Somali refugees wait for aid at a refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya. Photo by Laura Sheahen/CRS

These past weeks the news has been saturated with images of hunger-ravaged refugees streaming in from Somalia to camps in Kenya and Ethiopia. The Dadaab camps in Kenya receive an average of 1,300 new arrivals daily. The camps are more than 20 years old and built to accommodate 90,000 people; they have swelled to more than 400,000. Getting life-saving assistance to the exhausted, frightened, and famished new arrivals is critical, but as we help refugees, we must not forget the impact that these arrivals will have on the host communities surrounding the Dadaab camps.

The evidence of drought is everywhere.
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A letter from Bishop Howard J. Hubbard, Bishop of Albany, and chairman, Committee on International Justice and Peace, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and Ken Hackett, president, Catholic Relief Services:

Dear Brothers and Sisters in faith,

As the pivotal January 9, 2011 referendum in Sudan draws near, we urge  your continued prayer and advocacy for the people and the Church of Sudan. Catholic Relief Services and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops have encouraged Catholics in our nation to support our brothers and sisters in Sudan these last several months through our Catholics Confront Global Poverty initiative. We asked you to pray, learn, advocate, and give, and we are inspired by the  energy and engagement that continues to grow for the people of Sudan at this critical time.

Since September 21 (the UN International Day of Peace), we have joined the Church of Sudan in the 101 Days of Prayer that ends this January 1 on the Church’s World Day of Peace.  Parish and university groups have hosted prayer rallies and peace vigils; religious education groups have developed creative activities to remember the precarious reality of the people of Sudan; and thousands of people have called, texted, emailed, and written to Congress and the U.S. Administration to express concern and demand action. As a direct result of such advocacy, the U.S. government is now fully engaged with the parties in Sudan and with other world leaders in creating conditions for peace. While there is momentum for peace, there are many risks ahead.  We ask all Catholics to intensify their prayer, and to be attentive to the events unfolding in Sudan.
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Primary school children play soccer in the town of Nimule in southern Sudan. Photo by Karen Kasmauski/CRS

As the season’s first snow blanketed campus – and as many minds were on the end of the semester and upcoming finals – more than400 students, faculty and staff from the South Bend tri-campus community (Notre Dame, Saint Mary’s, and Holy Cross) converged in Notre Dame’s athletic convocation center to raise their collective voices for peace.  These 400 students came together because they believed that the possibility of violence 7,000 miles away in Sudan was worth their time and attention.

Sudan is at a crossroads. In early January, the people of southern Sudan will decide in a referendum whether to stay united with the north, or to secede and form their own country. After a peace agreement in 2005 ended decades of war between the north and south, this decision could either lead to a new path of peace, or back to violence and war.
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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

From Odyssey Network’s Faith in Action Series:

“When Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York visited Haiti one week after the earthquake, he made a promise to return and to keep its plight before the eyes of the world. He fulfiled that promise in August. An Odyssey Networks film crew was with the Archbishop as he returned.”

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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Catholic Relief Services is distributing aid items to flood victims. The aid packages include kitchenware like pots and plates; sleeping mats and blankets; soap, detergent, and water purification tablets. Photo by Laura Sheahen/CRS

Sixteen-year-old Renuka works twelve hours a day in a garbage dump in southern India, sorting cans, bottles, and glass. Each day she earns about 80 cents, enough to bring a few pounds of rice home to her family’s house in a slum area of the city of Adoni. Her parents don’t work, so she and her sister support the family by working at the dump. She sifts through a lot of trash, but says the needles don’t poke her.

Renuka could take Sunday off if she didn’t need the money, but she does—so she works every day. She took the day off on Tuesday this week, however, to travel two and a half hours to receive a package of aid items from CRS. Most of the beneficiaries live closer to the CRS distribution site, but Renuka and others from Adoni were added to the beneficiary list: not only is she HIV-positive, but her family’s home was destroyed in a devastating flood that hit India a few weeks ago.

It’s a triple whammy of crushing misfortune: impoverished, sick, and now virtually homeless, this teenager’s life seems impossibly grim. Renuka has someone on her side, though: a short, determined woman named Sister Lilly Lobo.
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Twenty-year-old Kasturi and her two daughters sit in a hut made of sticks and old saris in a tent camp near Rampurum, India. She and her husband and daughters fled severe flooding that struck the area in early October. Photo by Laura Sheahen/CRS

“The water rose from my feet to my waist in five minutes,” she says.

She is nine months pregnant, and does not know where she will go for the delivery. “I will probably have the baby here,” she says. Her daughters’ stomachs are distended; it is believed they may have worms.

Kasturi and her family, like many survivors, fled to higher ground and evacuation centers like railway platforms with only the clothes they were wearing.

Many of the people affected were lower-caste daily wage laborers who work in rice or cotton fields. The crops were destroyed by the flood, and there is no work for them now. Sacks of rice that some people had saved were also destroyed but mud and water, so the survivors have no food of their own.
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