“I saw the water rising, and then the huge wave. Then the sea and the land were covered with fire—the whole city was on fire.” The words aren’t out of Revelations. Masato Sakamoto, a resident of Kesennumma on Japan’s east coast, is describing the events of 11 March 2011. “While it was burning, at sunset, ...
By Val Morgan, Media Officer for SCIAF On some days in the field, I almost despair. It was a red-hot morning and we drove two hours to see a cattle feeding centre and destocking programme in Miyo, a village in southern Ethiopia. The more we drove the drier the landscape became until eventually it was ...
In summer 2011, heavy monsoon rains inundated southern Pakistan, an area already reeling from massive floods in 2010. Here, a survivor tells her story.
[slideshow] By Laura Sheahen in Kesennumma If you’d worked all your life to build up a business, only to see it swept away in minutes by a gargantuan wave, you’d be forgiven for wanting to give up. The aging residents of Japan’s east coast lost decades of labour when a tsunami struck in March 2011. ...
By Laura Sheahen in Kamaishi When you’re in a tsunami-hit zone, there are no ground floors. At my six-story hotel in Kamaishi, a town on the east coast of Japan, signs point the way to a staircase surrounded by what I assume are “under construction” signs. From the top of the stairs, the third stories ...
By Laura Sheahen Sakuma Kaname has taken the word “treehugger” to a whole new level. A high level. When a mammoth tsunami struck his town in Japan in March 2011, Sakuma “was on a hill near a bay,” he says. “I saw the water rising so fast—not just coming in, but rising up.” In minutes, ...
Amjad Gulzar, National Executive Secretary of Caritas Pakistan The first flood anniversary brings back many memories; both happy and sad. We supported the victims in times of pain and suffering but there were many whom we could not reach in time. Caritas Pakistan, helped generously through its international partners and played vital role of bringing ...
The fishing communities who survive on the produce of Manchar Lake in Sindh, Pakistan could never have imagined that the source of their livelihoods would one day destroy everything they owned. The lake is the biggest in Pakistan and has sustained generations of their families, with 20,000 people currently dependent on it for their survival. ...
Floods in Pakistan in the summer of 2010 were the worst in 80 years. As one-fifth of the country lay underwater, 18 million people struggled to find food and water and to keep a roof over their heads. One year on, communities are still rebuilding their lives. Caritas is with the people of Pakistan as ...
Ghulam Akber clutches his bag of cotton seed and knows he is holding his future. The seeds are the key to 22-year-old Ghulam rebuilding his life. More than anything, he needs a new house. But to get a new house, he needs money; to get money, he needs a crop; to get a crop, he ...