RANGOON, Burma — U.N. officials expressed hope yesterday they will soon be able to get help to more than 1 million cyclone survivors still waiting for food and shelter, if Burma’s ruling junta keeps its promise to let foreign aid workers into the country.

More than three weeks after the storm, people huddled along roadsides, desperate for any sort of handout. The United Nations estimated less than half the 2.4 million people victimized by the May 2-3 storm had received emergency assistance.

In Pyapon, a coastal township southwest of Yangon, hundreds of makeshift huts had been thrown up along a road. Women and children squatted outside, the children begging for food, their arms outstretched as vehicles pass.

The area can be reached fairly easily, but the survivors said they had not received any aid from Burma’s military government and were surviving on donations from private citizens and Buddhist monks.

“I have no hope that the help will come,” a 52-year-old farmer who has been living with his family of eight in a hut that he built with scrounged bamboo and thatch, Aye Shwe, said.

For sustenance, the family has had to rely on private donors who deliver rice and potatoes with trucks.

“We live from hand to mouth,” Aye Shwe said. “We have no buffaloes, no paddy fields.”

Burma authorities have been driving up and down the road since last week telling people by loudspeaker to go home. But Aye Shwe said the land on which his house stands, in a nearby paddy field, remained waist deep in water.

A spokesman for the U.N. humanitarian operation in Bangkok, Thailand, Richard Horsey, told the Associated Press that assistance could start flowing to those who need it most in the next few days if the junta quickly allows foreign experts into devastated areas.

The isolationist government has barred nearly all foreign aid workers and international relief agencies from the hard-hit Irrawaddy River delta since Cyclone Nargis hit.

Referring to U.N. Secretary-General Ban’s announcement Friday that the junta’s leader agreed to let international aid workers into hard-hit areas, Mr. Horsey said: “It is critical that that gets translated to practical access on the ground. The signs so far are good.”