Death in Bangladesh: Rebuilding the Tragic Cycle : Cyclones: It’s been 10 months since the last storm killed thousands. Poverty, failure to coordinate with aid donors limits solutions.

Kala Mia stopped hammering for a moment and scratched his head when a stranger asked recently why he was building his new house of bamboo, timber and straw on the precise spot where a 10-foot tidal wave flattened his last one.

He reflected for a moment on the terror he felt last April 29, when he watched the wall of water, pushed by 140-m.p.h. winds, wipe out his little village in a devastating cyclone that demolished thousands of communities and left more than 100,000 corpses strewn along the southern coast of Bangladesh.

Finally, Mia just shrugged.

“What a question! Where can I go?” he asked, turning to look toward the sea that has provided both life and death for his impoverished family of fishermen.

“Of course I’m afraid, but we have no place else to stay. Where can we go?”

Still, it is only now that Mia and the more than 300 other families of the beach village of Charpara, in the worst-hit regions around Cox’s Bazar, are getting around to rebuilding.

It took that long, he explained, for an international aid group to drop off the few dozen bamboo poles, a handful of 2-by-4s and the straw he needs for the new house.

How has the government helped you? Mia was asked.

“The government? Ha!” he replied. “Nothing. Nothing.”

The cyclone, one of the most lethal in Bangladesh’s history, brought hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid to this impoverished South Asian nation. But 10 months later, the government has done little to help its 112 million people, the world’s poorest, recover from one of the nation’s worst recorded disasters or to protect them from a future disaster.

And if another such cyclone hits here this year or next, according to aid workers and bureaucrats, the death toll would soar again into the tens of thousands.

Part of the problem lies in Bangladesh’s impossible geography. Most of the nation lies in a swamp the size of Wisconsin, a crushingly overpopulated riverine nightmare at the mouth of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers where shifting courses and currents eat away dozens of villages each year, only to deposit their silt to form new islands and coastal land farther downriver.

So the villagers are forced to follow their land. Mia and his family, for example, moved to their unprotected beach village here, within Bangladesh’s southernmost city of Cox’s Bazar, only after the river had eroded away their ancestral village in the north.

Clearly, the nation’s poor infrastructure compounds the problem. Roads and bridges are too few to link urban centers with the majority of a population whose average per capita income is just $220 a year. And, despite a massive airlift of medicines and other emergency supplies by the U.S. Marines during the month immediately after the cyclone, it has taken months more to deliver the relatively less urgent reconstruction materials to the nearly 2 million people who lost their homes in the disaster.

The sheer magnitude of last year’s destruction was a further obstacle to recovery.

“To me, this disaster was beyond the capacity of all of us taken together,” said Salehuddin Ahmed, program director of the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, one of the country’s largest and most effective aid agencies.

As the committee stated in its lengthy cyclone damage-assessment report late last year: “Loss of lives and destruction of properties were catastrophic. The extent of damage will never be fully known, (and) it is difficult to estimate in quantitative terms the magnitude of devastation of the fateful night.”

According to Ahmed and other Bangladeshi aid officials who have been trying to put the international assistance to use, at least part of the problem lies with the Bangladeshi government itself. “The problem is in the implementation . . . and the biggest problem is attitudinal,” Ahmed said of the government’s approach to reconstruction and recovery.

“We have become used to just giving things to people. . . . Everyone is busy showing what he or she is giving to the poor. I have not seen anything dynamic coming forth from the government.”

To illustrate the scope of the problem, Ahmed and other analysts here point to the one proven staple of cyclone survival for Bangladesh--the simple concrete shelter. Several recent studies, confirmed by last year’s storm, indicate that in a nation where the overwhelming majority live in flimsy huts and shacks, a single shelter can save 2,500 lives. At the moment, there are just 318 such shelters scattered along Bangladesh’s coastal regions. To protect the entire population on the coastal belt, the country needs at least 4,000.

The government is planning to use some of its post-cyclone aid windfall to build new shelters, but the task appears huge. There are no raw materials on the sites where the shelters are needed, most of them newly surfaced islands that become instant population centers. So logistics and high transportation costs leave each shelter with a price tag of $50,000 and a construction period of at least six months.

Under a $100-million cash grant from Saudi Arabia, for example, reconstruction officials are projecting just 100 new shelters. Several independent, non-government agencies are conducting separate relief projects with their own donations, but there is a serious lack of coordination between them and the government.

Ahmed’s committee is a case in point. Like most such independent agencies in Bangladesh, his group is focusing its cyclone-recovery project on a single part of a single island, a devastated, sandy tract 1.6 miles long where thousands died and an estimated 110,000 were left homeless. There are just four shelters on Kutubdia Island now, and Ahmed’s group has received enough international donations (about $3 million) to build 16 more, six in the first year and the rest later.

It’s a relatively small project; another relief group, Caritas, has received $12 million from Western donors with which it plans to build 50 shelters elsewhere in the coastal belt. But both groups are faced with the same problem: Neither knows for certain just where the government is planning to build its shelters.

“The coordination is a problem,” Ahmed said. “For example, we don’t know officially even if the government is planning to build shelters in Kutubdia. We’ve only heard rumors.”

There appears to have been a similar lack of coordination both in soliciting relief goods from abroad and in distributing the materials needed to rebuild villages such as Mia’s.

In the months after the disaster, Ahmed and other relief officials saw little humor in some of the materials the government received and sent out to the worst-hit, tropical coastal belt. Among them, they said, were snowshoes from Scandinavia, brassieres from Western Europe and huge water purification machines incapable of desalination, high-technology devices that were of no use in regions where sea water had contaminated the drinking supply.

And despite the insignificant cost of such simple yet vital items as bamboo poles and 2-by-4s, it has taken months for them to reach even the most accessible villages, beach colonies such as Charpara, which is just a few hundred yards from the runway at Cox’s Bazar’s domestic airport.