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YANGON, Myanmar—Myanmar’s military regime allowed in the first major international aid shipment Thursday, but it snubbed a U.S. offer to help cyclone victims struggling to recover from a tragedy of unimaginable scale.

Five days after the storm, the junta continued to stall on visas for U.N. teams and other foreign aid workers anxious to deliver food, water and medicine to survivors amid fears the death toll could hit 100,000.

Among those stranded in Thailand were 10 members of the USAID Disaster Assistance Response Team. Air Force transport planes and helicopters packed with supplies also sat waiting for a greenlight.

“We are in a long line of nations who are ready, willing and able to help, but also, of course, in a long line of nations the Burmese don’t trust,” U.S. Ambassador Eric John told reporters in Thailand’s capital, Bangkok.

“It’s more than frustrating. It’s a tragedy,” he said. Each day of delay means “a lot more people suffering,” he said.

Myanmar’s isolationist regime issued an appeal for international assistance after winds of 120 mph and a storm surge up to 15 feet high pounded the Irrawaddy delta Saturday.

But the junta has been accused of dragging its feet despite emerging reports on entire villages submerged, bodies floating in salty water and children ripped from their parents arms.

“My children were crying all night. There is not enough food. There will be no food this evening,” said Daw Thay, who took refuge in a monastery with her three children and her 99-year-old mother in a town 60 miles south of Yangon, the country’s biggest city.

Daw Thay, 42, said monks were going without food so others could eat.

“We share what we have but there isn’t enough. So they (the monks) give the food to the children and the old people first,” she said.

In the swampy delta, a horrible stench rose from corpses and dead animals, bloated and floating in the water. Someone had written on a black asphalt road in Kongyangon village: “We are all in trouble. Please come help us.” A few feet away, the desperate plea, “We’re hungry.”

Tired of waiting for help in Yangon, red-robed monks, other civilians and dozens of soldiers cleared piles of debris and toppled billboards from streets and cutting branches off uprooted trees.

“They’ve started doing the clean up themselves,” Aye Chan Naing, chief editor of Democratic Voice of Burma, said as a light rain showered down. “They are volunteers.”

Public transportation was slowly coming back to life in the city, with some trains operating, and cars formed lines three miles long to get rations of two gallons of gasoline.

weeks to reach victims.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on the junta to postpone the referendum entirely and “focus instead on mobilizing all available resources and capacity for the emergency response efforts.”