Flood in Pakistan – Marilyn R. Gardner

The readership of this blog was initially built through those who cared deeply about Pakistan, her people, her land, her resources and her future. Because of that, I will continue to beat the point home on the help needed of any variety, be it prayer, finances and on site work. I am hopeful that I will be able to go again in the next 6 months.

The Kaiser Daily Global Health Policy Report published this information last Friday on their weekly summary:

Two million Pakistanis have become ill from malaria, diarrhea, skin diseases or snake bites “since monsoon rains left the southern region under several feet of water, the country’s disaster authority said Thursday,” Agence France-Presse reports. “More than 350 people have been killed and over eight million people have been affected this year by floods that officials say are worse in parts of Sindh province than last year,” the news agency reports.

According to the WHO, a lack of access to clean drinking water has set off some disease outbreaks, AFP notes (9/22). “Officials have also expressed fears … that the problems affecting the southern province are only getting more acute,” BBC News writes. The U.N. last week launched an appeal for $365 million to help aid those in Sindh and Balochistan provinces affected by the flooding, the news agency notes (9/22).

The Boston Globe captured, in pictures, the human need around the world as a result of too much water. They rightly point out that water, so essential to life worldwide, has caused misery and tragedy in many places of the world in recent months. Take a look at what the Globe has captured in “Too Much of a Basic Need”

There are no words for what you will see and feel. I don’t bring this up on a Friday to depress, but I do bring it up to remind myself, and others, to do what we can to help.

Blogger’s Note: My wonderful partner in friendship and health care, Carol Brown, has a busy few months ahead as she and her husband prepare to go to Oxford and begin the Institute for the Study of Religion in the Middle East. My hope is that as I give her a shout-out in this blog (read: shame her publicly), she will realize she can squeeze in a trip for flood relief with me (even as she marries off a daughter, sells a home of many years, and prepares for a totally new life – not too much to ask, is that wrong of me?)