HOTLINE - week of July 23, 2007

Storm-induced flooding has caused widespread displacement in parts of Pakistan, particularly along the coastal regions of Sindh and Balochistan provinces.

Church World Service is providing assistance to more than 20,000 households in Gadap town and Karachi, Sindh Province; Thatta District, Sindh Province; and Turbat District, Balochistan Province. Assistance includes reconstruction materials for 1,300 of the families; preventive and curative health services for 33,750 people and vaccinations for 15,000 through five mobile health clinics; hygiene kits and health and hygiene training for 2,000 families; safe water and sanitary facilities for 12,000 of the families; and community services and psychosocial support for selected families. Church World Service has also distributed food packages and plastic sheets to some of the most vulnerable families in Gadap and Thatta.

Church World Service is seeking funds to assist flood-affected families in Pakistan, as well as in India, which has also experienced heavy flooding.

Church World Service Executive Director John L. McCullough has called the recent decision by North Korea to close its nuclear reactor in Yongbyon "a great and hopeful moment for North Koreans and for the larger world."

McCullough joined with a group of prominent religious leaders, the National Religious Partnership on the Nuclear Weapons Danger, in a July 17 statement congratulating the Bush administration for successful diplomatic efforts toward the denuclearization of North Korea and urging the administration to apply a similar strategy to the Iranian nuclear standoff.

"The decision is long overdue," says McCullough about this first shutdown, "but it certainly is not too late." To read more, visit the CWS Newsroom.

Torrential rains in late June and early July brought destructive flooding to the central U.S. Most damage was concentrated in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, where more than 70 counties in all are federally-declared disaster areas. Noteworthy is flooding in and around Coffeyville, Kansas, where a damaged refinery poured 1,700 barrels of crude oil into the floodwaters.

Long-term recovery groups are taking shape in all three states. CWS emergency response specialists are working with both established and newly-formed recovery groups to assist the most vulnerable families affected by the flooding.

Church World Service is providing 225 Hygiene Kits, 100 School Kits, and 100 Emergency Clean-up Buckets for distribution by the First Christian Church in Coffeyville and Independence, Kansas.

Church World Service is seeking funds to provide additional assistance for families as needs are identified in Texas, Kansas, and Oklahoma.

Two-hundred seventy homes were destroyed in the Angora fire, which consumed some 3,100 acres in Lake Tahoe. Church World Service emergency response staff have met with the faith community and others responding to fire-related needs in the area, and the Community Care Coalition of Tahoe is modeling its response in part on the CWS booklet "Managing & Operating the Faith-Based Recovery Organization."

Some 300 women and men on La Gonave Island, Haiti, are training as agricultural agents and rural community organizers, through a program of Church World Service-supported partner Service Chretien d'Haiti (Christian Service of Haiti).

The women and men are learning skills in leadership, management, crop protection and grain storage, livestock production and veterinary health, fruit grafting techniques, natural resource and environmental management, including soil and water conservation, marketing, disaster preparedness and response, conflict resolution, and project planning.

The training is helping to empower 55 grassroots organizations to assume responsibility in major decisions affecting the future of the island.

Your prayers and support - and your participation in CROP WALKS and the TOOLS & BLANKETS Program - make possible these and other life sustaining programs. For information on how to get involved, please call your Church World Service/CROP Regional Office toll-free at 1-888-CWS-CROP, that's 1-888-297-2767.

For information about free loan videos, please call 1-800-297-1516, ext. 338, or e-mail us at: videos@churchworldservice.org.

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