October 30, 2000, NEW YORK CITY – Church World Service, long engaged in
reconstruction and development work in India, Vietnam and Cambodia, is finding itself
well-placed to help assist survivors of the worst flooding to hit southern and southeast
Asia in decades.
West Bengal, India: Floods have
caused extensive damage throughout southern Asia in the last several months. Among the worst hit areas is the Indian state of
West Bengal, where flood waters submerged the capital, Calcutta, and more than half of the
state. 17 million people have been affected by some of the worst flooding in more
than 20 years, and at least 600 have died. About 1.5 million homes have been
damaged, and an estimated $350 million in crops lost.
Church World Service is undergirding flood
response work by its long-time partner, Churches Auxiliary for Social Action (CASA), which
has worked extensively in West Bengal among poor and marginalized people.
With CWS support, CASA manages a
multifaceted program of village development across India, including training and support
for income generation, construction of wells, pre-school and non-formal education, health
checkups and family health assistance, duck rearing, goat cooperatives, kitchen gardens,
tree raising, supplemental feeding and strengthening of village organizations.
In its response following the recent floods, CASA’s overall goal
is to provide life-saving and life-sustaining assistance to 10,000 families, with priority
given to the most vulnerable groups, which include women, children, the aged and persons
of marginalized castes, who generally are agricultural laborers, sharecroppers or small
farmers. Each of the 10,000 families will receive clothing, a blanket, a set of
kitchen utensils set and a food commodities packet.
CWS already has transferred $22,472 to CASA
for the purchase of the 10,000 blankets and is appealing to denominational partners for
additional resources for the purchase of food and cooking supplies.
Southeast Asia (Cambodia and Vietnam):
Since July, heavy monsoon rains – twice the average – have hit Thailand, Laos
and Cambodia, resulting in extensive flooding of the entire Mekong watershed area.
The floods this year, coming 45 days earlier than the usual seasonal floods, have been
coupled with continuous rainfall in Cambodia since August, resulting in the worst floods
in three decades.
Some two million people have been affected by the flooding in Cambodia, and some
four million in Vietnam.
CWS has underway a projected $386,680 program of response in Southeast Asia,
including provision of blankets, towels, plastic sheeting, tents, buckets for clean-up,
soap, mosquito nets, building materials, medical supplies, food (especially rice, canned
fish and salt) and agricultural kits (to include rice and vegetable seeds). The
latter “will build on our existing activities in support of food security,” said
Howard Jost, CWS Cambodia director.
Particularly hard hit is Vietnam’s Long An Province, the site of CWS project
for more than 12 years. CWS has assisted the provincial health service to develop a
rural health network. “Most of these clinics and hospitals in the area are now
under water and the staff are struggling to cope with the growing emergency,”
said Mr. Skip Dangers, CWS Vietnam director.
The province is one of four in the
“Plain of Reeds,” a bowl-shaped area that “will remain flooded for the
coming months, even if there is not another drop of rain,” said Mr. Dangers.
“It will be at least until mid-November when the Mekong River drops sufficiently that
the water will begin to drain out of the Plain of Reeds.”
An estimated 35,000 people in Long An
Province need food, water, shelter and medical care. “The people affected by
these floods are the ‘poorest of the poor’ in southern Vietnam,” Mr.
Dangers said. “For these people who normally live a very difficult life trying
to make a living from very poor quality land, the current floods are potentially
catastrophic.”
In Cambodia, where CWS work has focused on economic development and mine clearance,
CWS is working as part of the Ecumenical Work Group, which includes Lutheran World
Service, the Kampuchea Christian Council, the Mennonite Central Committee and others, to
provide flood relief aid in several provinces.
In Long An Province, Vietnam, CWS is working
with the World Food Program, the International Red Cross and the provincial health
service, “a good program, well-organized, which responds well to emergencies,”
said Rick Santos, interim director of CWS’s Social and Economic Development Program
who was a CWS project officer in Vietnam from 1994-97.
CWS is sending 100 health kits and 100 cleanup kits to the Apache
Reformed Church, a mission church of the Reformed Church in America, in Apache, Oklahoma,
in the wake of mid-October flooding that has affected Oklahoma, as well as Arizona and
Texas.
CWS has sent $13,950 to the Amity Foundation, a long-time CWS
partner, for the purchase of blankets and bedding for 720 families left homeless by
landslides that hit China’s Hunan Province in September. Torrential rains lasted more
than 24 hours and caused severe flooding and landslides. More than 10,000 homes were
destroyed, leaving more than 100,000 people homeless.
A total of 105 participants took part in the CWS Emergency Response
Program’s Domestic Disaster Response Skills Development Institute, held Oct. 21-25 at
the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Emergency Assistance Center (EAC) at Mt.
Weather, Virginia. Like the 1999 training, this year’s institute was built around a
“real-time simulation,” in which participants were trained to go to a community
affected by disaster to identify issues while working with individuals and groups to
assist long-term recovery.
Vitali Vorona, CWS-Balkans director, attended an Action by Churches
Together (ACT) International meeting Oct. 26 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, to explore
opportunities for relief and development programs in the wake of Yugoslavia’s new
government.
The CWS Hurricane Mitch work team program in Nicaragua will be
extended to August 2001, said Donna J. Derr, CWS/ERP Associate Director for International
Disaster Response. The program was originally scheduled to end in March 2001, but several
CWS-member denominations and CWS partner, the Council of Evangelical Churches (CEPAD),
have decided to extend it.
Preventing waterborne disease is the goal of a $20,000 Church World
Service program in Belize, hit hard by Hurricane Keith in early October.
Hurricane-related flooding has washed garbage and excreta from dumpsites, sewers, latrines
and septic tanks into residential areas, giving rise to malaria, cholera and
gastrointestinal and other illnesses. CWS, in partnership with the Belize Council of
Churches, is initiating a three-month program to provide essential medicines for disease
prevention and treatment for more than 72,000 people in Belize City and rural communities.
CWS has sent $50,000 to help the Presbyterian Church of Mozambique
with an animal restocking project in Mozambique’s Gaza and Maputo provinces.
The six-month project assists 2,825 families affected by floods in February and March
2000, by providing the families with goats.
Working with Christian Service of Haiti (SCH), CWS is helping people
on Haiti’s La Gonave Island to develop their potential. In the past year, SCH
has created eight new cooperatives, added 12 schools to its environmental program,
distributed 120 female goats and made available 15 male goats to farm families, trained 15
community leaders, and included fisherfolk in its development program. CWS support
during the past year totaled $19,250.
CWS has sent $36,000 to the Afghan Refugee Shelter Program, a
CWS-Pakistan-based program, to assist 593 Afghan families who have sought refuge in
Pakistan after being displaced by the fighting in Afghanistan. CWS-Pakistan is
providing a shelter kit (six blankets, one tarp and one plastic sheet) for each family.
Also, a total of 1,500 bedding sets have been provided by CWS to four hospitals in
Afghanistan. And CWS provided food packages over the summer months for vulnerable
families in both Afghanistan and Pakistan affected by severe drought.
CWS has sent a total of $80,000 to date to the Community Resource
Initiative, a CWS partner since 1991, which is assisting 65,680 people in eastern Kenya
with food supplies in the wake of drought there.
CWS is assisting Christian Medical Action (CMA), which works in 71
remote, rural communities along Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast to initiate preventative
health care among 30,000 indigenous people from five ethnic groups. CWS focuses on
one community in Rama Cay, San Francisco de los Caņos, where CMA’s Child Health
Project provides health training to benefit more than 1,100 children, from infants through
school age.
CWS start-up grants and other assistance are helping promote
small-scale agricultural projects in Armenia, where the economy has suffered extreme
setbacks since the fall of the Soviet Union. The
situation is exacerbated by the displacement of thousands of Armenians by the conflict
with Azerbaijan. Government services such as medical care, agricultural support,
employment, housing and heating have almost disappeared, and the food production system
has not recovered from the demise of the Soviet-era collective farms. Besides
providing grants for small-scale agricultural projects, CWS assistance will help train
project participants in accounting and project reporting, and will help engage church
leaders in social service ministries.
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