Help us rebuild, Vanuatu president urges world

Vanuatu's president March 16 pleaded with the world to help the cyclone-ravaged Pacific nation rebuild as aid agencies warned conditions were among the most challenging they have ever faced with fears of disease rife.
      
An emotional President Baldwin Lonsdale said the need was "immediate" after Severe Tropical Cyclone Pam tore through the country on Friday night packing wind gusts of up to 320 kilometres (200 miles) an hour, leaving massive destruction.
      
"The humanitarian need is immediate, we need it right now," he told AFP as he readied to fly home from a disaster conference in Japan, adding that the poverty-stricken island chain also desperately required longer-term financial support.
      
"After all the development we have done for the last couple of years and this big cyclone came and just destroyed... all the infrastructure the government has... built. Completely destroyed.
      
"We need international funding to (re)build all the infrastructure."       

Many world leaders have pledged support and military planes from Australia, New Zealand and France were arriving loaded with food, shelter, medicine and generators, along with disaster relief teams.
      
The official death toll in the battered capital Port Vila, where relief workers said up to 90 percent of homes have been damaged, stands at six with more than 30 injured, although aid workers believe this is likely a fraction of the fatalities caused by the storm.
      
While the aid missions continued landing in Port Vila, workers on the ground said there was no way to distribute desperately needed supplies across the archipelago's 80 islands, warning it would take days to reach remote villages flattened by the monster storm.
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