A wedding celebration - Going the extra mile

Christine with Osman at the bride's House

Yesterday we attended the wedding celebration of one of our nutrition staff. His name is Osman and he is the Outreach Supervisor in Camp 16 where we have one of our nutrition sites. His job is to supervise the 52 community nutrition volunteers (CNVs) we have in Camp 16. These CNVs visit regularly the women and children who receive food from our nutrition site. They share health and nutrition messages and generally look out for the well being of these families.

When we arrived at the house of the bride, we found Osman sitting at a huge table. Around the table were all of the male volunteers - 44 of them - eating together in this joyful celebration! Now, you have to realize that the CNVs are all Rohingya refugees. Most have been living in the camp for over a year now, and, like all Rohinga are not allowed to leave the camp. Osman and the CNVs managed to get special permission from the camp authorities to leave the camp and attend this wedding celebration in Cox's Bazar. Osman organized a bus to bring them into town - a trip of about 2 hours one way - so they could join him on this special day.

The Rohingya CNVs at table with Osman

Christine was literally speechless when we arrived and saw all of the CNVs sitting together with Osman around the table. Osman's job as an outreach supervisor with these CNVs is obviously more than just a job for him. Osman's desire to have them at his wedding celebration, and making that happen, is really an example of going the extra mile. This is an illustration of the love of our staff for the people they serve.

In Medair we like to share stories about going the extra mile. We are humbled to work with staff who live that out, not just in their work life, but their personal life as well.

Elizabeth, one of Christine's Managers, with the Bride

As we approach the end of the year please pray for the ongoing work of the nutrition staff and all the volunteers as we are at the end of project cycle. We are hopeful for renewed funding in the new year. But we don't yet have enough assured funding for the entire year.

Prayer points:

1. Funding for health and nutrition programs for next year.
2. A smooth handover of two Medecins Sans Frontières (MSF) clinics  to Medair as of the 1st of January. 
3. For the country of Bangladesh as it heads towards elections on the 29th of this month - there is much uncertainty around these elections.

Emergency Contingency Planning for the Rohingya

A month or so ago I was involved in emergency contingency planning.

This means that Medair was doing planning for the eventuality of an emergency like a cyclone (we call them hurricanes in the US - one of the most likely emergencies that we face here in Bangladesh). The focus was both on what we need to do in order for Medair staff to be safe and secure as well as what we need to do for our staff so that they have the ability to respond to the needs of the Rohingya in such a situation.

Our contingency plan says this about the situation that the Rohingya face in the case of

Erosion in the camps (photo by T Berger)

massive monsoon or a cyclone: “Experts  have evaluated  the  current  landscape  in  which  the  refugees  are  residing  and  have  noted  critical  concerns  for  at least  102,000  people  who  are  living  with a risk  of  flooding  or  landslides. 32%  percent  of  these  households included are  considered vulnerable  with female-headed  households,  elderly  or  disabled. In addition, it  is anticipated that lifesaving services such as health facilities and water points will also be flooded, leaving the population  on islands,  isolated without access  to services.  Widespread flooding will  cause  latrines  to overflow and further infect already contaminated water points. Use of untreated surface water could quickly result in outbreaks of water borne diseases such as cholera or hepatitis A or E. In addition, landslides on small and  large  scales  are  anticipated  leaving  small  groups  of  households  to  large  blocks  of  100-200  households suddenly without shelter and also needing immediate support for search and rescue, triage for injuries, and psychosocial support.”

That paragraph gives you an idea of what the refugees could be facing in an emergency. We have talked before about the risk of landslides. And though officials continue to move the most vulnerable to better sites (refugees do this spontaneously to some degree as well), this remains a risk for the refugees and the host communities.

Photo by Tamara Berger

Cholera is everyone’s worst nightmare in this situation. Given the population density that I mentioned in an earlier blog post, the conditions are perfect for massive morbidity and mortality from a cholera outbreak.

So the Health Project Manager prepared her Mobile Medical Teams to be ready to go into the camps with lifesaving measures immediately after such an event. Christine also has a Mobile Nutrition Team that has been trained in emergency nutrition and is currently working at practical simulations with nutrition clinics in order to be able to respond to the most vulnerable after such an emergency.

I assisted the Health Project Manager in getting foodstuffs, water and other essentials out to a house that we rent just outside the camps. I organized with the vendor from whom we rent vehicles to make sure that we could have two of his vehicles stay 24 hours/day at this house in case of an impending emergency. And we generally prepared to run emergency services from that house.

A Rohingya Woman (photo by T Berger)

The normal monsoon season in Bangladesh runs from June to  August  with  cyclone  seasons  on  either  side  in  May  and  September.  Average  rainfall  is  between  400-600 mm  a  month (15-25 inches)  with  single  days  reaching  200mm  in  the  past.

Thankfully, we seem to have missed the cyclones here in Bangladesh this season! We are thankful.

I have some specific prayer concerns to ask you to pray for:

1.    1. Christine has a particularly difficult World Food Programme report due in the next couple of days. Please pray for patience and wisdom in knowing how to best do this.

2.    2. I have moved into the Logs Manager position as our manager is leaving in mid-December. Pray for my preparedness and capacity building over the next two weeks, for wisdom as I take over this role, and for our logistics team to continue to pull together!
3. Continue to pray for a future with hope for the Rohingya!

Thank you for journeying with us.

Phil

The business of turning mourning into dancing

“So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, ‘After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?’" – Gen. 18:12

“Now Sarah said, ‘God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.’" – Gen. 21:6

I was reading these passages a week or so ago and was struck by the irony that Sarah scoffingly laughed at the suggestion that she would bear a child in her old age, when announced by the divine visitors that came to see she and her husband Abraham. Then a couple of chapters later in Genesis, when Sarah indeed does bear a child; she says that God has brought laughter to her – and others will laugh with her in the great joy of her having bourn a child.

I don’t know if Sarah hearkened back to that first scoffing laugh as she invited her friends to laugh with joy with her. But the irony of the situation must not have been lost on her because the meaning of Isaac is “to laugh” or “he laughs.”

Recently World Vision went into the camps where they work (this refugee “city” is divided into distinct, geographically delineated camps – hence the nutrition clinic in Camp 3) and asked what their prayer concerns were. Here is what the refugees came up with:

It strikes me that these concerns show the heart of the Rohingya people. The prayers of a mother for her child to have a good school to go to aren’t foreign to us. The entreaty that God would allow them to return to Burma as citizens is one with which not many of us can identify (with our passports in hand).

The joy of a child in one of the Nutrition clinics

I have taken to praying that the Lord will create a future with hope for the Rohingya (from Jer. 29:11). He has done this before. In the book of Esther we read that God turned the Jewish people’s calamitous situation into a cause for celebration when it speaks of: “…the month that had been turned for them from sorrow into gladness and from mourning into a holiday….” This is part of the business of God – turning mourning into dancing and clothing the downtrodden with joy (Ps 30:11).

So I have begun to envision the time when, like Sarah of old, the Rohingya will invite people to laugh in joy with them as they experience the future God desires for them. It is a difficult vision for me to grasp at this point. But I yearn for it in the faith that God will create a future with hope for this people.

Thanks for praying with the Rohingya (and their specific prayer concerns) and for them!

Hope for the vulnerable and the forgotten.

We are thrilled to be a part of an organization that is/has been responding to this type of devastating situation where people struggle to have the resiliency to face such challenges.

17 ¶  The flood continued forty days on the earth; and the waters increased, and bore up the ark, and it rose high above the earth.

18  The waters swelled and increased greatly on the earth; and the ark floated on the face of the waters.

19  The waters swelled so mightily on the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered;

20  the waters swelled above the mountains, covering them fifteen cubits deep.

21 ¶  And all flesh died that moved on the earth, birds, domestic animals, wild animals, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth, and all human beings;

I read these verses from Genesis 6 the other day. For whatever reason they hit me in such a strong way – much more powerfully than ever before. I don’t really like being all alone in a boat in the middle of a lake, given that I am not a great swimmer. So I can’t imagine being on the ark, seeing absolutely nothing under the heavens but water as far as the eye can see. I would think that there must have been moments of doubt for Noah as he spent day after day in the rain, seeing the waters rise around him until he could see nothing but those waters.

Maybe this hit me so much harder because of the apocalyptic pictures and video that we have been seeing from around our world as flooding devastates country after country and people after people. Vietnam. Myanmar. France. The Philippines. The US. Indonesia. And the list could go on. This flooding often seems to be of Biblical proportions. And this flooding leaves a trail of death, destruction and deficiency of the basics needed for life in its wake.

 

No doubt you have heard about the tsunami that has destroyed so much infrastructure and so many lives on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia. Medair has sent out an Emergency Response Team to Sulawesi. You can see more (and a short video) about their deployment here: www.medair.org/tsunami/.

Medair also reached Luzon in the Philippines within 24 hours of Super Typhoon Mangkhut wreaking havoc on the lives of people there. An Emergency Response team went there as well. 3 days after their arrival, the team did their first emergency distribution: www.medair.org/stories/reaching-remote-communities-philippines/.

And Medair has also been assisting in the international response to the Ebola crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is largely passing under the radar of many of us. Here you can read globally about how Medair is working in very difficult conditions to fence in the Ebola epidemic so that it doesn’t ravage vast tracts of Congo and move into neighboring countries.

We know that the vulnerable, and sometimes forgotten, people in these places face some of the same despair that I suspect Noah must have struggled with as he looked out of the ark’s window and saw nothing but water all around him. Christine & I are thankful to be a part of an organization that is responding in Christ’s love to give hope to these vulnerable people for whom an emergency distribution can be the difference between life and death, or where people might die of a horrible hemorrhagic disease if Medair didn’t help to fence it in!  Would you please pray for strength for these teams ministering in these places – and for hope for those people whom they serve!

Phil is working in the logistics department in Medair. For those of you who have done logistics in the commercial sector in the western world, you might have some idea of what it entails. Phil’s portfolio includes fleet management, facilities management of the high rise in which we have offices and rooms, equipment management, IT focal point (imagine!) etc. Let me give you more of an idea of what we do in logistics.

The other day I was in the camps doing physical counts of stocks (stock management is part of our portfolio). And I happened upon guys building "rat cages" to prevent loss from rats eating food intended for refugees. This became a real serious problem for us at our main warehouses, as well as the storerooms connected to the nutrition clinics. So while I was in the US for Nathan’s wedding, the logs team was working diligently to get “rat cages” planned and built to keep the rats out of the supplemental feeding foodstuffs that Medair gets from the World Food Programme (we were getting some flak from WFP for our losses).

This was at one of our largest warehouses that we use for stocking foodstuffs. The contractor was building a frame at the front of the warehouse that will be lined with heavy duty “chicken wire” (and have 2 mesh doors). Then he also lined the ceiling with this same mesh which he tacked to the top of the walls with wood boards. Because this warehouse has concrete walls and floors, we think that sealing off the front with the walls, covering the ceiling and bringing the mesh part way down the walls will be pretty effective in sealing out the rats (but time will tell!).In the second picture you can see the food behind that wall.

But, as I mentioned above, we were experiencing a problem in the storerooms connected to the nutrition clinics. The 3^rd picture is from the Camp 3 storeroom where we essentially lined the storeroom with the same mesh, hoping this will
keep the rats out. One of the challenges is that the entire building is built of bamboo, and the floor is brick, so we are concerned that the rats will burrow up thru the bricks. We shall see.

Rodents aren’t, unfortunately, the only problem we have with food. Sometimes the food we get is infested with insects. Loss from either of these means is a real headache for Christine as she has to report these losses to WFP in her constant reporting.

Thanks for your prayers that the food we offer to refugees would be protected from both rodents and insects so that it can get to the people that we serve, the Rohingya.

Below is a link to a really great exposé on a young girl from one of the camps where Christine works. Continue to pray for the Rohingya. We covet those prayers!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/rohingya_monsoon

We have talked a bit about the population density in the Rohingya camps here in Bangladesh. The best I can figure, the camps here must have a land mass of around 5.5 square miles. Compare this with the city of Minneapolis where we have lived the last 7 years – it has a land mass of 58.4 square miles. The population of Minneapolis is around 444,000. The population of the refugee camp here is around one million people. This gives you some idea of how incredibly crowded the living conditions are here.

That density creates significant problems for the Rohingya, and allows activities to take place in the camps that are very detrimental to the well-being of this suffering people.

The link below gives some insight into the plight of the Rohingya. It is from an Austrailian news outlet. As we watched it as staff, many commented that it seemed to be a bit sensationalist. For instance, malnutrition rates, at least in some categories of people,

are going down. But there is no question that the Rohingya face daunting challenges.

The piece focuses on one of Medair’s nutrition centers that Christine manages and interviews a Dutch colleague, Astrid Klomp. This interview happened while we were back in the US for Nathan and Anna’s wedding so it is very recent. We hope it contributes to your ability to pray for the Rohingya.

https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/world/2018/08/malnutrition-reaches-emergency-levels-at-rohingya-refugee-camp.html

Nutrition Site Number 3 has finally opened

Sunday Aug 5 was a special day for our nutrition team here.

To give you a bit of background. I have come to work as the Nutrition Project Manager for Medair. Medair is one of many NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) that is responding to the Rohingya refugee crisis which has brought an estimated 1.2 million people to Bangladesh. Most of them have settled in a huge area that is divided into 20+ camps called Kutapalong. A coordinating body has given different NGOs responsibilities in the camp according to what services they can provide. We have been asked to set up and run 3 different nutrition sites in Camp 6, Camp 16 and Camp 3. One of the biggest challenges was finding a little bit of land on which to construct the largely bamboo structure for each of the sites in a place with very high population density. The first two are already

running and Camp 3 was our last one to open.  

This is what happened a week ago on Sunday (incidentally the work week here runs Sunday - Thursday given that this is a predominately Muslim country-Friday is therefore the official weekend day). To get to the point of opening the site, beyond finding the space, the land had to be prepared with sandbags to prevent erosion and the structure needed to built. Next our registration team needed to register each of the households in our catchment area (the area we serve) that had children under 5 and PLWs (pregnant and lactating women) - amongst a general population of 40,000. The children under 5 and PLWs account for 6,000 persons. A couple of days before the site opened we had the food delivered to our onsite storeroom as well as all the supplies - tables, chairs, boxes of registration cards, scales, everything needed to run a nutrition site. Sunday morning our team arrived to meet our local Bangladeshi staff, our local Rohingya volunteers, and our community nutrition volunteers (also Rohingya). Introductions were made, we spent about an hour setting up the banners, the

stations and making sure everything was in place. Then around 10:30 the first beneficiaries arrived - those who had been asked to come the first day were a group of around 50 to allow our staff the chance to settle in and make sure everything was running smoothly.

Now 10 days later this 3rd nutrition site is well on its way to serving around 350-400 women and

children a day, providing all of them a monthly ration of enriched food. Phil and I actually just arrived in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, this evening. We are headed back to the US tomorrow for the wedding of our son Nathan to our soon to be daughter-in-law Anna Jeide. We look forward to seeing family and friends as we celebrate this special day. We'll be in Minneapolis from Aug 17 - 26. Feel free to give us a call or drop in for a visit if you're in the area while we're back.

Back overseas again.

C&P in Switzerland last September

For those of you who know us quite well, you might remember we returned to the US in December 2011 from South Africa. You might even have heard us say that our plans were to be in the US for 3-5 years. It has been a bit longer than what we predicted but we have finally made our way back overseas. It started back in September last year when we were invited to participate in an orientation course with Medair. Medair.org is a Swiss humanitarian aid organization. We have been very impressed with their values and their emphasis on serving the forgotten. This aligns well with the emphasis we always have had in ministry: serving the least served. Check them out!

In July we started a one year assignment in Bangladesh in order to be a part of the humanitarian aid response to the Rohingya crisis which has unfolded acutely over the last year in Myanmar - and now in Bangladesh. There are now around 1 million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh fleeing violence that is now most often being qualified as ethnic cleansing. Here is a story of one refugee: http://www.medair.org/en/stories/bangladesh-lost-together/.

Christine is returning to her calling of working with malnourished children and mothers, and Phil is doing logistics. We are thrilled to be part of an organization that is seeking to bring our professional, practical and management skills as an expression of God's love to the most vulnerable.

You may have actually seen Bangladesh on the international news. There have been student protests over the dangerous nature of Bangladeshi roads, provoked by two students that were killed by a bus. This is happening in Dhaka, which is very far from Cox's Bazar where our base is. But please be in prayer for this situation, that it would remain peaceful. We pray that this will provoke some much-needed change in driver conduct!

If you want to follow along on this adventure, just sign up for notifications for when we do a blog post. 

Will you join us in prayer for the Rohingya people? A state-less people. A people who has suffered unspeakable violence. The forgotten.