CHAR CHAPEL, Pakistan Nov. 13 (AP)—Rustom Ali, a hardened kernel of a man about 5 feet tall, looked toward the Bay of Bengal a quarter of a mile away. The waters were lapping at the shore.

Just a year ago the bay, whipped by winds of 100 miles an hour, swept the spot where Rustom Ali was standing and carried him half a mile to a palm tree, which he held onto to survive. The waters blotted out his little home and swallowed eight members of his family: his wife, two daughters, a son‐in‐law, four grandchildren,

Rustom Ali and a son, Mohammed Shonan Mia, 12 years old, survived.

A cyclone—elsewhere it would be called a typhoon or a hurricane—and a tidal wave accompanying it struck the islands and coast of the Bay of Bengal In East Pakistan the night of Nov. 12–13. About 300,000 people died in an area of 3,897 square miles with a population of more than three million. The disaster claimed 470,000 cattle and demolished 235,000 homes. Property damage was put at $186‐million, including $126‐million in crops.

Lives With a Cousin

A year later, Rustom Ali, a farmer who is about 50 but does not know how old he really is, has built no new house. Poor and without materials, he has moved in with a cousin.

The house is much like the one he lost, thatched roof, siding of woven fiber, dark and cool inside, a dirt floor where he and seven others sleep on mats. He no longer farms his half khani‐1.3 acres —of land. Sand driven ashore by the storm Covers it
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“I work as a day laborer,” he said to an interpreter in Bengali. “I collect wood or straw for fodder. I do repairs. I make baskets.”

The pay? “A meal and 10 annas a day, sometimes one rupee.” This is a range of 12 to 21 cents.

To a visitor returning to this low‐lying, fertile shore country for the first time in a year, the contrast is striking. Where bodies and carcasses festered on the banks of innumerable channels and men wept for help, bullocks and cattle now graze and rice ripens for the harvest.

The Scene Is Deceptive

But the scene is deceptive; the people are hungry.

Char Chapli a year ago was home to about 1,500 people. They raised rice and fished.

By official count, the storm killed 688 in Char Chapli. No one had shelter or warning.

The 980 people still in the village do receive some relief supplies despite the civil war, which has disrupted communications and Government control in the area.

By the end of this month they will start a harvest that should produce enough rice to keep them going into the new year. The villagers hope for loans to replace fishing boats destroyed by the storm.

But the extensive effort that Pakistan and relief agencies promised a year ago has collapsed under the effect of the civil war and red tape.

Eleven months after the cyclone, the American relief organization CARE signed an agreement with the Government to construct 30,000 low cost houses on Bhola Island, where 119,000 died. The timetable calls for completing 10,000 homes by 1973—if the fighting, which now has virtually cut off Bhola from relief efforts, allows a start.

Program a Dead Issue

An ambitious World Bank program, using rehabilitation of the cyclone‐affected area as the start for a province‐wide development program costing $1.8‐billion, is a dead issue.

According to officials of the United Nations Children's Fund, a program to sink 1,200 wells has stalled under the bureaucratic procedure of approving, sites for them.

Under a separate program, relief officials say, 200 wells were sunk by last January in Bhola; none has been sunk since, although hundreds were scheduled.

Rustom All intends to remain on this spit of land, where a year ago he buried his wife, brother, daughter and one grandchild—the other bodies never were found.

“Although the cyclone comes,” he said, “still we hope we can live in peace. We all have hope.”