“I saw one patient, an old man, being carried on a stretcher,” says a Catholic Relief Services staffer in mountainous northern Pakistan. “He told me they hiked 5 to 6 hours over steep terrain, carrying him.”

The normal roads that people would have taken were cut off by the massive flooding that struck Pakistan in summer 2010, along with the landslides that followed. For CRS staff watching exhausted villagers trek for hours to clinics or food markets, it was a spur to action: “We need to provide access to the main road.”

Catholic Relief Services teams quickly assessed the most important paths, bridges, and roads that needed repair. By paying local men to do the work, CRS also helped families who had lost their crops or shops to the flooding and have no other source of income.
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CRS is building transitional shelters like this one for Pakistanis coping with flood damage in northern Pakistan. Photo by Laura Sheahen / CRS

As CRS employees in northern Pakistan stood on the office porch watching the floodwater rise, they also videotaped a nearby building. Through the pouring rain, I see a ragged chunk of the wall being eaten away, as if the water were taking bites out of it. Then, within the space of a few minutes, the roof began sliding down. It was all over in a half hour.

After a day of waiting, the staff eventually made it home, using ropes as they walked through waist-high water to get to safer ground. The CRS office survived undamaged, but across the region, hundreds of houses collapsed. A few feet in front of the office, what had been fields was a floodplain.
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As CRS Pakistan teams hike through dangerous terrain to reach survivors of massive flooding, staffers are also coping with their own losses.

Sultan Ahmad, who has worked as a security guard for CRS in northern Pakistan since last December, lives 100 feet from the Indus River. His 18 family members, including his siblings, their children, and his elderly parents, live together in their six-room house. The house is new, and a labor of love—Sultan and his brother helped build it with their own hands last year.

When water levels started rising last week, Sultan and his family rushed to grab the children, including two babies, and flee to higher ground. In fifteen minutes the floods had taken over. Sultan and his family were alive–but their house and everything in it was lost.
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Over the past few days, Catholic Relief Services teams have hiked through mudslide areas, coping with broken bridges and submerged roads, to reach survivors of massive floods in northern Pakistan. Mr. Said Mehmood, Senior Field Engineer for CRS in the Pakistani town of Besham, reports from the field:

A man evacuates his children through waist-deep waters after heavy flooding in Nowshera, located in Pakistan’s northwest Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province. Photo by Adrees Latif

“We faced the first mudslide which blocked the road just 2 miles from the CRS office. After this we started our journey to Dubair on foot. On the way we passed 6 big landslides and many small ones. The local community made a temporary bridge from electrical utility poles which is only for walking, not cars.

“During our travel we also observed many people coming toward Besham from different affected areas of Kohistan. These peoples are continuously traveling for 8 to 10 hours for food and other items from Besham market. They are coming through very dangerous and irregular hilly areas.

“We reached the Dubair bazaar by crossing a huge slide with a huge deep gully. When we reached Dubair market, we were very surprised to see that a 70-foot-deep stream had washed away houses and shops. We were grieved that we could not see the plot of land where we had planned a new CRS school. All the building material and the plot of land was washed away—the flood threw all of it into the Indus River.
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Actors perform a skit related to CRS’ programs for villagers in Kashmir. Photo by CRS staff

In October 2005, a 7.6-magnitude earthquake shook mountainous northern regions of Pakistan. An estimated 73,000 people were killed, and approximately 3.5 million more were left homeless. In this impoverished region, already struggling to develop, infrastructure like roads, schools and universities, hospitals and water systems were also destroyed.

Catholic Relief Services took action immediately, providing more than 10,000 shelters to more than 90,000 people. CRS then opened an office in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, and began long-term reconstruction efforts. Over the past four years, CRS in Kashmir has built 27 elementary schools serving an estimated 1620 students per year, and 47 water systems providing drinking water and crop irrigation to close to 50,000 community members. CRS also constructed roads that connect isolated villages to markets and health care; taught villagers about health and sanitation; and enabled 1738 households to earn a living through its livelihoods programs.
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Covered with trash, the “Monster of Germs and Uncleanliness” grabs an actor who cavalierly drank unpurified water. Photo by Laura Sheahen/CRS

Swathed in black draperies, a monster is stalking the mountains of Kashmir. He swoops in to grab lollipop-licking children, unsuspecting apple-eaters, and overconfident villagers.

He is the Monster of Uncleanliness. Drop your lollipop on the ground; fail to wash an apple; drink from a polluted stream, and he could nab you too.

In rural villages in northeast Pakistan, the monster is making the rounds. Recently he appeared at a mountaintop school before an audience of nearly 100 laughing, clapping villagers. He snatched and shook unwary stream-drinkers, who then hugged their middles painfully, wincing at their stomach troubles. He snatched a “city boy” lucky enough to have a lollipop—but who started licking it again after he’d dropped it.
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