KHATACHIRA, Bangladesh, Nov. 20 - The wind whipped through the sky. The river swelled above the tree line. And in a flash, Mamataz Begum's youngest child, barely two years old, was swept from her arms, as a tidal wave smashed through the fragile mud homes of this village and scooped up everything in its watery arms.

In this hamlet, on the southernmost fringe of Bangladesh, cut by rivers that empty into the Bay of Bengal, nothing was spared by the cyclone that ripped through here last Thursday. Barely a single house was standing; they were all made of mud and they simply collapsed back into the earth. The meager food stocks of the village had washed away. Fishing boats and nets, a principal source of income here, were gone. The paddy fields had filled up with brackish water, which meant there would be no harvest.

On Tuesday, animal carcasses, stinking and bloated, lay scattered along the river bank. There was no drinking water left. A small bag of food from the government, the sole aid so far for this village of about 1,000 families, had run out.

The people of Khatachira were a testament to the bittersweet blessings of the latest natural calamity to befall Bangladesh. Relatively speaking, the death toll from the cyclone was small - nearly 3,500 according to latest official count, roughly double the death toll of Hurricane Katrina but far less than the 140,000 killed during the last Bangladeshi cyclone, in 1991. In large measure that was because of an early warning system that announced the storm and urged people to head to shelters.

But in claiming relatively few lives, it left many more people in utter ruin. The government estimates that about 4 million people have been affected.

"The crisis is just beginning," said Suman Islam, humanitarian assistance coordinator with the aid agency, Care, which had sent its first relief assessment team here Tuesday afternoon. "We have saved lives. But now the challenge is the same."

In Khatachira, near the edge of the Sunderbans, the world's largest mangrove forest, villagers have so far buried 57 of their own, nearly half of them children under age 10, most likely because they couldn't swim or cling to trees. On Tuesday morning another body, that of a local woman, was found in the bush of a neighboring village; she had yet to be brought home for burial. All but seven people had been accounted for.

An old man who lost his entire family was still searching for the bodies of his two grandchildren. Another old man said his granddaughter, age 8, was still missing. A woman with a hideous gash on her right foot - from a piece of tin roofing that fell and sliced her skin - said four in her family had been killed, and five left to carry on.

The nearest cyclone shelter was about two and a half miles away, and it had swelled well past capacity by the time most of this village was ready to evacuate. One woman even went to the shelter, came home after it seemed that the storm was not coming, and was killed.

"See over there, that was our house," said Muhammad Himayat, pointing at an open stretch of paddy. The house is gone, along with two dozen goats, two cows and three fishing boats that were together were the family's livelihood. "It is all river now."

This is what the villagers said among themselves:

"Where's Salem?" one man asked.

"He lost his son," someone responded.

"Has the grandson been found?"

"No."

Scientists studying climate change in this part of the world say they expect extreme weather, including cyclones and powerful tropical storms, to increase in frequency here. And the United Nations has increasingly warned of the high toll these disasters exact on the poor, including for the long term. A study in several disaster-prone countries led a United Nations team to conclude for instance that in India, adult women who were born during a disaster were 20 percent less likely to be educated. In Niger, children under the age of 2 who had been born during a drought were more than twice as likely to be malnourished.

The survivors of Cyclone Sidr happen to be among the poorest of the poorest, most disaster-prone countries in the world.

Dysentery was the next demon that aid workers were guarding against. In this watery land, clean drinking water is in short supply. There are only a few water wells. The ponds, from which many villagers get their drinking water, are contaminated with rotting leaves and animals. Toilets are rare, and the practice of defecating in the fields makes it that much easier for disease to spread.

The government has appealed for international aid and in a rare gesture, opened its visa gates to foreigners, including journalists. Officials said relief workers and the military reached the last remaining pockets of the devastated areas on Tuesday in an operation involving helicopters, planes, boats and thousands of troops and aid workers, Reuters reported.

But food supplies remained woefully inadequate. "Hundreds of hands go up to grab just one food packet," said a relief worker in the Patuakhali district.

Donor countries have pledged $142 million in emergency aid. The United Nations World Food Program has distributed nearly 100 tons of high-energy biscuits, a was to begin delivering rice on Friday. The United States has offered two C-130 transport planes and two amphibious naval vessels with helicopters to help the relief mission.

But delivering aid to places like Khatachira is not easy. Getting here means a long drive, crossing a narrow river whose only ferry has been destroyed, driving through a fetid market town that reeks of dead flesh and a two-hour boat ride along the Baleshwar River, afloat with dead goats and ducks.

Along the journey one can see evidence of life limping back. A village government office, relativelyuntouched, has placed its documents on the front porch to dry. A remote college has had its roof and walls blown off, but someone has neatly arranged the desks in neat rows under the sun. The roads had been cleared of fallen logs. Banana trees and palms lay crumpled on top of each other, like victims of an all-night brawl.

The day after the cyclone, villagers here had hoisted red flags at the edge of the hamlet. Aid workers had been slow to arrive but those who had were besieged with villagers, who knew that only in narrating their loss could they expect to gain anything.

On the edge of the water, near a tree whose roots are barely hanging onto the earth, stood a couple of cooking pots - remnants of Mamataz Begum's kitchen. Her son's body washed up in another village, and they brought his corpse here. Her other children survived by clinging to trees. Her husband broke his leg as he swam through the waves.

On Tuesday, she was still dazed, and had no idea where the family's next meal would come from.

"If God will feed us, we will eat," she said.