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People came with a few belongings -- a small pot, perhaps, a woven bamboo mat -- but often with only the clothes on their back. Now they waited. They sat and stared, they slept, they collected scattered wood for fires. And they waited.

U Than Swe, a middle-aged Myanmar man who owned a simple hardware shop in the area, smiled when he saw foreigners approaching.

To him, their presence spelled salvation -- food, maybe some money. But the visitors had nothing to offer. Not food or currency. He retreated into the shadows, to sit and to wait.

Elsewhere, people scavenged for fish in canals that had turned black as oil and were starting to reek of decomposition. Children and grandparents cleared debris, while men extracted rusty nails from broken wood beams.

Wind and water from nowhere

The fierceness of this storm was unexpected. "We didn't know it was coming," said Ma Naung, a mother of three in the village of Pyiapon. "Nobody warned us. In the middle of the night, the winds knocked down our walls and water began to flood us out of our home." She and her children hung onto the floorboards. When the winds died down a bit, they made it to a neighbor's house.

Many around her did not survive. Thousands in Pyiapon drowned in the surging floodwaters, people said. Houses were ripped apart.

Another small community of the bereft was taking shelter beneath a concrete bridge Thursday. They waited out the heat and put out their few belongings to dry in the sun. A woman cooked a pot of rotten paddy rice. Her name was Mayn.

"My baby is sick," she explained. The 2-month-old girl appeared severely malnourished, reminiscent of a skeleton, eyes and bones bulging, and in constant discomfort. Mayn said she wanted to take her baby to the hospital, but it was destroyed by the cyclone along with its small reserve of drugs.

All she could do was wait.

(Jennifer Cavagnol is a co-founder of Vagabond Reporters International.)

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