Scenes of Suffering in an Agonized Land: Bangladesh Strives to Recover : Catastrophe: Relief workers still find vast new areas that were laid waste. An entire island disappeared for a week.

Her face was hidden, but tears stained the woman’s veil, and sobs racked her thin frame.

Waves that crashed over palm trees during a catastrophic cyclone nine days ago literally swept her ramshackle hamlet away, killing 2,000 people, including her husband and four children. She and one son somehow survived atop a palm, hanging on for life.

“I have nothing now, nothing,” she wailed Thursday as she sat by the muddy road. Her 8-year-old boy, clad in a torn Mickey Mouse T-shirt, clutched her tightly, as if still in that terrible tree.

Searing scenes of suffering continue to grip this agonized land. Bodies keep washing ashore, and stunned relief workers say they are still finding vast new areas devastated by the storm, including an entire island that disappeared beneath the churning waves for a week. It is now devoid of life.

With fierce new storms each day, hundreds of thousands of people remain inaccessible and have received no food, water or medicine. Health workers say diarrhea is now epidemic, increasing by 20% each day in some areas.

“Many of our people feel the situation is going out of control,” Robin Needham, program director for CARE, the largest private relief group, told a press conference in Dhaka. “The situation may be so overwhelming that we may not be able to make a significant impact.”

He said CARE and other relief groups would step up emergency operations, including hiring gravediggers. Many villagers have refused to bury badly rotted corpses, despite obvious health risks. Special laborers, or a particular Hindu caste, usually bury or burn the dead.

But a two-day drive down 100 miles of the worst-hit southeast coast showed progress as well. From Chittagong to Cox’s Bazar, villagers are starting to rebuild the destitute fishing and farming hamlets that bore the brunt of a storm that killed more than 125,000 people and left millions homeless.

Army, government, student and private relief groups are distributing rice and clothing. Medical teams are fanning out, treating thousands of sick and injured. Helicopters with food and medicine increasingly are able to land as floodwaters recede.

Farmers buried their cattle and dried water-soaked rice on the road. Others pumped saltwater out of shallow-bore wells to reach freshwater again. Markets held bananas, coconuts and rice. Barefoot barbers cut hair by the road. Hammering filled the steamy air as simple bamboo-and-thatch homes were rebuilt amid the rubble.

An American aid official said the storm’s long-term damage may be less than initially feared. Next month’s monsoon is likely to leach much of the salt from flooded fields. And although local standing crops were ruined, the rest of the country’s upcoming rice harvest remains promising.

“It’s a good, excellent, if not record crop,” he said. “This storm doesn’t affect that.”

A narrow channel was cleared into Chittagong, the nation’s main port, allowing several ships to enter Thursday. Commercial life in the battered city appeared almost normal, with busy streets and shops. Army trucks distributed rice to long lines in several neighborhoods.

Overall, relief remains scanty and often poorly delivered. But it is growing.

In Pekua, a coastal town four hours south of Chittagong, a Communist students’ group nearly caused a riot when they threw small biscuits and clothing from a bus to several hundred villagers. Men beat the mob back with bamboo lathis but could not control them.

Surging forward with outstretched hands, they pushed and shoved as pants and shirts were tossed out. Several men tore a shirt to shreds in the melee. Nearby, three small boys cried and traded punches, but each held on grimly to a pair of green trousers they had snagged.

A woman stood weeping at the edge of the crowd, clutching two infants, hungry but afraid to get closer. A small girl was nearly trampled, but was scooped up and carried out. Another boy literally danced for joy when a man handed him a pair of child’s pants.

A three-man CARE medical team worked several miles away in a damaged but still-standing clinic. They quickly treated 193 people for diarrhea, dysentery, pneumonia and broken limbs.

Down the road in Mangnama, Mossadek Hadir Chodri carefully handed out one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of rice and a small bag of biscuits to each family from a government relief supply. A plane had dropped bread several days before.

It wasn’t much, but in a once-bustling seaside village virtually flattened by the storm, no one appeared to be starving.

“We are hungry,” said Chodri, who lost three children, his home and two fishing boats. “We’re always hungry.”

The storm clearly proved the value of the nation’s new cyclone warning and shelter system. There are too few shelters, and not everyone heard or heeded the warnings, but it worked. About 350,000 lucky villagers survived the cyclone in special concrete shelters, built on stilts and shaped like an arrow to point into the wind.

In Mangnama, for example, about 3,000 people jammed a shelter built for a third that number. But they survived. About 8,000 others, caught out in the storm’s fury, perished.

One woman found her 25-year-old son Wednesday, drowned under a hut several miles away. She wandered forlornly down the road in a torn sari, wailing aloud and begging for money to buy a shroud to bury her boy.

“What can I do?” she cried over and over. “What can I do now?”

Closer to Chittagong, the storm hammered South Salimpur, leaving little but mounds of soggy rubble in the beachfront hamlet.

The entire village, about 1,000 people, hid in a concrete school and shelter, and only two people died in the storm.

Villagers said South Salimpur has washed away three times since the 1960s. Each time they rebuilt. They have no choice in this tortured land.

“Where else can I go?” asked Hamda Musa, 39, a textile worker standing in the debris that once was his home. “This is my house. This is my land.”