Nearly two months after cyclone Aila devastated east India and the coast of Bangladesh, the plight of survivors is no longer headline news. However, daily flooding is making their recovery almost impossible. In North 24 Parganas, one of the worst affected areas in the state of West Bengal, MSF is providing humanitarian assistance in remote villages.
MSF distributes relief items to people affected by Cyclone Aila. Bangladesh, 2009.
Photo by Veronique Terrasse/MSF
23-year-old Usha Mondal points to a mud house sunk deep into the floodwaters. It lays just a few metres from the embankment where she now lives with her husband and her five-year-old son in a temporary hut made of flimsy bamboo and whatever else they could find. The roof of the house emerges from the murky water like the tip of an iceberg. It is all Usha has left after cyclone Aila struck.
Huge needs in remote areas
“How long can we last like this?” asks Usha Mondal. “We’ve been living in this mud with very little aid for over a month now. We received food from the government, but nothing for the last ten days,” she says. “We used to be farmers, but all the paddy fields are still under water and we can’t work now, so we’ve begun fishing,” she explains. “But this doesn’t provide us with enough food for the whole family.”
Joining a queue of neighbours Usha lines up, ticket in hand, to receive blankets, water purification tablets, soap and plastic sheeting provided by MSF. MSF plans to meet the needs of some 15,000 people in the worst affected villages of Sandheshkhali Block II. MSF health educators are showing the villagers how to use plastic sheeting to collect rainwater and how to store and purify it.
“We focus on areas where the needs are the greatest and where access is difficult and requires a boat,” explains MSF project coordinator Rivkah van Barneveld. “Although the immediate cyclone response has been adequate, in some places people need more and we’ve seen situations where several families have had to live under one plastic sheet.”
Poor conditions
Unable to resume normal life, villagers are forced to stay in crowded temporary shelters. Poor hygiene conditions and the lack of clean drinking water pose high risks of disease outbreaks. With the monsoon season approaching, conditions could deteriorate further.
MSF has set up a surveillance system to monitor and control potential disease outbreaks. Health workers and medical staff are scouring villages for cases of malaria, diarrhoea, measles and cholera, and meeting regularly with the nurses at local health centres.
The long-term impact of the disaster is likely to be devastating. “Surviving each day is a struggle that takes all our strength. We haven’t had time to make any other plans,” says Usha Mondal. “This is my village and I don’t want to leave, but we can’t hold on like this forever. I have two children to feed. If things don’t get better soon, we will have to go to [the capital of West Bengal] Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) in the hope of finding work there.”
To find out more about MSF's response to Cyclone Aila, you can read the following blogs by our staff on the ground.
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Kathy Dedieu is working as a water and sanitation specialist in Bangladesh. To read her letter from the field, click here.
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Homa Mansoor is working in West Bengal to set up a medical surveillance system in Sandeshkhali. To read her letter from the field, click here.
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Rivkah van Barneveld coordinated MSF’s emergency intervention in West Bengal. To read her letter from the field, click here.
To read testimonies of survivors of Cyclone Aila gathered by MSF staff in India, click here.