Hurricane Wilma has insured that Southern Baptist disaster relief efforts worldwide will have plenty to keep workers busy.
The Oct. 22 hurricane pounded the Mexican coast as a Category 3 storm with 125-mph winds and claimed at least eight lives in Mexico and more than a dozen in the Caribbean.
After Wilma made landfall in Mexico, International Mission Board (IMB) workers there and their local Baptist partners began efforts to bring basic relief in the form of water purifiers, rice and beans. Food staples were purchased using Southern Baptist world hunger and disaster relief funds and will be warehoused in the Baptist churches in Mérida, Cancún and Playa del Carmen. They also will provide clothing and housing supplies.
“We have had major destruction, not only in the poor areas, which normally in a flood would have tragedy, but also, even in the main hotels in the hotel zone,” said IMB missionary Doug Millar. “There was a 30-foot [wall of] water that went across the hotel zone into our bay that devastated the area.”
Earthquake relief
Relief efforts also continue in areas affected by the 7.6-magnitude earthquake that shook buildings from central Afghanistan to western Bangladesh Oct. 8. Pakistan’s northwest frontier and the region of Kashmir in both Pakistan and India were hardest-hit. At least 50,000 people died and 75,000 were injured. About 3 million are without shelter, and 350,000 winter tents are still needed.
In Kashmir, non-governmental organizations (NGO) have supplied rice millet, utensils, mattresses and milk powder to most affected villages. Christian agencies are sending relief mostly through the churches.
The destruction is so immense that the federal government has allowed international aid agencies deep into militarized and formerly forbidden areas.
Efforts in Pakistan
For Pakistan, aftershocks have been a near daily occurrence since the initial quake.
IMB workers in the region responded immediately after the earthquake, buying needed supplies and meeting medical needs. They distributed about 10 tons of food in one town that serves as a hub for several villages Oct. 20. And Oct. 25, they distributed food and blankets in the same area.
Southern Baptist volunteers arrived Oct. 21 to work until the first of November in a Christian hospital in Pakistan’s Kaghan Valley. A second team of medical volunteers were to arrive Nov. 1 and stay through Nov. 10, when a third team will arrive.
A search-and-rescue team from Hungarian Baptist Aid and Baptist World Aid (BWAid) — BWAid Rescue 24 — is also working in Pakistan. Baptists from North Carolina and Virginia are assisting.
BWAid, with financial assistnace from the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, is also working to provide wells for people suffering from a yearlong drought in Cambodia.
The Cambodia National Disaster Control committee estimates that 90 percent of people in 76 districts or 400 communities are facing famine; 90 percent of people lost their rice seed and have nothing to grow during the wet season (if there is a wet season this year); and 70 percent of people in six provinces face no drinking water and dying animals. (Compiled from reports)
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