TORONTO - Three months after cyclone Nargis swept into Burma, a Canadian aid worker says initial relief efforts to help its victims will take three months longer than expected to complete.
Andrew Kirkwood, Save the Children's Burma director, spoke Wednesday from Minden, Ont., where he's on a brief leave. He says distributing items such as cooking and eating utensils, plastic containers, blankets, clothes and mosquito nets to disaster victims usually takes about three months.
But he expects it will take at least six months to finish that task in Burma, which was hit by the cyclone May 2-3. An official count said Nargis killed 84,537, left 53,836 missing and presumed dead, and 2.4 million survivors.
Distributing the aid is a slow, painstaking process, with Kirkwood saying most of about 2,000 villages in need are accessible only by boat in an area that's twice the size of Lebanon.
Some 8,100 square kilometres of rice paddy were left submerged and 85 per cent of seed stocks were destroyed along with boats and fishing equipment.
With the planting season set to end in August, Kirkwood notes many people have lost the ability to plant a rice crop and will have to rely on food distribution by aid workers for at least six months - and for some people, until November 2009.
