The stench of death hung over the Irrawaddy delta town of Labutta, where the blackened bodies of people and animals, rotting in the tropical heat, were washed aground as Burma’s cyclone floodwaters receded.
Struggling to breathe through the overpowering smells, residents wrapped layers of cloth around their faces and rubbed in balm to mask the odour. Death pervades this town so completely that many said they cannot sleep because ghosts of the cyclone victims torment them. One said: “We can’t sleep at night, because we can hear people shouting at night. Maybe these are the ghosts of the villagers."
Grossly bloated bodies lay strung out along the roads running atop embankments between paddies in a region that was the country’s rice bowl, but is now the centre of one of the world’s worst natural disasters.
One man said: “I cannot describe how I felt when I saw so many dead bodies.”
