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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Two Pakistan flood survivors face rebuilding homes and lives where swollen rivers swept away houses and destroyed crops and bridges. Photo by Laura Sheahen/CRS

When floodwaters rose in his village in southern Pakistan, Muhammad Idrees spent the long, hot days floating. Sleeping on a raft built from tree branches, watching over his waterlogged house, Muhammad battled mosquitoes and snakes. His wheat crop was gone; so was some of his livestock. He piled household goods in the middle of the raft, determined to keep what he could.
Muhammad’s wife Sharifa had already fled their village by boat with their three children.

“I was shouting because the boat seemed unbalanced,” remembers Sharifa, 30. With other women and children, they stayed away almost a month.
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CRS is responding to July flooding in Pakistan with kits containing jerry cans, water purification tablets, soap, detergent, towels and cookware. Photo by CRS staff

“I was offered a glass of the brown river water yesterday,” says Lisa Beyl, a Catholic Relief Services program manager in flood-stricken northern Pakistan. “It literally looks like mud. It is the dirtiest water I have ever seen in my life.

“I can’t believe that people are drinking it, but they are, out of necessity.”
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A man wades through waist deep water with his child while escaping floods in Risalpur, located in Nowshera District, in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province. Photo by Reuters/Adrees Latif, courtesy www.alertnet.org

Catholic Relief Services staff in northern Pakistan are unhurt, but cut off from homes or the CRS office due to massive flooding. Rains that began late Tuesday have turned parts of a major road, the Karakoram Highway, into a raging river.

“Staff from our office in Besham had to go sleep in a house on higher ground at night instead of their normal guesthouse,” says Carolyn Fanelli, Head of Programming and Acting Country Representative for CRS Pakistan. The flood washed away an important bridge in the town, cutting the CRS office off from the market. “We have our head of office on one side of a bridge, and the office on the other.”

“Local people say they have never seen this much water in this stream in the last 50 to 60 years,” says Husnain Abdullah of CRS Besham. “At the moment, the office and staff house are some distance from this worst of the flood and look safe.” Though cut off from the market, stranded CRS staffers were able to buy rice, milk, and beans to eat for the next few days.
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