It’s been a difficult year since record rainfall drenched the Balkans last spring, unleashing the worst flooding in more than 100 years and leaving a trail of destruction across Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. More than 70 people lost their lives, while hundreds of thousands of survivors had to evacuate as family homes and farms, roads, and utilities were damaged or destroyed. Relentless summer and fall rains renewed flooding, which slowed recovery and threatened to keep many families from having warm and dry shelter in time for winter.

“I have never felt so scared and helpless in all my life,” recalls Ljubica, of the day last May when forceful floodwaters rushed through the doors and windows of her modest home in Šamac, Bosnia. She and her husband, Živko, both disabled, sat trapped and helpless as cold, muddy waters quickly rose toward the ceiling. Neighbors managed to carry the couple up to the attic where they spent 13 days living on food and water rations delivered by rescue boats and waiting for the floodwater to subside. When it did subside, their wood stove and water heater were all that was spared. Everything else in the couple’s home of 40 years was carried away by water or buried under a foot of mud and silt.

In neighboring Serbia, Mladen, 32, a Kosovo refugee, had just moved his pregnant wife, Dragica, and their son, Stevan, 2, from his mother’s cramped apartment into a newly renovated two-bedroom cottage near the town of Kraljevo. Mladen purchased the dilapidated house in 2012 with savings from his job at a local trucking company, and then spent the next two years rebuilding it by himself after work and on weekends. It was going to be a fresh start for him and his family. One month after they had settled in, the May floods engulfed the rooms within minutes, destroying everything inside and leaving the young family without a home once again. “I lost my home in Kosovo when I was 17,” said Mladen. “Going through it once more was heartbreaking for me and for my wife.” “I was beyond tears,” added Dragica quietly.

From its offices in Serbia and Bosnia, ACT member International Orthodox Christian Charities (IOCC) responded on the heels of the disaster, ensuring the delivery of relief to vulnerable families in the region’s hardest hit communities. Through the financial support of church and private donors in the US, Australia and New Zealand, and close cooperation with local partners, the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Red Cross, IOCC’s ongoing assistance has helped thousands of survivors like Ljubica and Mladen return to their homes and resume their lives. More than 800 families have received support with cleanup, home repair kits filled with construction materials, or replacement stoves and refrigerators.

The raging waters not only damaged homes and businesses, but also swept away desks, books, computers and lab equipment from school classrooms. Schooling came to a standstill for the 950 students of Šamac. IOCC has helped restore the learning environment for the community’s schoolchildren. Replacement desks, blackboards, computers, and teaching materials now fill the classrooms at Šamac Primary School. At nearby Nikola Tesla High School, future pharmacists and chemists can pursue their studies in the newly equipped chemistry lab.

“The children and their families in this community have suffered great losses from the floods,” said Principal Milivoje Dzombic. “The restoration of the school, and especially the lab, also restores the morale in these high school students and gives them the will to continue their education.”

Noorkipali Nooloboru is one of the traditional birth attendants in Sitoka village. In the past she would advise women, including her daughter-in-law Christine, to have their babies at home. This was the tradition for Maasai women, despite the risks involved, and she didn’t see any reason for it to change — that is, until Christian Aid’s project started.

Noorkipali has now been retrained as a ‘mother advisor’ by our local partner, the Transmara Rural Development Programme.

‘My mother was a traditional birth attendant. I would watch the other birth attendants to see what they were doing. Then one day there was a woman in labour and there was no one to call to come, so I helped and I did a good job.

‘I don’t know how many children I have delivered. I have delivered most of the babies in this area in the last 20 years. But I don’t know how many that is. Some babies would die, particularly if the mother was sickly.’

Now things are changing. Our partner organises a monthly mobile health clinic in the village and one of Noorkipali’s new roles as a mother attendant is to refer women for their antenatal check-ups. That way, if there are any complications in the pregnancy they can be spotted early on. As part of her training, Noorkipali has learned the importance of women delivering at a health clinic or hospital, where they can get expert medical care if something goes wrong.

‘I am old now and I know what it means for a mother or child to die because care was not taken. So I support the nurses and mothers. I help keep the community alive.’

Noorkipali works with the local community health workers, such as Dennis Dio, pictured left. Hers is an important role because of the trust and respect the villagers have for her. ‘The husbands always come to me to confirm whether it is okay for their wives to be checked by the nurses. Once the pregnant mothers get a referral from the community health workers, the men bring it to me. Without my approval they will refuse to allow their wives to be checked. So we have worked out a relationship where they refer and I confirm.

‘Sometimes when the pregnancy is at risk I conduct the delivery myself, but only when the ambulance is far away and I see the baby and mother are at risk. I conduct palpation and massage the stomach to feel where the baby is – this helps me to decide whether the delivery is due.’

Only 44 per cent of births in Kenya are attended by a trained health professional. In Narok County, where Sitoka is found, that figure falls to just 17.6 per cent.

There are many reasons why women in Kenya tend not to give birth in hospital. And in communities like Sitoka, if a woman gets into difficulties during the birth there is no trained help to hand. So having trusted women like Noorkipali to refer women to health facilities is one of the ways Christian Aid is ensuring more women deliver in safe surroundings.

Norwegian Church Aid has cooperated with local, church based organizations in Cuba since 2001. Today we focus our work on gender based violence.

Gender-based violence

Our partners develop various local initiatives to overcome violence within close relations. This work is run through the church network in local communities in Cuba. They are often met with challenges in connection with alcohol and we support initiatives to help the victims of violence. At the same time we support the promotion of women’s participation in the churches.

Faith-based actors

Norwegian Church Aid support our church based partners measures for dialogue across religious communities internally in churches. We seek to promote participation and cooperation across religious communities and social divisions.

Coordination through ACT Alliance

Norwegian Church Aid is a member of the ACT Alliance’s international network. In Cuba the ACT-members have several joint partners, which enable closer collaboration.

We also acknowledge that our Cuban partners can play a central role in South-South exchange. Therefore we wish to explore the opportunities for cooperation between our Cuban partners and other partner organizations in the region. This could particularly be relevant with Haiti.

More information about Norwegian Church Aid’s work around the world here.

Heavy rains have fallen in the Antofagasta and Copiapo regions in northern Chile, where rain hasn’t fallen for 20 years. 30mm of rain fell within two days, causing floods and enormous damage.

Rivers broke their banks and drainage was hugely inadequate for towns and cities in the region. Local governments have organised evacuations.

The President declared a state of emergency in Antofogasta and Atacama. The ministry of health declared a health warning in several areas.

Twelve people have have been confirmed killed by the flooding, 22 disappeared. 760 people have lost their houses, 5700 are in one of the 23 temporary shelters in the affected region.

The ACT forum in Chile are proposing interventions.

In February and March, heavy rain and floods have hit Acre in northern Brazil, 80,000 people have been severely affected  in particular marginal communities and indigenous people.

According to authorities the Acre River exceeded its highest recorded height of 17.66 meters, reaching 18.40 meters.

The most affected people are communities on river banks and indigenous peoples, especially the Apurinã indigenous people of Pauini, near the Purus River in Amazonas.

Communities are helpless, with no support from government, including the official indigenous body of the Brazilian state.

Immediate action is needed to support 640 families (3,200 people) affected by the last March rain, with food, mattresses, clean water and kits to clean the houses.

The Civil Defence is working in the capital of Acre State and in the other cities, where urban and riverside areas have received some support, but so far, the Aripunã region has not received any assistance.

According to the local partner, the Council of Mission among Indigenous Peoples (COMIN), there are no indications the government will provide any support for the areas identified by the ACT forum.

ACT Alliance members FLD and CESE have provided resources for the affected communities from the February rains, through the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) and COMIN. Now with the March rains ACT members are planning to issue an appeal for the most affected and isolated indigenous communities.

Planned responses include the purchase and distribution of food, water and cleaning kits. Partners CPT and COMIN will work on planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of activities.

ACT member Christian Aid is to make an initial £25,000 available to partner organisations providing emergency supplies in the aftermath of Cyclone Pam which hit the Pacific island chain of Vanuatu on Friday, killing at least eight people, injuring many more, and reducing many houses and shops to matchwood.

The money will go to sister organisations in the ACT Alliance that are best placed to provide immediate assistance to the islands’ 270,000 strong population. The alliance is a global coalition of more than 140 churches and affiliated organisations working together to fight acute poverty.

As well as making money available, Christian Aid says the ferocity of Cyclone Pam must be seen as a stark warning of the kind of disasters that will become more commonplace if the global community fails to take significant measures to combat climate change.

“While it is difficult to attribute any one event to climate change, scientists are clear that it makes extreme events like Cyclone Pam more likely,” said Mohamed Adow, Christian Aid’s Senior Climate Change Advisor.

“The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction revealed earlier this month that 87 per cent of all natural disasters over the past 10 years have been climate-related. That means a significant proportion of the 700,000 people that have died over that period through disasters, together with the 155 million that were displaced and the $1.4 trillion of economic losses that have piled up, are all down to global warming.

“This is a crucial year for tackling climate change, with a UN summit in December supposed to produce an international climate deal to come into force in 2020. Rich countries must put forward in advance their own carbon cutting targets and set out their support for the poorer countries which are already bearing the brunt of climate change to help them cope with further inevitable impacts.

“But all we have seen so far is a deeply worrying lack of ambition on the part of rich countries. Short-term emergency measures are no longer sufficient. Massive adaptation programmes commensurate with the projected level of warming are needed.

“At the same time, Governments have got to slash their carbon budgets, undertaking to move speedily away from fossil fuels for energy generation and investing instead in renewables if the global temperature rise is to be kept below 2oC, the point beyond which scientists predict climate chaos.”

Speaking today at a UN conference on disaster risk reduction in Sendai, Japan, Vanuatu’s president, Baldwin Lonsdale, said the storm, which virtually wiped out Vanuatu’s development, was directly linked to climate change.

“We see the level of sea rise …The cyclone seasons, the warm, the rain, all this is affected. This year we have more than in any year … Yes, climate change is contributing to this,” he said.

As well as making extreme weather events such as cyclones more powerful, climate change has also triggered rising sea levels which means the tidal surges that accompany storms are stronger, deeper and more lethal.

Peter Rottach, Chair of the ACT Alliance Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) Community of Practice, speaks from the 3rd World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction (WCDRR) taking place in Sendai, Japan (14-18 March 2015). He highlights, on the back of the devastating cyclone that hit Vanuatu on 14 March 2015, the urgency of action needed to help communities build resilience to extreme weather events as the impacts of climate change continue to increase.

Cairo, Egypt is one of the largest urban refugee centres in the world. Over 255,000 refugees call Cairo home. Unlike refugee camps like Kakuma or Dadaab in Kenya, refugees in Cairo are not all congregated in one place, but live as they can throughout the city.

In the last few years, the Sudanese and South Sudanese refugees who were the bulk of Cairo’s refugee population have been joined by tens of thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing the violence in their home.
Since 1987, Refuge Egypt, a ministry of the Episcopal Diocese of Egypt based in All Saints’ Cathedral in Zamalek, Cairo has been working to support refugees in the city.

ACT member PWRDF has supported this work for over 20 years through two children’s clinics operated by Refuge Egypt. The Well Baby and Well Child clinics provide health care, health education and nutrition support to children aged 0-5 and their families.

Staff at the clinics focus on monitoring the growth of the children, as well as ensuring their vaccinations are up to date, and checking them for malnutrition and disease. When a family brings their child to the clinic, they receive a food basket with milk, rice, cooking oil, biscuits, cheese and peanut butter.

These food packages motivate the parents to bring their children in, and they also provide the opportunity for staff at the clinic to talk with the families about proper nutrition to help ensure their children’s growth is not stunted due to malnutrition.

One newborn baby came to the Well Baby Clinic when he was 29 days old. After weighing and measuring him, the staff determined he was underweight (under the 3rd percentile), and then referred him to the malnutrition clinic. At the clinic, his mother learned about the importance of breast feeding and of her own diet while she is lactating.

One month later, his weight had improved, and his mother was happy to see her baby growing and being more active.

PWRDF has just announced a grant of $39,352 to Refuge Egypt – an increase of $21,000 over our previous grant, in order to provide food baskets to the families of Syrian refugees who are flooding into the city along with the already existing African refugee population.

Since the war in Syria began, over 160,000 Syrians have fled to Cairo, and this huge influx of refugees has strained the capacity of Refuge Egypt’s clinics.

PWRDF’s additional grant will help to provide thousands of children and their families with food to help keep them healthy and strong.