A new warehouse containing equipment that can be used during natural disasters and supplies for distribution to families was officially opened at Malololelei on Monday.

WE RISE is the US$1.5 million Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) Expansion, Resilient Islands, Strengthened Environments (WE RISE), and is backed by USAID.

The project is also being launched in Fiji and Tonga and implemented by Catholic Relief Services in partnership with local organisations Caritas Samoa, Caritas Suva and Caritas Tonga.

Karen Anaya, head of the programme from Caritas Samoa, said the project will help them enhance their support to the Disaster Management Office - the primary agency for emergency response - by strategically prepositioning more resilient supplies across the country.

Read More

It's a report that Richard Savo, head of programmes for Catholic Relief Services in Zimbabwe, said hits home.

"As someone with a young daughter and teenage family members, this makes me sad and angry," Savo told Crux.

Zimbabwe has known economic hardship, but the war in Ukraine has pushed inflation to painful new levels, and it now stands at over 130 percent.

Savo said women and girls are paying a disproportionate price. In an interview with Crux, he examined the hard economic times for ordinary Zimbabweans, the dangers it has caused to female hygiene and what CRS has been doing to bring respite to desperate people.

Read More

To date, more than 1300 people have died, and at least 5700 have been injured, according to information from the Haitian civil protection agency on 16 Aug.

Haiti has suffered multiple crises recently. It is barely a month since the assassination of the President of the Republic, Jovenel Moïse.

In the past 2 years, a wave of violence and abductions have afflicted the country and droughts have plunged the rural population into deeper poverty.

"On top of all this, the earthquake has inflicted on thousands of families a situation worse than all the rest. It is an impossible situation. The people are in total shock," commented the executive president of pontifical foundation ACN International, Dr Thomas Heine-Geldern.

ACN is in contact with churches in the most seriously affected dioceses. They are assessing where the greatest need lies in the immediate aftermath.

Catholic Relief Services (CRS) is sending teams to provide clean water, sanitation, shelter and emergency supplies.

"It is quite possible that Haiti is going to need more help than ever before," said Akim Kikonda, CRS' country representative in Haiti.

"Prior to the earthquake, people here were already struggling to make ends meet," said Kikonda.

"The area was slowly recovering from the devastation caused by Hurricane Matthew in 2016. But drought and two recent tropical storms have largely destroyed the little livelihoods people had been able to restore. After Saturday's earthquake, it is only going to get worse."

Fiammetta Cappellini, a Haiti-based country representative for AVSI, told CNS that she recently travelled from Port-au-Prince to Les Cayes. She estimated that some 30% of the buildings were severely impacted by the earthquake.

"The Catholic community here has experienced a lot of churches and Catholic schools in the area that went down. That worries us a lot, because education is maybe the only way out for this country. Now again, we face a closed-school situation impossible to manage," Cappellini said. "And so this is a very hard (situation) long term."

AVSI, she said, will focus on providing materials for temporary housing and prioritize pregnant women with children and women with large families.

"We plea to you to pray for the country, to pray for all those who have lost their loved ones, those who have been wounded and those who have lost everything. May Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, Patroness and Protector of Haiti, bring them all support and consolation," Dr Thomas Heine-Geldern appealed.

Sources

ACN International

Crux

Reliefweb

The Vatican press reported that this sum is intended to be "an immediate expression of the feeling of spiritual closeness and fatherly encouragement from the Holy Father towards the people and territories affected and will be shared, in collaboration with the Apostolic Nunciature, among the areas most affected by the catastrophe."

The Dicastery's contribution to the disaster relief is part of the aid that is being activated throughout the Catholic Church.

In addition to various Episcopal Conferences, it involves numerous charitable organisations.

Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and Malteser International were among Catholic aid agencies sending emergency response teams to Indonesia.

The local CRS team is working closely with its Caritas partner and additional teams have been deployed from around the world to assist with pipeline logistics, temporary shelter and relief supplies.

CRS is supporting Caritas staff and volunteers to respond to people's most urgent needs with temporary shelter materials like tarps, blankets and sleeping mats, as well as sanitation kits, clean-up and other supplies.

"Because of the many injured survivors, the healthcare facilities need to be put back into service as soon as possible," says Nicole Müller, Mission Director of Malteser International in Indonesia.

"Therefore, we will equip the centres with medical equipment and medicines."

In addition, Malteser International is providing emergency funds to allow relief supplies to be distributed to surrounding communities.

Help has also come from the Catholic church in Korea and in Italy

Source

• press.vatican.va
• malteser-international.org
• crs.org
• Image: arabianbusiness.com

Yenni Suryani said with the airport damaged, getting access to Palu and Donggala is a huge problem. Responders and local aid groups have drive overland 10-12 hours.

That means a bottleneck for relief supplies in coming days. Landslides are hindering road travel in some places, she said.

"There's very limited electricity in Palu but power is out almost everywhere. Some mobile phone towers have been repaired allowing limited communication, but it's unreliable."

Sunyani said she was worried about people who might have been washed away.

Indonesia's Vice-President Jusuf Kalla has pointed out that when the Indian Ocean tsunami struck in 2004, the death toll recorded that night in Aceh, on the northern tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, was around 40 people.

The eventual body count in Aceh exceeded 130,000.

The island of Sulawesi has been divided, at times bloodily, between Muslim and Christian populations.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was widespread communal violence in and around Poso, a port city not far from Palu that is mostly Christian.

More than 1,000 people were killed and tens of thousands dislocated from their homes as Christian and Muslim gangs battled on the streets, using machetes, bows and arrows and other crude weapons.

Source

• crs.org
• newstalkzb.co.nz
• wral.com
• nytimes.com
• wyomingpublicmedia.org
• Image: timescolonist.com (AP Photo/Tatan Syuflana)

Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tucson, Arizona, said he and Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York had spoken to Madagascar's Archbishop Odon Razanakolona of Antananarivo and Archbishop Désiré Tsarahazana of Toamasina about allegations that the CRS was involved in contraception and abortifacient distribution.

"They assured us clearly that they did not feel that this was something that CRS was doing, that they had great respect for CRS and great regard for the work that was being done," Bishop Kicanas told the Catholic News Service.

The prelate's comments counter a report from the Population Research Institute which contended Madagascar's Catholic Church was alienated from the US-based Catholic relief agency and believed its work to be violating Catholic teaching.

The Washington, D.C.-based institute on July 26 charged that the relief agency was "using funding from American Catholics to distribute contraceptive and abortifacient drugs and devices in concert with some of the world's biggest population control / family planning organizations."

Sources

CNS/St Louis Review

Catholic News Agency

LifeSite News

Image: CNS/USA Today

With a background in strategic planning and the experience of serving as dean of a major Catholic business school—the University of Notre Dame's acclaimed Mendoza College of Business—Woo also brings a sharp business acumen to running an agency dependent upon the support of others to carry out its work.

In these excerpts from the interview we conducted with her for our May 2013 issue, Woo discusses business ethics, funding challenges, and passing on the faith.

How did you become interested in studying business?

My academic training was in strategy. There are very few people who specialize in strategy and strategic planning. I was 21 years old when I decided that I wanted to get a Ph.D. in strategy, although I don't know why I did it. It was a new field, people didn't know much about it and neither did I.

But it was the opposite of my undergraduate major, which was economics. I wanted something really broad, but it might not have been the best major for a person without experience. I grew to love it though. And now my role and my contribution to CRS is to make sure that we are strategically on track and that we are organizationally healthy in fulfilling our mission.

Having worked at a Catholic business school, how important do you think it is to teach ethics and values to business leaders in today's world?

Development cannot take place without business, because in the end, business is there to create jobs. They don't only create a market for products, but behind the products are people and talent. If there's no market, there's no place for exchange, and we will be tending to our own little plot somewhere. Continue reading

Sources

• U.S. Catholic
• Image: Caritas Aotearoa New Zealand

"As of Thursday we received the news that we would be allowed to resume operations," Catholic Relief Services spokeswoman Sara Fajardo said.

"We are working with the local government to ensure that food distributions begin immediately."

Fajardo said the Government had asked CRS to leave because they said they couldn't guarantee their security.

One of the Government's claims was also that we were distributing bibles. "This is completely wrong. It is against all our operating principles', Fajardo said.

Fajardo clarified that CRS was a humanitarian organisation and the majority of the staff in Dafur were Muslim.

"Our work is based on need and not creed".

The United Nations has warned that a growing list of NGOs are being forced out of Darfur at a time when humanitarian work is already failing to meet local needs.

Last month, French aid agency Medecins du Monde was expelled from the eastern part of Jebel Marra, Darfur's fertile central highlands, after it was accused of supporting a rebel group active in the area.

Sources

• Reuters
• AFP
• ucanews.com
• ucanews.com
• Image: Caritas