This audio file is also available as an MSF Frontline Reports podcast.

Photo: MSF | Juli Niebuhr, MSF Deputy Country Manager. Yangon, Myanmar.

TRANSCRIPT:

"The villages we have access to, most of them are 80—90% destroyed by the storm: it’s a big mess. At the moment our main concern is to get the essentials to the most affected people as quickly as possible, meaning medical supplies, shelter materials, food and clean water.

We have 12 medical teams operating in the area right now — they are mobile teams who go from village to village trying to find the people most in need.

The majority of the patients we see are injured people — minor injuries. We see patients with infected wounds, fever and diarrhea and people who have physical damage due to the force of the rain. The biggest concern is for people left with out shelter at the moment, without proper sanitation, with a shortage of water and shortage of food. There are hundreds of thousands of people who are displaced — who have lost their houses. Much aid and support is needed and at the moment there is not enough in the region.

Our big advantage is that we have been operational in this country for over ten years with a large number of qualified staff and therefore we were able to get a large number of qualified medical people very quickly into the region who could start work immediately.

We have to truck our supplies down as far as possible — the road has been cleared — and from there on we have to move our supplies by boat. By small boats and even by motorbikes to the different villages.

Logistically it’s very complicated — the people are spread out and not easy to reach.

We have been moving about 100,000 metric tons of rice, tens of thousands of plastic sheetings will be brought to the area and we have medical supplies that we could send immediately, but we will run out eventually so we are expecting 3 flights to come in in the next two days and we hope we will get clearance for those.

In the areas where we have been we haven’t seen any aid being delivered so far, so the amount that has reached people in the areas where we are had been minimal.

We have covered an area now of about 50,000 people and we’ve distributed rice, canned fish, jerry cans, plastic sheeting to those households most in need.

Given the fact that there is not enough drinking water in the area, that have been flooded, there is of course the risk of an outbreak of diseases.

The scale of this and the size of this is enormous and the numbers of injured, dead and missing people are increasing by the day. It’s a big area that has been hit and the impact of the storm has been enormous — whole villages have been wiped away and the “less affected areas” — as we call them now — have had 80—90% of there building destroyed.

Thousands of people in Yangon have been affected by the storm as well — there’s still no electricity, there’s bad communication. Shops are closed, there is not enough food and many people have been made homeless.

I think a lot of people are still in shock, most people are trying to deal with it with whatever small means they have. All the MSF teams are working extremely hard at the moment — we sent over 90 people into the delta area who are working non stop. We’re sending in more staff and more supplies on a daily basis. Of those 90 staff about half are medical and we have 17 doctors working in the area — setting up clinics, trying to reach new areas and trying to find the most vulnerable people in this situation."

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