Young people and community members participate in a 2-day camp to discuss how to promote peace in their homes, communities, and country. Photo by Jennifer Hardy/CRS

East Timor, the world’s second-youngest country, experienced violence during elections in 2007. Now, with election season in full swing, CRS is supporting the Church’s efforts to promote a peaceful and fair election process. Darren Hercyk filed this report from the capital city of Dili.

As we approached the second round of the East Timor presidential election this week, we were not sure what to expect. There were reports of tensions rising and that the election would be too close to call. In the closing days there were large truckloads of supporters on the streets chanting for their candidate. None of this added to a festive spirit of the elections, it just seemed to add to the tension.
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Catholic students in Timor-Leste pray at the kick-off march for a three and a half month long campaign, led by CRS and the local Catholic Church, for peaceful national elections. Photo by Darren Hercyk/CRS

By Darren Hercyk

During the first week of Lent, Catholic Relief Services in East Timor, along with the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission in Dili, launched a program called “111 Days of Prayer for a Peaceful and Democratic Election in Timor-Leste.”

Our goal is to provide Timorese society—which is 96% Catholic—with daily prayers and reflections before and during the upcoming national elections in March and June. This nation has seen its share of violence in the past. With prayer, we hope never to go backwards.

To kick off the campaign, we helped organize a march in the capital of Dili, and thought that maybe a thousand people would show up. It was so overwhelming to see almost 10,000 Timorese turn out—in the heat of the day under threatening skies—for the two-and-a-half-hour “Journey for Peace” walk that day.
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Tamil children learn letters, numbers, songs and dances at a preschool in northwest Sri Lanka. Jesuit Refugee Services runs several such preschools with funding from Catholic Relief Services. Photo by Laura Sheahen/CRS

By Laura Sheahen,

“When the bombing was bad, we didn’t go to school. We were in the bunker,” says 10-year-old Anthony.* “I put my fingers in my ears to shut out the shelling.”

Huddled in a hole dug quickly in the ground, with sandbags to protect them from blasts and tree branches screening their “bunker” from view, Anthony and his mother waited hours with their neighbors until the bombing stopped. Across northern Sri Lanka, thousands of children were doing the same thing, over and over, day after day.

A decades-long civil war in this island nation near India brought tremendous suffering to both sides. It also robbed children of an education. Bombardments destroyed schools and frequent evacuations uprooted students. Eventually, even makeshift classes held under trees became impossible.
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Nida Go sits with her daughter, Glejen Ting. Glejenís daughter, Jharrly Jean, age 14 months, died when the house they were sheltering in was hit by a floating industrial truck and collapsed. Photo by Jennifer Hardy/CRS

There are many stories of flood victims weaving through evacuation centers and temporary relocation sites after flashfloods triggered by tropical storm Washi (the storm is called “Sendong” in the Philippines) swept through low-lying areas of Cagayan de Oro in the Philippines. Stories of the youngest casualties stand out.

Glejen Ting, 20, and her mother Nida Go, 40, sit on a gently sloping hillside, resting in the shade and breezes that were scarce in their first evacuation site after tropical storm Washi. Their faces reflect the long days and noisy, restless nights after their home was washed out to sea. They’re relieved to be in a new, more open site, but as each hot day passes, the reality of their loss becomes a heavier burden. They are grieving the death of Glejen’s first baby and Nida’s first grandchild, Jharrly Jean. The bright eyed 14-month-old girl delighted her parents, grandparents, and aunts and uncles. Now the whole family waits to see if they will have a chance to properly say their goodbyes.

Nida described her family’s scramble for high ground as the flashflood took her neighborhood by surprise. “When we heard the neighbors’ shouting about the flood, we climbed on a roof. When the water moved higher, we thought the tree near our home would be best. But there were too many people in the tree, and it broke beneath us.”
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Severe weather badly affected harvests in North Korea in the mid 90s. CRS was part of a U.S. faith-based consortium that supplied food aid to affected communities. Photo by Tom Price/CRS

The news that Kim Jong Il, the “Dear Leader” of North Korea died, came as a surprise to the world. For me it brought back memories of the CRS efforts to assist the people of that destitute country.

Just after returning to my office in Jakarta after lunch one day in 1996, I was handed a note informing me that a call had come in from the North Korean Embassy. As the regional director for Southeast and East Asia at the time, we had stretched ourselves to assist people in remote places such as Papua New Guinea and the Russian Far East, but North Korea was not on our map.
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Flash floods caused by Tropical Storm Washi have killed more than 1,517 people on the southern Philippines Island of Mindanao. Catholic Relief Services continues to work with the Diocesan Social Action Center of the Archdiocese of Cagayan de Oro and Xavier University to respond to the December flooding.

After assessing the biggest needs of the affected communities, CRS is supporting temporary shelter construction, hiring people in cash-for-work programs and creating access to clean water and sanitation facilities for displaced families.

Donate here.

The CRS Newswire will provide updates as more information is available.

Volunteers float relief supplies on Styrofoam to stranded flood victims near Bangkok. Photo by Elizabeth Tromans/CRS

By Elizabeth Tromans

Filling the lobby of Caritas Thailand’s central office in Bangkok is a mountain of donated food and cases upon cases of bottled water. The Royal Thai Army quickly loads the food and water onto a military truck. In the lobby I find a group of ladies from various church groups bustling about, loading a few last items into the truck and taking turns snapping photos of each other. We boost each other up into the back of the truck. Amidst laughter and heaps of food we manage to find the last bits of open floor space, lay a piece of cardboard and settle in together in a pile bound for flooded neighborhoods on the outskirts of Bangkok.

Since July, Thailand has been suffering from the worst monsoon flooding in more than 50 years. At its height, floodwaters covered one-third of the country and affected an estimated 13.5 million people. The flooding made its way slowly south to Bangkok and surrounding areas. The crisis is taking a huge toll on the poor, particularly on the estimated 2.2 million undocumented migrant workers who have no access to government services.
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Father June in the hospitality house, where he has been assisting migrants to recover from recent floods in Thailand. Photo Elizabeth Tromans/CRS

By Elizabeth Tromans

At the foot of an overpass about 40 km northeast of central Bangkok, Father Ongart Kaesue, known as Father June, pulls over his truck and announces, “This is where the flood begins.” A volunteer wearing a bright orange vest asks drivers their destination in order to arrange rides for the dozens of people standing on a nearby platform. “Saphan Mai,” says Father June, and the volunteer shouts the location into the megaphone. A few people with bags of groceries climb into the back of the truck and we cautiously continue into standing water.

Father June didn’t realize the calamity ahead of him when he began working with the National Catholic Commission on Migration (NCCM), a part of Caritas Thailand, four months ago; he had only just been ordained as a priest in the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate.
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People wait patiently at a distribution center in the Nakhonsawan Diocese of Thailand, where CRS and Caritas Thailand handed out rice, noodles and other emergency supplies to sruvivors of the worst flooding in 50 years. Photo by Donal Reilly/CRS

By Ross Tomlinson

The first indication that this food distribution was going to be different from others that Catholic Relief Services responds to was that the road was smooth and we got to stop for breakfast (rice and roast pork, spring onions and sweet spice sauce) during the six-hour drive to our destination. This week I had the privilege of participating in the ongoing activities of Caritas Thailand and their Diocesan partners supporting flood affected- families in Northern Thailand. It is an experience I will not forget.

In 2011 the monsoon rains came early to Thailand and in unusually high concentrations. They say there were three storms at once. The heavy rains were coupled with age-old water management issues: how much should farmers (and politicians) hold back for the successful planting and harvesting of crops? Is this all the rain we will have? As nature and water policy collided, storm waters thundered through the highlands and the dams. Paddy fields filled to dangerous levels. For the last two months Thai lowland farmers, town folks, bureaucrats and managers have wrangled with the hardest of questions with not much time: Where will the water go? Which fields will we flood, which towns will we flood? The flood waters were coming!
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As her classmates look on, a young girl in the village of Bahar-e-Olia completes an art lesson on the white board. CRS organized this class through its Community Based Education program, which launched in Afghanistan in 2006 to make education accessible to Afghanistan’s children, many of whom were cut off by mountainous terrain and poor roads from formal education institutions. Photo by David Snyder for CRS

By David Snyder,

I’m wrapping up five days up here in west-central Afghanistan with CRS, and I have to say it’s been an amazing week. I’ve been to Afghanistan once before but I was only in Kabul. Ghor Province, of which Chakhcharan is the capital, is like a different world.

CRS has been working here since 2006 and much of their programming centers around water and education. From a photographer’s standpoint they are amazing projects to photograph—clear running spring water against a parched and seemingly desolate landscape, and the cherubic faces of Afghan children in dimly lit village classrooms.

But beyond the visual elements of the last few days, the work being done here helps to put Afghanistan in a different context for me. Before this trip I knew only the TV news version—suicide bombings and casualty figures, nightly tragedies that run the risk of inuring us to the plight of human beings in this country.
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