Photo by Dave Snyder for CRS

Wrapping up the second week of my time with CRS here in Cambodia. Spent this week visiting partners conducting HIV and AIDS support, as well as health projects targeting tuberculosis and water and sanitation. After seven years living in Africa, I am well familiar with the impact of HIV in poor countries. Despite that, I still find it hard to convey the real scale and scope of that impact, especially in a country like Cambodia, which has such limited health care capacity. What that means in real terms are hospitals that don’t have mattresses on the metal frames of their beds, or in many cases even basic medications. Often, the family members of those who are hospitalized live on the hospital grounds, cooking meals they themselves purchase, depleting already-limited family resources.

Much of what I saw this week with CRS were efforts to address that directly – providing support to the hospitals and health centers that are faced daily with Cambodia’s HIV patients. I spent time with community volunteers who refer people directly from the communities and follow up – daily in some cases – with home based care. I met a Community Health Volunteer who dispenses TB drugs – one each day for eight months – to a TB patient in his village to make sure she is cured without passing it on, or making it resistant to drugs by missing dosages. I met a grandmother who lost not only her own husband to AIDS, but also three of her five grown children – as much an indication as any of impact of the virus in some parts of Cambodia.

I think what always strikes me most about the people who volunteer to help fight AIDS in small communities like those I visited this week is their dedication. They receive no pay, and yet still spend hours each day in many cases caring for others in their communities – others often avoided or shunned by poorly informed villagers. It is selfless work, and it’s making a difference for many here.

It’s my first time in Cambodia, and I am interested to see more of it. We started out the week down south, visiting beneficiaries who had received small grants to start up or expand agricultural businesses, like selling tree seedlings or digging ponds to hold year-round supplies of wild fish. I’ve seen lots of similar development projects over the years, and I know they work. Poor people in most developing countries know how to make money – they just don’t have access to the startup capital they need to do it. A grant of $50 is all the start-up many people need to begin earning a viable income.

Photo by dave Snyder for CRS

Mid-week we headed west to visit the Chambok ecotourism site, near the Kirirom National Park, which you can find in most guidebooks. What you may not be able to find is more information about the Chambok site – more than 1,200 hectares of lush forest, and a still fledgling effort by locals to earn their living by preserving the forest – a new concept in much of impoverished Cambodia, where natural resources are often quickly consumed out of necessity. With CRS help, the communities within the Chambok site are working to draw tourists from both inside and outside Cambodia. Through entrance fees, guide services, accommodation and food sales, the community is working to sustain itself, and preserve the environment. It’s amazing how much of an impact even a few tourist dollars can make. Entrance fees are $3 for foreigners - .25 cents for Cambodians – and a night of accommodation in the home of a local, who like all at the site shares in the profits, is another $3. Having seen so much environmental destruction in much of the developing world, where resources are often seen only as quick cash or cooking fuel, it was a delight to see people working hard to save what they do have, and support themselves in the process. We all benefit from such efforts. I’d encourage you to learn more about the Chambok group at www.geocities.com/chambokcbet

Back in Phnom Penh tonight, and heading out Sunday for more projects. Fitting on this night to see fireworks over the city. I don’t know where they are coming from, but it’s nice to be reminded of home.

A flooded neighborhood. Photo by Ryan Russell/CRS

Ryan Russell, CRS’ regional technical advisor for emergencies in the Asia Pacific region, wrote from Mindanao, Philippines, where he is working with staff and partners to carry out emergency relief for thousands of families who have been uprooted and devastated by Typhoon Frank:

In Mindanao, conditions in the camps are dire, with 12 to 15 families (up to 90 people) taking shelter in each classroom, and abysmal sanitation, sometimes none at all. While people are making their way home, there are still around 4,500 families whose homes are underwater, and it is not clear when they will be able to go back. It could be a few weeks or months since some major dikes and dams broke, and rivers have changed course.

For those going home, most have lost the crops they had just planted. Many were already having difficulties feeding their families and were dependent on government-subsized food, all brought on the last few months by a doubling in food prices, such as rice.

People are desperately in need of seed and tools if they are going to be able to feed their families down the road. Most took loans to plant what they just lost at an interest rate of 10 percent a month, and will still have to pay that back. A lot of the fields are covered in mud and sand, which will take weeks or months to repair before planting can occur.

Dear Friends,

After 45 days of hectic work, the Church and its group of committed volunteers take a pause from the long journey of rebuilding our people’s lives to express our deep gratitude to all of you who stood by us and the people of Myanmar in their hour of darkness.

Thousands are returning home, or where their home used to be. Children return to school, knowing some of their friends will not be here. Farmers are returning to a slowly healing land, wounded by the marauding sea on that fateful day. The Ayeyawady River is subdued into serenity after straddling killer waves and exhibiting dead bodies for a month.

It has been a heavy month for the Church. In Dedeya, Fr. Benedict and his group valiantly buried dead bodies, exposed to sun and rain for a month. It is a challenging work, for days together, many villages were a valley of bones, and now they are rested with dignity in a place. Elsewhere the caregivers, our volunteers, faced threats to their own physical and psychological health, living amidst contaminated water and rotting bodies. Some have to be carried back to Yangon for medical attention.

All the parishes have been turned into disaster response teams. Food and non-food items are distributed through them. Many times the Buddhist monks are fellow sojourners in this act of mercy. Just a month ago, no family had wish or wherewithal to send their children [to school]. This month, with our support for uniforms, books and fee, hundreds of children are returning to the school. This return is healing and is the first signs of life to the battered communities. Hundreds of temporary shelters are coming up. Seeds are distributed. The Church is designing a healing process through psycho-spiritual training and trauma healing services.

The nightmare is slowly replaced with hope. The Catholic Bishops Conference of Myanmar (CBCM), all the religious and faithful, Karuna (national Caritas) and the Caritas International reiterate their commitment. We thank all of you at this juncture. Our work has been very challenging, done under great restrictions on access. But you all made our work rewarding by standing by us with your great fellowship. Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI evinced fatherly concern from the day one. He mourned with the Myanmar Bishops when they met him for their ‘ad limina’ visit. His Delegate Archbishop Salvatore Pennachio rushed in by the first plane available and personally interacted with the survivors and the caregivers all through these days. The churches from various nations contributed their mite and prayers to our work.

It has been a month of pain and sorrow for our people. But the tide is turning, because people like you felt their pain from far and rushed with assistance. The Church could save lives because of you. On behalf of those thousands who survived we owe a deep debt of gratitude to all of you. Once again we realize that the Universal Church is a mother who reaches out where there is a tear, a human brokenness.

It is still a long journey. The full recovery will take at least two years. Cyclone Nargis was nature’s nuclear attack on our people. There are villages destroyed without any trace. The farm lands are polluted with the sea water. The human asset is diluted, social assets destroyed, natural assets mutilated with wanton destruction. The poor of Myanmar, already handicapped by some of the worst permanent disasters, are crawling back to normalcy.

So our journey continues. The urgent needs are for setting up homes, shelter and regenerating the livelihoods through supply of seeds to farmers, encouraging micro enterprises. This has been a month of challenge, but a blessed challenge because we felt the power of human oneness, the unstinted support of the Mother Church and great generosity of human sprit among Myanmar’s people through their selfless service to their suffering brothers and sisters.

Our heartfelt thanks to every one of you,

In Solidarity,
Archbishop Charles Bo, S.D.B.

A letter from Archbishop Charles Bo of Myanmar:

As the waters raged in the predominantly Christian village, the monks from the nearby monastery were on the noble mission of saving people. A monk swam across the currents to pull out a woman who was about to be dragged by the marauding river. In the far off Phyapon, where Church workers linked to Caritas Internationalis were distributing aid to the survivors, they choose Buddhist monks as their partners in distributing aid to non-Christian villages.

Archbishop Bo reaches out to those affected by the cyclone

All religious groups were made victims by the cyclone. All places of worship — monasteries, clergy houses and convents — bore the brunt of the deadly cyclone. Nargis, in its monstrous ferocity, tore through many of the famous places of worship of all religions. In Aima, in the Pathein Diocese, Fr Andrew Soe Win offered his life as a supreme sacrifice in trying to reach his marooned people. His body was found after 18 days.

Nothing deterred them from the sacred duty of saving lives. In the predominately Buddhist country, where Metta and Karuna (mercy and compassion) are the major tenets of a great religion, compassion broke forth like a healing stream after the demonic deluge. Churches and monasteries became the refugee camps. With death and mayhem threatening them in their villages, thousands took refugee in sacred spaces, seeking coping and mutual consolation. Even before the government could move in, or the do-gooders and NGOs could move in, spontaneous charity sprang forth with Buddhists feeding Christians and Christians feeding the Buddhists, etc. Nargis broke many things in an evil way. Goodness broke all parochial borders that fateful night, when death danced arrogantly across, wounding a nation.

In Bogalay, the Hindu temple opened its portals to feed the multitude. In the ravished streets of Yangon, Muslim merchants were distributing food to the starving masses. More poignant was the response of many poor and lower middle class people. They collected whatever they had and every weekend they treaded across in aid convoy to far off Labutta. Nargis stripped naked a nation with violence, but people of all faiths are clothing it now with compassion.

With other Christian communities, Catholics threw in everything into rescue — money, material and manpower. Many young men and women volunteered to go to the risky villages, strewn with dead bodies of people and animals. The first psycho-social assistance came from nuns who risked their lives by undertaking dangerous boat travels, without life jackets, etc. They were the first ones to hold mothers who lost their children, carried orphans and consoled a grieving community with prayer and simple presence. Hundreds of seminarians were the first rescuers, clearing the villages of debris. All these are done under extreme restrictions. Through the Caritas Internationalis network, assistance continues.

Compassion is the common religion in the post-disaster phase. In Myanmar people lived with various tags — religion, color and tribe. But now Nargis taught us all that human tears have no color, no religion and no tribe.

June 2, 2008 marks the start of the school year in Myanmar and also one month after Cyclone Nargis. However, for so many children there will be no school to go to. For the children in the delta region their lives have been turned upside down. Many of them lost their parents and their homes.

Last week I visited a village called Aima and some surrounding island villages called Pha-ya-lay-gone, Pein-ne-gone, Ta- yoke-gone, and Lein-maw-gone. Aima village is in Labutta township in the southern delta region and is very difficult to reach.

It took almost 10 hours to get there by boat. There, I met families who are still struggling to survive and feed their children. In this area all the schools have been destroyed. For the children of Aima, the horror of the cyclone still haunts them.

Many children cry at night and when it rains. The children fear the worst and re-live the trauma of the night of the May 2. In this village there are so many inner wounds that must be healed over time.

To date very little aid has been able to get to these communities. For the first two weeks, the only aid received by these people was from the Catholic Church.

They told me that without this, they would not have survived. The government now only supplies two cans of rice per person per day, which is not enough for people to live on. In some cases people have been asked by the government to leave temporary camps and return to their villages. In many of the villages there was still no shelter, food or clean water and the government only supplied them with a few kitchen utensils.

My trip to Aima also demonstrated how important it is for the Catholic Church to continue our work and ensure that we support communities as best we can. To date we have been able to supply food, clean water, tarpaulins for shelter, cooking utensils and medical supplies to approximately 20,000 people in Labutta township.

We now must continue to support them, firstly to survive but also in rebuilding their lives. The people I met remain modest in their requests, and ask only for food and shelter. Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a message from Myanmar’s Rangoon Archbishop Charles Bo, a Caritas Internationalis partner helping to bring vital relief to people struggling to recover after Cyclone Nargis. Catholic Relief Services is supporting the cyclone emergency response of the Caritas network, which will reach more than 50,000 people with food, household living items, shelter, medical and psychological care, and means for child protection. Read the rest of this entry »

Vicel Meregillano-Hicks, the wife of CRS Afghanistan country representative Paul Hicks, reports on the CRS response to the winter emergency in Afghanistan.

Road to remote villages in Kushk district cleared through CRS cash for work project. Photo by Vicel Meregillano-Hicks for CRS

The mountain cloaked in white looms beyond, its spires reaching up to the heavens and its crevices heavy with undisturbed white powder. It has one dreaming of endless ski and snowboard runs like those in one of Colorado’s premier ski resorts. Unfortunately, this setting is located in a country that has never known ski resorts. This is Western Afghanistan, deep in the harshest winter in decades. A winter that people were ill-prepared for. A winter made worse by the lack of food due to the drought that preceded it.

[Map of Afghanistan]

With roads covered in icy snow, vehicles bearing food, fuel, medicine and other supplies have been unable to reach remote villages in Kushk District, Herat Province. Access to the district center was also limited to the use of donkeys or walking through knee-deep snow. The district government and CRS jointly identified the most vulnerable communities in the district and villagers were mobilized to clear the roads and paid cash for their work. By paying for labor, CRS puts much-needed cash into the hands of the people. The opening of snow-covered roads enabled not only supplies to get into villages, but enabled villagers to bring their sick to the district health center.

The district governor of Kushk, Mr. Asef Sakhna, expressed deep gratitude for the rapid response of CRS to the winter emergency. CRS is the only organization working in this remote district. The Deputy of Provincial Council, Mr. Abdul Rahman Rangor, said that they were able to send a mobile clinic comprising a team of health workers from the district health center to the remote villages because the roads are now open.

Negar Jama Khan with her youngest daughter. Photo by Vicel Meregillano-Hicks for CRS

In the village of Qala Safid, a little more than 7 miles away from the district center of Rabat Sangi, Negar Jama Khan’s youngest child inserts her hand inside her mother’s sweater to keep warm. Light streaks through one small window into a damp and cold room. In the evening, in this tiny room made of mud, a heater is fueled by burning bushes and shrubs, warming a family of eight people. The heater remains unlit throughout the day.

“We only light the heater at night because we don’t have enough shrubs to burn. Our neighbors help us by giving us shrubs and some bread to eat,” Negar said.

In Adraskan district, CRS field staff and members of the district government were looking at maps to identify the most vulnerable areas. Working side by side with the government, CRS builds their capacity to identify and respond to future emergencies. In Adraskan district, vital supply routes are cleared of snow by the villagers and CRS paid cash for the labor.

In Ghor province, the failed harvest during the summer has created a shortage of food, putting over 230,000 people in need of food. In the districts of Dulaina and Chaghcharan more than 1,000 families are vulnerable to starvation. CRS field staff worked with the shura (village leaders’ council) in each village to identify and verify households that are most vulnerable: households that are unable to work to support themselves and those whose primary breadwinners are widows, elderly, disabled or chronically ill. CRS provided food, blankets and heating fuel to these households through a voucher program.

CRS continues to coordinate with other agencies and the provincial government to provide food and other essential supplies to those hardest hit by this year’s winter. With temperatures continuing at their lowest in decades, the most pressing need is getting food and heating fuel to remote districts in Ghor Province. CRS continues to clear roads, providing access to these remote districts.

Many of the children spent the night of the cyclone on what is called a “talla,” or a man-made hill, just under a mile from the school. Photo by Debasish Shom for CRS

Caroline Brennan, CRS’ regional information officer for South Asia, sends this dispatch from Bangladesh:

It may be hard to believe, but a certain mound of dirt in the Bangladeshi village of Tiakhali is special. It’s not for any historical significance and, should you make it here — which requires six ferries round-trip and a tractor ride through mustard-yellow rice fields — you may start to wonder if it was worth the hike. But, after stretching your legs and being generously offered a fresh coconut, you’ll turn around to see why it is.

Standing on top of this dirt mound are about 100 elementary-school children, who see this muddy swath as nothing less than their school. While most of us might hone in on the empty space where walls and a roof should be, or the missing desks, chairs and chalkboard, the students and teachers stand defiantly in the space of what Cyclone Sidr pulled to pieces one night in November. They have exams, they say; the cyclone should have thought better.

The view on all sides feels like a tropical twin of Kansas: it is flat country. Bangladesh is so flat that most of its land mass is less than four feet above sea level; with sea levels rising, the country’s population density is one of the highest in the world. (Imagine roughly half the U.S. population — 140 million people — squeezed into the state of Wisconsin.) Finding places of high ground during a flood is not easy or, in some places, possible. In villages like Tiakhali, these places have to be made by hand and are known as tallas (man-made hills), where people or animals can flee when waters start to rise.

Read the rest of this entry »

Caroline Brennan, CRS’ regional information officer for South Asia, writes from Bangladesh, where she is traveling with CRS-Caritas assessment teams following the devastating super cyclone, Sidr:

After crossing the river with CRS’ regional director Kevin Hartigan and three Caritas staff, we took bicycle rickshaws through the narrower streets of the port town of Chandpai. Photo by Debabsish Shom/CRS

So, two ferries, one rickshaw, two motorcycles and kilometers of walking later, we met with several families living in the Chandpai village of the Mongla district, where an estimated 500 families endured serious damage to their homes and assets just more than a week ago, in a span of an overnight superstorm. Sidr, the name of the cyclone, is now a popular name here — even a baby born in the night of the cyclone was named Sidr! — and the emphasis on articulating each word of the phrase “super” “cylonic” “storm” seems to be people’s desperate attempt to convey just how powerful this was.

What was striking in Chandpai is the level of damage we didn’t see. The storm’s winds at 155 miles an hour uprooted trees that could envelop several houses, and tore corrugated iron from their wooden frames like sheets of notebook paper; the thatched roofs didn’t stand a chance. CRS’ partner Caritas is supporting about 500 families (or 2,500 people) here with food distributions and essential living supplies, and had started distributions within 36 hours of cyclone. Across the country, we are supporting 51,000 families, and tomorrow we’ll visit the eye of the storm’s devastation in the neighboring district of Barisal. But today, people’s resilience was the real story, with how much they’ve done to put back the pieces of their lives left amid the debris.

Read the rest of this entry »