It is a scene Myanmar's ruling generals are unlikely to see played out for themselves: As a convoy of trucks carrying relief supplies, led by Buddhist monks, passed through storm-devastated villages, hungry children and homeless mothers bowed in supplication and respect.

"When I see those people, I want to cry," said Sitagu Sayadaw, 71, one of Myanmar's most respected senior monks.

Recently, people who had taken shelter at monasteries or gathered on roadsides waiting for aid to arrive were being displaced again, this time by the junta, which wants them to stop being an embarrassment to the government and return to their villages "for reconstruction." UN officials said Friday that refugees were also being evicted from government-run camps.

"In my entire life, I have never seen a hospital. I don't know where the government office is. I can't buy anything in the market because I lost everything to the cyclone," said Thi Dar. "So I came to the monk."

Nay Lin, 36, a volunteer doctor at the Kun Wan clinic, one of the six emergency clinic shelters Sitagu has opened in the delta, said: "Our patients suffer from infected wounds, abdominal pains and vomiting. They also need counseling for mental trauma, anxiety and depression."

Since the cyclone, the Burmese have become even closer to the monks while their alienation from the junta grows. This bodes ill for the government, which brutally cracked down on thousands of monks when they took to the streets last September appealing to the generals to improve conditions for the people.

Village after storm-hit village, it is clear who has won people's hearts.

Monasteries in the delta - those still standing after the storm - were clogged with refugees. People went there with donations or as volunteers. Monasteries that served as religious centers, orphanages and homes for the elderly were now also shelters for the homeless.

"The monks' role is more important than ever," said Ar Sein Na, 46, a monk in the delta village of That Kyar. "In a time of immense suffering like this, people have nowhere to go except to monks."

Kyi Than, 38, said she had traveled 25 kilometers by boat to Sitagu's camp.

"Our village monk died during the storm. I felt so good today having my first chance to talk to a monk since the storm. Monks are like parents to us," she said. "The government wants us to shut up, but monks listen to us."

"Meditation cannot remove this disaster. Material support is very important now," Sitagu said. "Now in our country, spiritual and material support are unbalanced."

However, like other senior monks here he must strike a careful balance. He has the moral duty to speak out on behalf of his suffering people but he must also protect his social programs and hospitals, which provide free medical care to the destitute in a country whose government views such private undertakings as a reproof.

But, speaking at his shelter as an afternoon monsoon rain drummed against the roof, Sitagu sounded frustrated with the government.

"In my country, I cannot see a real political leader. General Than Shwe's 'Burmese way to democracy?"' he said, referring to the junta's top leader. "What is it?"

Still, a 40-year-old monk at Sitagu's camp said that "monks are very angry" about the government's recent move to evict refugees from monasteries, roadside huts and other temporary shelters, even while the state-run media are filled with stories of government relief efforts. "The government doesn't want to show the truth."

A young monk in the Chaukhtatgyi Paya monastery district in Yangon predicted trouble ahead. "You will see it again because everyone is angry and everyone is jobless," said the monk, who said he joined the September "saffron revolution" and had a large gash over his right eye from a soldier's beating to show for it.

A monk from Mon State in southern Myanmar, who was visiting the delta to assess the damage and arrange an aid shipment, said: "For the government, these people are no more than dead animals in the fields."

The interdependence between monks and lay people is age-old. Monks receive alms - food, medicine, clothes, cash to buy books - from the laity. In return, they offer spiritual comfort. In villages without government schools, a monastic education is often the only one available for children.

"There is a relationship of reciprocity between monks and the lay people," said Desmond Chou, a Burmese-born scholar of comparative religion in New Delhi. "If a fire breaks out in a Myanmar village, it is usually the monks, not firefighters, who arrive first to rescue the people."

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The compound - part boot camp, part rehab center - resembles programs around the world for troubled youths.

Drill instructors drive young men through military-style obstacle courses, counselors lead group sessions, and there are even therapeutic workshops on pottery and drumming.

South Korea boasts of being the most wired nation on earth. In fact, perhaps no other country has so fully embraced the Internet. Ninety percent of homes connect to cheap, high-speed broadband, online gaming is a professional sport, and social life for the young revolves around the "PC bang," dim Internet parlors that sit on virtually every street corner.

But such ready access to the Web has come at a price, as legions of obsessed users find that they cannot tear themselves away from their computers.

It has become a national issue here in recent years as users started dropping dead from exhaustion after playing online games for days on end. A growing number of students have skipped school to stay online, shockingly self-destructive behavior in this intensely competitive society.

Up to 30 percent of South Koreans under 18, or about 2.4 million people, are at risk of Internet addiction, said Ahn Dong Hyun, a child psychiatrist at Hanyang University who just completed a three-year government-financed survey of the problem.

They spend at least two hours a day online, usually playing games or chatting. Of those, up to a quarter million probably show signs of actual addiction, like an inability to stop themselves from using computers, rising levels of tolerance that drive them to seek ever longer sessions online, and withdrawal symptoms like anger and craving when prevented from logging on.

To address the problem, the government has built a network of 140 Internet-addiction counseling centers, in addition to treatment programs at almost 100 hospitals and, most recently, the Internet Rescue camp, which started this summer. Researchers have developed a checklist for diagnosing the addiction and determining its severity, the K-Scale. (The K is for Korea.)

The rescue camp, in a forested area about an hour south of Seoul, was created to treat the most severe cases. The camp is entirely paid for by the government, making it tuition-free.

During a session, participants live at the camp, where they are denied computer use and allowed only one hour of cellphone calls a day, to prevent them from playing online games via the phone. They also follow a rigorous regimen of physical exercise and group activities, like horseback riding, aimed at building emotional connections to the real world and weakening those with the virtual one. "It is most important to provide them experience of a lifestyle without the Internet," said Lee Yun Hee, a counselor. "Young Koreans don't know what this is like."

South Korea's gaming addicts. (BBC News)

Experts say the definition of an addict is less to do with the number of hours spent online, but more about the central role computers and the internet can play in someone's life.

Symptoms include:

• Preoccupation with the internet
• The inability to perform normal tasks in everyday life
• Losing control over yourself
• The disruption of daily routines and lifestyles
• Feeling nervous and anxious when not online

Visualising their dreams can help addicts wake up to reality and reduce time spent at the computer, counsellors believe.

The following is the case of a young woman, severely depressed and with no social life, who threatened suicide unless Erickson was able to help her within three months. She was attracted to a young man at work, and he seemed to show some interest in her, but she was unable to act on her impulses in any way. Her parents were dead, she was alone, and she felt completely isolated:

The young woman was pretty, but she managed to make herself unattractive [with her unkempt hair and unflattering outfits] ... Her main physical defect, according to her, was a gap between her front teeth. [Yet] the gap was only about one-eighth of an inch... Generally, this was a girl going downhill, heading for suicide, ... and resisting any acts that would help her achieve her [stated] goal of getting married and having children.

Erickson approached this problem with two major interventions. He proposed to the girl that she have one last fling [spending her savings on herself, at the clothing store and the beauty salon].... The woman was willing to accept the idea, since it was not a way of improving herself but part of going downhill and merely having a last fling.

Then Erickson gave her a [second] task. She was to go home and in the privacy of her bathroom practice squirting water through the gap between her front teeth until she could achieve a distance of six feet with accuracy. She thought this was silly, but it was partly the absurdity of it that made her go home and practice...

When the girl was dressed properly, looking attractive, and skillful at squirting water through the gap in her teeth, Erickson made a suggestion to her ... [to play] a practical joke. When that young man appeared at the water fountain at the same time she did, she was to take a mouthful of water and squirt it at him. Then she was to turn and run, but not merely run; she was to start to run toward the young man and then turn and "run like hell down the corridor."

The girl rejected this idea as impossible. Then she thought of it as a somewhat amusing but crude fantasy... She was in a mood for a last fling anyhow.

On Monday, ... [meeting the young man at the water fountain,] she filled her mouth with water and squirted it on him. The young man said something like "You damn bitch." This made her laugh as she ran, and the young man took after her and caught her. To her consternation, he grabbed her and kissed her.

The next day the young lady approached the water fountain with some trepidation, and the young man sprang out from behind a telephone booth and sprayed her with a water pistol. The next day they went out to dinner together... Within a few months she sent Erickson a newspaper clipping reporting her marriage to the young man, and a year later a picture of her new baby.

Although the account is somewhat humorous, the young woman's inner condition was quite serious, serious enough that no amount of direct counseling would have worked. While there are major differences between the case of Kisa Gotami and this young woman, in both cases the teacher/therapist meets the supplicant/client at her point of greatest need in the here and now and turns what had seemed to be a great negative into the very thing that becomes the positive force for religious/therapeutic transformation.

From: Buddhism And Psychotherapy Across Cultures: Essays on Theories and Practices by Mark Unno