The Finacial Times : By Amy Kazmin in Ka Na So Chaung, Burma
Published: July 29 2009 03:00 | Last updated: July 29 2009 03:00

It was the house of his dreams – wooden, with a 15ft ceiling, a corrugated iron roof and sturdy cement steps leading inside – and U Aung Kyin, a 57-year-old farmer with seven acres of land, had planned for a lifetime to build it.

The wood came from trees planted when his son was born 30 years before. The $1,400 (€990, £852) for the carpenter’s fees, roof and other materials was saved from sales of the fruit from his 100 banana trees. When he finally moved in last year, after decades living in flimsy bamboo and thatch structures, U Aung Kyin felt like a king.

“I waited 30 years to get that house,” he says. “I can’t even describe what it felt like.”

Yet in May last year, just a month after he moved in, cyclone Nargis struck Burma’s Irrawaddy delta, killing about 140,000 people and destroying some 800,000 homes. U Aung Kyin’s house was ripped apart, with only the cement steps left standing.

Today, he and his family are living in a shelter constructed from salvaged materials. It is plush compared to the precarious plastic-tarpaulin structures sheltering most of his neighbours, impoverished fishermen for whom a $35 roof is out of reach.

“We already borrowed $15 to buy bamboo matting,” says 38-year-old Myint Tin, his fragile home teetering above thick mud. Though aid workers assessed the village’s dire housing and promised help, Myint Tin, who repairs fishing nets to support his eight family members, says nothing has come. “We’ll have to wait for the roof,” he says.

Up to half a million cyclone survivors remain in similar squalor as international efforts to help them rebuild peter out amid tensions between foreign donors and the ruling military junta. “There is a lot of unhappiness in the donor community,” says a Rangoon-based western diplomat. “It’s worrying because there is still an incredible amount of need.”

Just after the storm the world rallied to help survivors, overcoming resistance from the junta to gain access to the area. Led by the UK and the US, the regime’s fiercest critics, the international community contributed about $329m to emergency relief efforts, the largest flow of foreign aid ever to Burma, for years the target of sanctions.

But while survivors are still struggling to get back on their feet after the loss of their homes and livestock, aid agencies are facing a severe funding crunch amid a renewal of western concerns about Burma’s human rights record and its suppression of dissent.

“The humanitarian re-sponse went fairly well; 95 per cent of people received something,” says a Rangoon-based United Nations official who works on housing issues. “It’s the early recovery and reconstruction which from a shelter perspective has been very weak. Once we tried to go beyond tarpaulins and rope, donors said their hands were tied.”

In December, the UN laid out a three-year, $691m rehabilitation programme for the cyclone-affected area, a modest plan compared to the $5bn that went to rebuild Aceh after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. But so far, just $100m has been pledged for Burmese reconstruction and a tiny fraction of that has been delivered. “Everyone has done something, but no one has done enough,” says another UN official.

Analysts say the sentencing of high-profile political dissidents to up to 65 years in prison at the height of last year’s relief effort undermined aid efforts. Donors are also unhappy with the end of fast-track visas for foreign aid workers, leading to a large application backlog.

The continuing trial of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel prize-winning opposition leader, and the junta’s snub of UN chief Ban Ki-moon, who was barred from meeting Ms Suu Kyi during his visit to Burma, has further darkened the climate.

“Policymakers are going to wait and see how the politics play out in coming months, which is extremely unfortunate,” says Thant Myint-U, who monitors international policy to-wards Burma. “People are scratching out such a bare living,” says the UN housing official. “It’s a fallacy to think they will just get livelihoods and be fine.”

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Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009