cent, or £15, a month, more than her family is capable of earning. With no prospect of significant help from the Government and no sight of foreign aid, Daw Aye had a choice between hunger and irredeemable, lifelong debt.

It is a situation faced by countless others in the Irrawaddy delta, the area most devastated by the cyclone that struck four weeks ago today.

Fishermen have no boats, engines or nets. Even if farmers had seed to sow, their fields are inundated with salt and they have no buffalo with which to plough them. Having dodged death by drowning in the storm, having avoided so far the threat of epidemics of cholera and malaria, many of the survivors of the cyclone face a future stripped of any means of supporting themselves.

In a straight line, Thaungche is 30miles (50km) from Rangoon, but a foreigner can make the journey only after an elaborate clandestine operation. We set sail before dawn in the bilges of a rattling, diesel-powered cargo boat, concealed from view behind bags of rice, sacks of clothes and bottles of cooking oil. Ten Burmese accompanied us on this chartered aid mission. They gave us warning when Burmese naval ships loomed ahead, and deflected the sailors' questions with gifts of food.

Officially, the Burmese Government welcomes international aid, and the United Nations reports that its visa applications are finally being granted. But few foreign faces are to be seen in the delta, and undeclared journalists are always unwelcome to the authorities. Yet in Thaungche — in the farthest reaches of the delta, a few miles from the Andaman Sea — such rules are meaningless in the struggle to survive.

After six hours of chugging downriver, past endless stretches of flooded rice fields and banks of grey mud, the first people we encountered in the village were uniformed soldiers with assault rifles who barely gave us a glance. They talked of how they had cleared the fallen trees and given out food, but in their absence the villagers whispered the truth.

The little rice handed over by the army had been wet and spoilt. The villagers had to sell animals to feed themselves or, like Daw Aye, borrow money from the local usurer. Beyond the anxiety of day-to-day survival was the question of how this situation was ever going to improve.

The two industries of the delta, fishing and agriculture, have been crippled, the workers drowned and tools of production destroyed. According to the Government's own (and no doubt conservative) statistics, 55 cold storage depots and 2,649 fishing boats were lost in the storm, along with 18,000 fishermen.

Unlike other parts of the deltas, Thaungche has only one rice harvest a year; it must be planted during the monsoon rains, by the end of this month. Daw Mya Kin is an aristocrat among the people of the village. Her two-storey house of wood and tile withstood the cyclone; her 100 acres of fields yield 3,600lb of rice in a good year. This year she faces ruin.

Daw Mya Kin's seed rice, 250 baskets worth of the best of the previous year's crop, were washed away in the storm and she has nothing to replace them. “We know how to clean the fields, and buffalo we can borrow,” she says. “But without seeds from the Government, there will be no harvest.”

Brother Thu Sita, a monk from Thaungche's monastery, said: “It was hard enough to rebuild their houses.Then the problem is finding enough food to eat. People borrow money, they get into debt to feed themselves. And there is so little from outside. All that we can do as monks is to share a little of our food and help them psychologically. But as far as their future goes, they are on their own.”

Toll of tragedy

134,000 dead or missing
750,000 people will need long-term food aid
280,000 cattle and water buffalo killed
1 million acres of arable land flooded in southwest Burma
$243 million requested by the Burmese Government to help its rice farmers
$20 million requested for new livestock
80% of rice grown in Burma is exported, mostly to Sri Lanka
4,000 schools demolished, affecting 1.1 million students

Source: DEC, Agencies, Unicef

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