"Here comes another body"

THANAP PIN SATE, Myanmar — The bodies come and go with the tides. They wash up onto the riverbanks or float grotesquely downstream, almost always face down. They are all but ignored by the living.

In the southern reaches of the Irrawaddy Delta, where the only access to hundreds of small villages is by boat, the remains of the victims of the May 3 cyclone are rotting in the sun.

"These people are strangers," said Kyaw Swe, a clothing merchant who said he expected the tides to take away the six bloated bodies, some with their clothing intact, lying on the muddy banks near his collapsed home. "They come from upstream."

Villagers here say it is not their responsibility to handle the dead. The government or military presence is barely felt in the serpentine network of canals outside the devastated cities of Bogale and Phyarpon.

"When we first saw the bodies floating past, we were sad and afraid," said Aung Win, a 45-year-old rice farmer who seems to have survived because his house is made of hardwood and withstood the storm. "Now we just say, here comes another body."

Many survivors interviewed Saturday during an eight-hour trip by boat through a series of canals outside Bogale used the same word to describe how many bodies they saw in the immediate aftermath of the cyclone: "countless."

One reporter saw 24 bodies, most of them along the banks of canals.

Even more pervasive are the giant corpses of water buffaloes bobbing in the water.

Because the bodies have not been gathered in one place, calculating a precise number of deaths caused by the cyclone could ultimately prove impossible. In villages here, people say the missing are presumed dead.

With no roads connecting them to larger cities, these villages have always been isolated. Now, villagers say they feel abandoned.

In Gwe Choung, 13 miles from Bogale, a reporter visiting Saturday was the first outsider to set foot in the village since the storm hit.

"We have no seed, no cows and no buffaloes," said Mawin Lat, 34.

"We only have food for the next few days."

Of the 200 people in the village, 96 died. In other villages visited Saturday, the death tolls ranged from three to 20.