Bangladesh

By ANITA PRATAP/UJANTIA

This is the tale of one town. When dawn breaks in Ujantia, it is not chirping birds or crowing cocks that herald the new day but the wailing of hungry babies. Rarely do desperate parents have anything to silence the cries. Says Sultana Razia, rocking her infant girl: "I have only water to feed my child." The howling dies down, more often than not, when the babies simply fall mute from exhaustion.

It has been two weeks since a cyclone smashed into Ujantia, situated on a small island five miles off the Bangladesh coast in the Bay of Bengal, but the misery of the town has yet to recede. The storm, which claimed at least 125,000 lives nationwide, killed about 3,000 of Ujantia's 15,000 people. The trees, what few remain, were stripped of leaves and fruit. The homes, if not completely washed away, were whittled to bamboo skeletons. A four-hour boat ride from Cox's Bazar, the nearest mainland city, Ujantia has received only a pittance of relief supplies. Food is in such meager quantities that the village can scarcely find the strength to begin to build again.

Before the tempest struck, Delwara Begum and her family went to bed untroubled by the roaring winds, even though the monsoon season was approaching. Delwara was too poor to own a radio and did not know that the government had announced a signal-9 storm -- the second most severe warning -- earlier in the day. As the 20-ft. tidal waves destroyed her house, Delwara clutched her six-year-old daughter, clung to a bamboo beam, and was washed up battered but alive seven miles away; her husband and five other children perished.

Today Delwara and her daughter live at Ujantia's cyclone shelter, a concrete rectangle on 10-ft. stilts that can house up to 2,000 people. On the night of the storm, 7,000 villagers crowded the shelter, but now 389 families call it home. They huddle within its chipped and dirt-stained walls, a lucky few clutching their possessions: scraps of clothing, a blackened pot or a tin lamp.

In a building next door, relief workers distribute rations. Each day's handout brings a stampede as the villagers jostle one another to be next in line. So far, relief packets have been dropped on Ujantia twice from the air, but the efforts ended in disaster. Most of the items fell into the water; villagers snatched up those that landed intact before relief workers could distribute them fairly. Last week fresh supplies arrived by boat. Still, allowing just 9 oz. of rice and a packet of crackers for each person, the ! supplies are enough for only half the families. "I am going mad," says Jasimuddin Chowdhury, the local Red Crescent representative.

Drinking water is an even bigger problem than food. The closest source of potable water, a well, is two miles away. Ujantia never had any vehicles, not even bicycles, so the only way to get to the well is to walk there, and that can take two hours. Relief workers are providing single women and babies with water, but have told those families with male members to fetch it themselves. Contaminated water has already sickened more than 300 children with diarrhea. A Red Crescent doctor treated the youngsters for three days. Then he ran out of medicine and left.

Some of the townspeople are beginning to build makeshift homes out of shreds. Mohammad Sharif, a farmworker, managed to find enough of the pieces of his old hut to build a two-story shack for his nine-member family. Its two decks are just cubicles really, 4 ft. by 7 ft., with 4-ft. ceilings. There is no door, so when the rains blow in at night, the family is soaked.

At this time of year, the villagers would usually be busy cultivating the land, but their fields are flooded with salt water. The 10-ft. mud wall that normally keeps out the sea was washed away in the storm. Until the dike is rebuilt, the tides will bring more salinity to the soil, eventually making it unfit for farming and threatening Ujantia's existence.

The villagers know this but are waiting for the government to start its food-for-work program, in which the state will reward the workers with rice for rebuilding the embankment. Why not go ahead on their own?

"Right now," says Shamsuddin, a young farmer, "it is an effort for me even to talk to you. How can I dig and shovel earth without food in my belly?"

The government, however, is overwhelmed just trying to deliver food and medicine to stave off death and disease; it also has to worry about reports of another cyclone building up in the Bay of Bengal. Reconstruction efforts are a lesser priority, a fact that has upset Ujantia's elders. "If we don't plant soon," says Abdur Rahman, a small landowner, "we will have no crop next season. There will be only starvation." The screams of the babies at dawn are destined to grow louder.