Pakistan floods: The Critical Hour
By Nikki Massie, LWR staff writer
Imagine you’re a farmer and the crops you grow are all you have to feed and support your family. Now imagine there’s an earthquake that reduces your house to rubble. Then, over the next two years, severe flooding washes all your crops away and kills your livestock. The next year brings another earthquake, only this time at the beginning of winter. Finally, imagine that while you’re struggling to overcome all that, fighting and violence erupts, forcing you and your family to flee what’s left of your farm.
Now you live in a tent barely big enough to house your whole family. Conditions are cramped, you want to go home and return to your life. But then another flood, a massive flood, washes everything away once again.
This scenario sounds like a page from the book of Job, but it’s the current reality for thousands of Pakistanis, like Mehr Nisar. She’s a 50-year-old widow from Punda Balla village, and she lost her husband in the earthquake and had to live in a pre-fabricated shelter with her son. Now even her makeshift home is gone, washed away by the unforgiving storms.
LWR is working with IRD to deliver 3,300 quilts, more than 13,000 health kits and 1,500 layettes in response to the flooding. The quilts will bring some small comfort to the homeless or, at least, shelter from the sun. Layettes will keep babies warm and safe from the elements. And the health kits contain soap, a washcloth, towel and other things to help stay clean and healthy. Following a natural disaster, especially a flood, simple sanitation can be life-saving.
LWR is also responding to the floods as a member of the ACT Alliance, a global coalition of churches and agencies engaged in development, humanitarian response and advocacy, and is supporting the coordinated ACT response in Pakistan.
LWR is accepting donations to the “Pakistan Floods” fund online at lwr.org/giving, by phone at 800.597.5972 or by mail at PO Box 17061, Baltimore, MD 21298-9832. You can also help by donating quilts, kits and layettes to LWR to send around the world in times of emergency. To find out how to donate, visit lwr.org/beinvolved.
