WAT MYON (Myanmar): They are living with the dead.

More than two weeks after Tropical Cyclone Nargis wiped away all but one of this village’s houses, decomposing corpses still lie on muddy pathways or are trapped in eddies along the shore of the broad Pyamaia River nearby.

The stench overpowers every corner of U Thon Tun’s badly damaged home, where 25 survivors have taken refuge beneath a leaky roof patched with tarp. The wind and the rain, which pours down on them every day, fails to erase the sickly smell.

The villagers, all tenant farmers, want to get past their loss, go back to work and earn money again before another rice crop is lost. But their paddies are ruined, they have no seeds to plant and there are no tools to work soil flooded by the sea.

Without any tools, the villagers say they can’t solve another pressing problem: the corpses that are poisoning the river, where they wash themselves each day.

Soldiers sent in to gather the corpses suddenly disappeared on Sunday and villagers say they heard the troops were refusing to dispose of any more bodies, leaving survivors no choice but to live with them.

“It’s not 10, it’s not 100, it’s thousands of bodies,” Thon Tun said. “We gave up collecting corpses around here. It’s impossible to bury them properly.”

Local authorities have provided small rations of food but not the seeds, equipment and water buffalo that villagers say they need to start planting by the end of June. The water buffalo they had died in the storm that thrashed the village and flooded the paddies that now cannot be planted without the help of cattle.Meanwhile, saltwater is poisoning the soil and fresh water reserves. Yet villagers have no salt, which is essential to a healthy diet, for their meager meals. The Irrawaddy River delta produces most of the country’s salt, but the factories were destroyed in the storm.

So Thon Tun, 56, and the refugees who depend on him, have a lot of time to sit and think, to breathe in the inescapable smell and to worry what fate they might be condemned to suffer because they survived, only to face an agonizing wait for help.

“I didn’t die, but I feel dead,” said Hla Ye, 70, staring blankly. “The people killed by the cyclone are lucky because they don’t know anything about what came next. I wish I could join them.”

She turned, placed her withered hands together and bowed her head in prayer to a small statue of Buddha, surrounded by bouquets of plastic flowers in a sitting room shrine. She struck a triangular bronze gong, suspended by string from the ceiling, ringing it the traditional three times to share her merit. Then she sought solace in a deep puff on a long cheroot, rolled in an old scrap of newspaper. As she brooded, the sky over the delta darkened.

Lightning strikes and booming thunderclaps shook the wooden walls as rain and wind thrashed the region for several hours on Monday. “What we really want is to go back to work in the fields, but we can’t do that,” said Zaw Zaw, 28.

As survivors here continue to wait for help, one of the few things that makes them smile is the name of what was once their village: It means “the pig gone with the water.” Legend has it, villagers say, that the fast-moving creek next to their homes has washed away a lot of pork over the generations.

Nargis’ storm surge was so powerful, said one man, that a wave at least 10 feet tall swept him five miles from home. It killed so much livestock that survivors are thinking of renaming the village Koway Myon: “the water buffalo gone with the water.”The joke ends there.—Dawn/The LAT-WP Service (c) Los Angeles Times