~CSI - Pakistan Update

Pakistan Update

9/3/2010

This is a brief update on the assessment trip Brother Malik and I made to the Southern Punjab and Northern Sindh provinces where the flood recently passed through. We covered 2,300 kilometers in two days and were in the car for one 22 hour stretch. Although the main floods had passed through eight days before, many houses were still mostly covered by water, if standing at all.
The national highway had been covered for miles and now that the water had receded, people were staying under brush arbors built on the median of the highway or anywhere they could find high ground.

People in our churches in Pakistan have mobilized to help in our relief program. We have made assessment tours and organized each of our five districts to have collection points for clothing, bedding, medical supplies and food. They will then organize camps in different affected areas and distribute the items raised locally and through Compassion Services International and other private international donations. We will be printing and putting pamphlets offering spiritual help by the UPC in each of the relief packages. Most of the flooding is in areas where we have had few or no churches, and have had a difficult time getting established there. Through our relief efforts we have already made many contacts, and have received invitations to come and start churches in the affected areas. In fact a District Superintendent of the Church of Pakistan which is the largest Protestant church in the country offered us his unqualified support and travelled with us on the tour. Although God has spared most of our people, a number of our pastors and believers have had homes destroyed or damaged, and we will be helping them as well.

We are very grateful to CSI for their initial immediate response of $10,000 for the need here, enabling us to begin our distribution efforts right away.

May God's blessings be upon you and CSI as you labor to help those whose lives have been devastated and interrupted by natural disasters.

Allan Shalm