With no time to feel emotion, volunteers dig with their bare hands in race to reach victims

As monasteries and mosques are reduced to rubble, the human cost is emerging

- Rebecca Ratcliffe

The children at Bright Kids nursery in Kyaukse, a town south of Mandalay, were taking a nap when the earth-quake struck on Friday afternoon.

The two-storey building collapsed with dozens of children aged between two and four trapped inside. For hours, rescuers sifted through the rubble, searching desperately for survivors.

"We were clearing the building using diggers and rescuing people with manual tools," said Thar Nge, a volunteer. They needed better equip ment – metal cutters and generators - but made use of what they had. Thar Nge helped carry a four-year-old girl to safety. She pleaded, over and over, for him to save her, he said. He held a bottle of water to her mouth before her dusty body was freed.

The girl was among 12 children saved, along with four teachers. A fur ther 16 children and a teacher were found dead. Thar Nge barely had time to feel any emotion. Afterwards, his team of 11 volunteers moved onwards across Kyaukse, one of many areas devastated by Friday's earthquake.

Similar scenes have played out across central Myanmar, with teams of volunteers using anything at their disposal to free survivors, digging with their bare hands and crawling through collapsed structures, often with no safety equipment.

The injured are taken to hospitals that were already overstretched before the disaster and are now completely overwhelmed. According to Myanmar's military junta, more than 1,600 people have been killed and more than 3,400 injured in the quake. Aid agencies warn that it could take days or weeks for the real scale of the disaster to emerge.