Advent in Bangladesh and other news

It has been too long since our last blog post. In the meantime we had a wonderful Advent season here in Bangladesh! We decided as a Medair team that we wanted to do a Advent devotional together, and found one written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer! Many of the writings were from Christmas sermons he had given, then complemented by writings to family, friends and his fiancée from prison before he was executed by the Nazis. This was really a meaningful addition to work and a great preparation for Christmas. One of the things that Christine & I love doing is adapting Christmas traditions to wherever we are living. So it was fun to find a Christmas tree of the same variety that we once had in Benin!

Our colleague, Robert (from Uganda), has pizza for the 1st time!

We had a lot of meaningful team time. We had a pizza meal together one evening. And on Christmas morning we had a brunch together (which included Christine and Phil's world famous cinnamon rolls - they must be world famous as we have made them around the world!) before our gift exchange. About half our colleagues were gone over the holidays. But we loved celebrating with the ones who were here!

On of the benefits of having a few days off around the Christmas season (primarily because our programs were shut down for a week because of elections here in Bangladesh) was that we were able to talk with all three of our kids who were in Minnesota over that time period. Anna's parents live in the Twin Cities, so Nathan and she were there for around 10 days. And so for around a week we talked with various combinations of kids each morning and each evening (we are currently exactly 12 hours ahead of MN, so our day was happening during their night). This was so special for us as we miss them so much! It was difficult to be away from them this Christmas, but speaking with them so often helped dull the pain of the absence a bit! This is a picture that we took on FaceTime during one of our conversations.

(from left to right - in case you don't recognize them)
Lydia, Annika and Nathan

 You may have been read about the Rohingya in international news over the last 3 months as well. There was an aborted attempt to resettle a first group of Rohingya back in Myanmar when they simply refused to go. There was an outcry from the international community over what appeared to be a rushed effort (https://www.medair.org/42-ngos-warn-return-refugees-myanmar-now-dangerous-premature/). There have also been persistent reports of repression of their people in their home country and settling of other ethnic groups in Rohingya villages that were burned during the crackdown of 2018. All this has had a very sobering and unsettling effect on these people alongside whom we are walking.

Please pray/praise:

1. Praise God for a wonderful Christmas time and relatively uneventful elections here in BGD.
2. Pray for last issues to be resolved with our new landlord as we need to move into our new office/accommodation nearer the camps by the end of the month.
3. Please keep the Rohingya in your prayers, that God's vision of shalom for them would be accomplished!

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