PWRDF pledges $25K for Nepal flood victims

The Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund (PWRDF) is making a grant of $25,000 to help people affected by flooding in Nepal, PWRDF announced Monday, August 21.

The Anglican Church of Canada’s relief and development agency said it was making the grant to ACT Alliance, a network of faith-based aid groups of which PWRDF is a member, and that the money would go to the Lutheran World Federation’s Nepal program.

The federation, an international communion of Lutheran churches, has been working through its Nepal program since 1984 in most of the areas now affected by flooding, PWRDF said. Together with ACT Alliance, it has determined that the main priorities are to provide shelter; water, sanitation and hygiene; and food in flood-stricken areas.

(Aid agencies distinguish between sanitation—essentially, preventing contact between human waste and people—and hygiene, or proper washing.)

As of Tuesday, August 22, more than 800 people had died as a result of flooding in India, Nepal and Bangladesh. In Nepal, the flooding, which began August 13 after torrential rains, has afflicted 18 districts in the country’s southern plains, PWRDF said.

According to the Lutheran World Federation, the Nepali government has reported 143 deaths from the flood, with more than 300,000 families affected.

The floods have hit almost all the agricultural land in Nepal’s southern plains, PWRDF said, meaning a loss of livelihood for farmers and a loss of food supply to the country as a whole.

In one village, Bharthaha, the Lutheran World Federation provided rice, instant noodles, water and legumes to 123 flood-stricken families who had gone without food for three days, PWRDF said.

One of the aid recipients, Bale Nepali, told PWRDF that floodwaters had entered his family’s house through the front door as they were trying to escape. The flood destroyed his house and peanut farm and swept away his cattle and chickens. He was left without food and homeless along with five other family members.

“The floods came early in the morning and…changed our normal life to a tragedy,” Nepali said.