A woman rows a boat in Sindh, Pakistan, where swollen rivers swept away homes and destroyed crops and bridges. Photo by Laura Sheahen/CRS

By Jennifer Hardy, CRS digital and new media communications officer

While 6 to 8 feet of water submerges homes in Orissa province in India, floodwaters are also packing a second punch to people in Sindh province, Pakistan. Still rebuilding their homes and farms after deadly flooding in 2010, half of the people Catholic Relief Services plans to assist in Sindh are losing ground in their recovery efforts.

In the four districts CRS is prioritizing in Pakistan—among the poorest in the country—flooding has damaged or destroyed more than 200,000 homes. Jack Byrne, country representative for Pakistan, says this is “a double blow for many of the families affected by the current flood. They lost so much in the 2010 floods, and were beginning to get back on their feet. They’ve lost their crops, homes and belongings for the second time in a year.”

Teams from CRS in India report that some people are waiting to be rescued from the tops of their houses, whereas others have made it safely to embankments but lack sufficient shelter.

CRS is responding in both countries.
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Children in Sri Lanka used to run from bombs, now they are running to class.

Check out this CRS World Report.

For more on CRS work in Sri Lanka, see this story by Laura Sheahen.

In northern Sri Lanka, Naheswari Selvakumar stands near her new CRS-built home. She is a widow with four children. Photo by Laura Sheahen/CRS

The snakes moved in when the people moved out. So did scorpions and biting lizards. In the jungle villages of northern Sri Lanka, nature slowly took over after people abandoned their homes to flee shelling.

A long civil war kept villagers away from home for years. When the war ended in 2009, families left displacement camps and made their way back. Many homes were bombed; sometimes the walls were standing, but the roofs were gone. Thousands of families had to create makeshift shelters out of tarps and salvaged wood. Many slept on the ground.

At night, villagers keep sticks handy to kill creatures that got too close. But with no electricity or lamps to see by, they didn’t always succeed.
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This girl is among the survivors of Pakistan’s 2010 summer flooding. CRS built 1,500 transitional houses in northern Pakistan alone. Photo by Laura Sheahen/CRS

“The water got so high that I carried my two-week-old grandson up the ladder to the roof,” says Marhaba Ahmad, a woman living in mountainous northern Pakistan. It was summer 2010, and floodwaters were about to engulf the house she’d lived in for over 30 years. As the rains poured down and the white water rose higher, the grandmother of eight started scrambling up the steep slopes of a 9,000-foot-high mountain.

“When we were climbing, many stones were falling,” she remembers. “The rocks hurt our hands. Our shoes got stuck in the mud and we lost them.” With hands, knees and feet shredded by needle-thorned plants and rough boulders, Marhaba and her large extended family scrabbled up while trees and rubble slid down.
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Soomri, a 75-year-old mother of five and grandmother of 23, sits inside her new CRS transitional shelter. Photo by Jessica Howell / CRS

CRS Program/Advocacy Officer Jessica Howell recently left Chicago to visit CRS’ relief projects in flood-stricken Pakistan. Here, she describes one woman’s indomitable spirit.

“Ours was a love marriage,” recalls Soomri, a frail woman with almond-shaped eyes that seem to dance when she thinks about her youth. “He was the only literate man in town,” she says of her husband, “and we were both favored by our parents.”

The 75-year-old mother of five and grandmother of 23 lives in a small village in the northeast corner of Pakistan’s Sindh province. She loves to tell stories. She talks about her village, the weather and her children. But mostly she talks about her husband.

A wistful smile comes to her face as she recounts a story from years ago, when she stumbled across a large cabinet for sale while wandering through the local market. She was instantly taken by the piece of furniture, but it was expensive. Later that night, she told her husband about the cabinet but assured him that she knew it cost too much. But two days later, “the cabinet just appeared in my home!” she recounts, in an animated tone that makes it easy to imagine her surprise and joy all those years ago. It’s been a prized possession of hers ever since.
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CRS staff visit a new greenhouse in Sare Ahangaran, which introduced vegetables into the local diet. Photo courtesy of Lisa Bandari/Aga Khan Foundation

CRS Senior Legislative Specialist Jill Marie Gerschutz filed this report following a recent trip to Afghanistan:

Out of gratitude to CRS for its work and the importance Muslims and Afghan culure place on hospitality, the communities which we visited often invited our entourage of four to lunch. We called their typical meal the “starch trifecta”: boiled potatoes over rice with naan bread. It’s delicious and keeps us going for hours.

The reason for this diet is simple: potatoes, wheat, cauliflower and lentils are among the few plants that can survive this harsh climate and overused soil. Because of the 5-months growing season, many organizations teach farmers how to properly store potatoes in order to get them through the winter.
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Contour walls built to reduce erosion and restore the water table line a mountainside in Afghanistan. Photo courtesy of Lisa Bandari/Aga Khan Foundation

CRS Senior Legislative Specialist Jill Marie Gerschutz filed this report following a recent trip to Afghanistan:

It is hard to imagine a winter in Sare Ahangaran; perhaps hibernation is a close parallel. The desolate mountainside which is grazed by animals during the 5 months of warmth becomes a snow-covered avalanche threat. As the snow, (called “barf” in Dari) melts after a winter of heavy accumulation, floods pour down the mountainside causing erosion and sometimes wiping out roads and homes.
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CRS provided local farmers with vouchers to buy seed and fertilizer so they could recover some of the crops wiped out by floods. Here, farmers in the hard-hit southern region of Pakistan take advantage of the program. Photo by Maria Josephine Wijiastuti/CRS

Namah Rullah, his wife and three children survived the historic floods that inundated parts of Pakistan earlier this year, but the water swept away everything he owned—his house, his personal belongings, his livestock and the family’s wheat and rice crops. He and his family were evacuated and lived in a camp for two months until the water receded enough for them to return.

“I own three acres of land, and I am also a tenant in an additional three acres, so in total I have six acres of cultivable land. Before the floods I was able to support my family’s needs satisfactorily. Farming is our source of income. After the floods, I felt hopeless, wondering what to do after losing everything. Thinking about how I would manage to feed my children and restart our lives was very upsetting,” said Rullah.

CRS provided Rullah and other eligible farmers with vouchers that they used to buy seed and fertilizer for their land. A few vendors in the area were selected to participate in the program, too. It’s a win-win situation—the vendors get the much-needed business and the farmers buy what they need to get back on their feet. Cash grants are also being provided to kick-start the local economy and assist farmers with other agricultural needs not covered by the vouchers.

Since the planting season ends in December, Rullah and other farmers are preparing the land now so they can soon cultivate their crops. “I am very pleased that CRS has given us this support. Seeds and fertilizer are the just the resources we need most right now to restart our lives,” Rullah said. “I don’t know what I would have done without this assistance. The care and support shown by CRS has encouraged me to do more for my family. I cannot wait for the crops to come in.”

Reported by CRS staffer Maria Josephine Wijastuti who is currently based in Pakistan

A farmer carries supplies provided by USAID and CRS through a voucher program that allowed Pakistan flood survivors to purchase seeds and fertilizer. Photo by Maria Josephine Wijiastuti/CRS

CRS staff in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh were unhurt by a stampede that broke out on Monday, but shared in the nation’s dismay as a festival meant to be a joyous holiday turned tragic. The Water Festival marks the end of the rainy season in Cambodia, and is usually celebrated with boat races, fireworks and picnics. On Monday, over 370 people were killed when dense crowds–who had been watching the celebrations from a bridge–suddenly panicked and trampled others while fleeing the bridge.

“In this time of great tragedy, we are relieved that all CRS staff and their immediate families are accounted for and uninjured,” says Kellie Hynes, Head of Programming for CRS Cambodia. “We are keeping those affected by this terrible event in our thoughts and prayers.”

Rachel Hermes is the CRS education program manager in northern Sudan. She filed this story from Darfur.

Neliya’s house was destroyed when, on October 18, Typhoon Juan (Megi) struck Isabela province in the Philippines. Photo by Laura Sheahen/CRS

In a town whose name, translated, means Bamboo, CRS field staffers are talking about bamboo: what it costs, where to buy it, how to cut it right to make the strongest walls. In this typhoon-hit area of the Philippines, the poorest people’s homes have been blown apart. Better-off people have already nailed back the roof sheets that Typhoon Juan blew away in October, or reassembled their walls. Resourceful villagers use clever workarounds to make up for construction materials they can’t salvage.

“Some people split a metal oil barrel, pound it flat, and use that as roofing,” says a CRS engineer.

But some poor people can’t find enough of their homes, and also can’t buy the roofing and wall materials they need to rebuild—or even the tools they need to get started.

In the village of Aggassian, Teresita Boce, 34, stands in the sun where once there was a house. She and her husband have three children; he is a day laborer, she works on a rice farm.

“We saved our children,” she says thankfully.
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