IN A SMALL, airless hall in Rangoon, a team of highly experienced European disaster relief experts briefs a group of Burmese volunteers who have been travelling down to the cyclone-hit areas of the Irrawaddy delta. "Show us photographs of what you are seeing," says the team leader, who has a PhD in disaster management. "We will try to tell you what to do."

This is how international emergency relief efforts have to operate in Burma at the moment - undercover and by proxy.

In the wake of Cyclone Nargis, which hit Burma on May 2, aid organisations and United Nations agencies have been on standby to supply aid and expertise. Burma's military rulers, however, have so far prevented most foreign aid workers from entering the country and have allowed only limited access to the hard-hit delta.

With an estimated 133,000 people dead and 2.5 million affected, there has been rising concern both inside and outside the country as to whether the regime is able, or even willing, to cope with the aftermath of this massive catastrophe.

In an effort to encourage the Burmese generals to accept more international assistance, UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon flew to Rangoon last week. After his meeting with the regime's top general, Than Shwe, the UN announced a major breakthrough in negotiations as the Burmese government agreed to allow "all aid workers" into the country. But three long weeks have passed since the cyclone hit and, for many in Burma, it will be too little, too late.

Back in the meeting hall, the disaster relief team is trying to turn inexperienced Burmese volunteers into aid workers in the space of a few hours. Advice ranges from the simple but sage (choose a team leader and always carry a whistle) to the need-to-know steps of disaster response (first assess the water situation, then food, shelter, sanitation and medical needs).

Discussion among the attending volunteers indicates that the primary concern about clean drinking water has been momentarily remedied by recent rains, and the conversation turns to food. Fish are a ready source of nutrition in the myriad canals that flow through the delta, but there are reports that many survivors are afraid to eat the fish because of the thousands of dead bodies still floating in the waters.

In Rangoon, a story is circulating that a fishmonger at a market sliced open a large fish and found a human finger in its belly.

Though the meeting is helpful to the volunteers, it is frustrating for a seasoned disaster-response team more used to working on the front line. "This is not how I like to operate," says one team member who specialises in water search-and-rescue. "I do not want to be sitting here giving lectures. I want to be out there. I need action."

In lieu of any substantial government assistance or international help, Burmese individuals are organising their own private relief operations.

One night, I sat in the house of a wealthy Burmese businessman and watched footage of the cyclone-hit areas he and his colleagues had taken while delivering aid. They had hired a large boat and travelled through some of the worst-hit areas in the far reaches of the delta, distributing food, shelter materials and diesel oil to pump contaminated water out from the wells.

The images, taken 10 days after the cyclone, are bleak and gruesome. Villages have been reduced to piles of planks, fallen trees and debris. Bloated corpses float in the murky waters, spread-eagled in ghastly rigor mortis.

A Burmese doctor I know was just given permission to start a relief clinic in a delta town. She is preparing to deal with immediate medical concerns - skin infections and lacerations, diarrhoea and respiratory illnesses - but in some areas the urgent issue of shelter has yet to be addressed.

"Many people have nowhere to go," she says. "They have nothing left. Some of them were naked after the storm. They have no home left and no family - they have absolutely nothing, not even their clothes."

Currently unable to travel down to the delta (Westerners who are caught at military checkpoints are turned back, and journalists are being systematically tracked down and deported), I spend my time collecting these eyewitness accounts. It is impossible to get any overall sense of the situation.

The aid community issues warnings about appalling sanitation conditions, potential for outbreaks of disease, and areas that have not yet been reached by any kind of aid. But no-one really knows for sure exactly what is happening in the delta.

As a spokesperson for a leading international humanitarian organisation says from their Rangoon office: "At the moment it is like a jigsaw puzzle, we are just trying to put the pieces together."

Each morning, I pick up a copy of the New Light of Myanmar, the government's state newspaper and official mouthpiece. In sharp contrast to the first-hand accounts I am hearing, the pictures and articles depict a successful and efficient disaster-relief operation.

General Than Shwe, who only recently made his first public appearance since the cyclone, is seen inspecting orderly camps housing neatly dressed survivors.

One Burmese friend scoffs at these images: those tents were empty before the general turned up, he says, before he arrived they were filled with "model" refugees ordered to say that everything is fine.

The regime is falling back on familiar patterns of behaviour. Its usual modus operandi in times of crisis is to churn out propaganda such as this, rewriting the news to suit its own needs, while controlling access to prevent any real information from leaking out.

Even as the announcement of a "major breakthrough" in the delivery of aid comes after Ban Ki-moon's meeting with Than Shwe, there is little positive news on the ground.

Increasingly, I am hearing about survivors sheltering in schools and monasteries who are being forcibly moved back to their devastated villages.

On Thursday, while the high-level meeting took place in the new capital of Naypyidaw, a group of 600 cyclone refugees who had built makeshift shelters along a road on the outskirts of Rangoon were split into smaller groups and moved to less visible locations in nearby muddy fields.

So far, among the Burmese people I meet, the news of a breakthrough has been greeted with scepticism and few are ready to forgive the regime's initial intransigence.

A Burmese man volunteering in the delta told me he had met people who walked from their destroyed villages to the safety of larger towns, passing survivors they were not able to help along the way. Many more could have been saved, he feels, if only the government had acted quickly and allowed international aid into the country at the critical moment."

What's the point?" he says wearily, on hearing the UN's announcement. "Everyone is already dead."