@Tom Cruise & Pakistani Floods Updates/ Ways to Help 28 August Updates

Reuters

Tom Cruise challenged fans & Twitters to help out with Pakistani Flood Need - why not other Movie Stars? here


To donate to perhaps the most highly respected and known Pakistani Relief/Emergency Organization out of US Plz send your check to:

USA Edhi international Foundation
42-07 National Street
Corona, New York, 11368 USA

Tel: (718) 639-5120 Fax: (718) 335-1978

See how to contribute to Edhi worldwide at end of this post...

Of course many others are doing an amazing work round the clock. Seems the most effective besides the essential helicopters are private and nonprofit groups. Learn about some of these in this post.
Undus River


Help call on others & Celebrities we all support! Good for Jolie & others not in limelight as well. If course there are many who give without needing any attention. Those suffering don't care whether we who give are famous or not. Still, it's heart-warming to see the well-off warm to Pakistan in her great need. After all, many Pakistanis have supported these movie-stars and musicians over the years. Bjork announced that the proceeds from her new release will go to Unicef to provide relief to the flood victims in Pakistan. And surely many more musicians will follow.

Tweeting for Pakistan by By Sahar Habib Ghazi on 08 28th, 2010 | Comments (17) From her home in Brooklyn, New York, Natasha Jahangir reached out to one of the world’s most famous actors, in a rather unusual way. She tweeted: “It’s so sad @TomCruise is ignoring his Pakistani fans. -Help raise awareness/donations for Pakistan. Please RT! #pkfloods.” By using Twitter’s @ or mention function, Jahangir ensured that her message would feature in a tab on Tom Cruise’s page.

Most photos in this post are from Internet Cache, Dawn.com, organizations mentioned near photos or from BBC World/South Asia online.

REUTERS/Tim Wimborne
A man carries water back to his tent at camp for flood victims in Nowshera, in Pakistan's northwest Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province. Floods in Pakistan have affected more than 18 million people. Water has destroyed buildings, roads and entire villages. People are left without homes, without food, and without livelihoods.The international community estimates that it will take billions of dollars to repair the country. Host Peggy Wehmeyer spoke with aid worker Muhammad Shafi, who works with Save the Children See More here Also a report on how "Save the Children" Opens Child-Friendly Spaces to Give Thousands of Children in Pakistan A Place to Play, Recover and Learn GO here

Evidently many if not all flooded areas of Pakistan are desperate for doctors and medical care of all sorts SEE one highly respected international organization Doctors Without Borders here

Flood survivors sit together around a mausoleum at a local graveyard after fleeing their villages, in Thatta near Hyderabad. – AP Photo

International Committe of the Red Cross Red Crescent also is on the ground - GO here


1 million displaced since mid-week: Pakistanis displaced by floods collected wheat flour from the road at a distribution point near the southern coast yesterday. Relief workers say they have reached more than 2 million people. (Asif Hasson/AFP/Getty Images) Just In By Carlotta Gall - New York Times / August 28, 2010 ...sharp increase in cases of acute diarrhea. Of 3.3 million people treated at clinics and hospitals in the flood-affected areas over the last three weeks, 13 percent — or 430,117 people — had acute diarrhea, said Paul Garwood, spokesman for the World Health Organization in Islamabad. The numbers represent an increase of 30 percent compared with the same period last year, he said. In just one 24-hour period from Sunday to Monday, 71,753 people were treated for acute diarrhea — or 16 percent of all patients treated in the flood areas. A high incidence of malaria is also being reported in the southern provinces, Garwood said.
Pakistani villagers flee their homes due to flooding in Thatta near Hyderabad, Pakistan Thursday, Aug. 26, 2010. The Taliban hinted Thursday they may launch attacks against foreigners helping Pakistan respond to the worst floods in the country's history, saying their presence was "unacceptable." The U.N. said it would not be deterred by violent threats. (AP Photo/Fareed Khan) JUST In from Ashraf Khan Associated Press Writer / August 28, 2010: THATTA, Pakistan—Floodwaters made another break Saturday in the levees protecting a southern Pakistani city, as thousands of residents fled for high ground and left the city nearly empty. Both sides of the main road were crowded with people from Thatta and nearby flooded villages fleeing the floodwaters.

Many had spent the night sleeping out in the open. Hadi Baksh Kalhoro, a Thatta disaster management official, said more than 175,000 people had left the city, leaving few behind. Some are heading for nearby towns or cities, he said, with thousands also headed for the high ground of an ancient graveyard for Muslim saints. He said the latest levee breach, which happened early Saturday, could leave the outskirts of Thatta flooded by later in the day...

"The people who come here to give us food treat us like beggars. They just throw the food. It is humiliating," said 80-year-old Karima, who uses only one name. She was living in the graveyard with more than two dozen relatives. The floods also displaced thousands of minority Hindus in southern Sindh province. About 3,000 were living at a centuries-old Hindu temple inside the sprawling graveyard. "I am also fasting and praying for the flood to recede as it has already snatched husbands from wives, sons and daughters from parents, brothers from sisters, and sisters from brothers," said Geeta Bai, 32, as she sat outside the temple...See full article at BBC World and others 28 August here It is estimated 21 million people have been affected by the floods as of Reports 28th August - A mass migration of 10 million occurred during Partition which a description by Mohammed Hanif who clarifies emphatically: "These areas are of no strategic interest to anyone because they have neither exported terrorism nor do they have the ambition to join a fight against it" Read more from earlier report here from Pakistan

Before and after: A lush Swat valley turned into water and stones.

Find Video & Various Reports at BBC World and here and here Before and after: A lush Swat valley turned into water and stones. Photo: Huma Beg Two women from Islamabad, who decided to put their personal lives on hold in order to help Pakistani flood victims, describe the areas they visited and what they did there. also see the scenes seen by Omar Ahsan and others - for Photos Click here Desperate for Doctors: Omar Ahsan, an interior designer living in Karachi, has visited 17 remote mountain villages in Shangla district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province (formerly North West Frontier Province or NWFP).

"I have a comfortable life in Karachi and when this calamity hit, me and some of my friends felt we had to help some of the affected people. First we took food relief to Peshawar and some other urban areas of the NWFP.

Then I got a phone call from a driver, who used to work for me. He said he's been seeing bodies in the river where he lives, about 150km (95 miles) from Islamabad. He said there were many, many bodies, hundreds of them, and that they all came from Shangla district.

At that moment I decided I should go to that place. I came over here alone. I managed to get one truck of relief. It's a big district, hundreds of kilometres. The whole network had collapsed, the telecommunication network has come down.
When I reached the end of the roads, I had to start walking.

I spent the last four days traveling on the outskirts of Shangla district, walking in a mountainous terrain. I covered about 55km and visited 17 villages. People there are hungry and thirsty. There's no electricity, no water, no gas, no food supplies. The nearest place where food is being distributed is Karora and the queues are 3-4km long.

Thousands of people come down from the mountains and stand in the sun for a whole day in order to get a bag of flour. The queues are long, these are simple people, their patience is compromised, queues are broken and some go away with bruises and injuries.

In each village I went I was supported by the elders and I was joined by volunteers. Elders would tell me how many houses were destroyed, I would gather the data and issue them with a token to come to Karora where we had our own food supplies waiting for them.

Yesterday we set up a camp in Karora. From early morning till late afternoon we distributed food to 300 families, which is probably more than 3,000 people. It was a tough day. But work is far from over. People desperately need more food and most importantly they need lady doctors. There are hundreds of thousands of women and children without a doctor. Kids were crying of pain and mothers were begging me to bring them female doctors.

If someone is ill, they put him on a stretcher which four men carry down the mountain until they reach the nearest hospital. That could take a couple of days of walking. And there are hundreds of thousands of people stuck there without any help." See other eye witness reports here

Army said to be doing an heroic job even trumping federal government in their abilities to act efficiently.

BBC World New exodus in flood-hit Pakistan - Villagers from flooded villages sit are rescued by boat near Shahdadkot (27 August 2010) August 28: Fresh flooding in southern Pakistan has displaced almost a million people in the past 48 hours, the UN says.* Floods 'consuming' southern villages* Damage and challenges* Army boosted by floods reaction* Flood victims 'no terrorists'
Read More here

Patrick McCully who is Executive Director for International Rivers says:
There are three vital global lessons to learn from the ongoing flood catastrophe in Pakistan. First, the rise in the planetary temperature has reached a tipping point. We are now in a scary new era of extreme weather. Extremes are the new normal. And there's no going back, at least not in our lifetime, and very likely not in that of our children.

We should be doing everything we can and more to cut our greenhouse gas pollution. We can slow the rise in heat and limit the maximum temperature level (provided we avoid triggering irreversible feed-backs like a surge of methane from melting permafrost or the drying and burning of the Amazon forests). But we can't stop more warming, and we can't stop more weather disasters (which, climate denying evil wing-nuts take note, will include more snow-maggedons).

Second, we urgently need to step up efforts to protect ourselves from this new normal. We need to do all we can to stop weather disasters becoming catastrophes. This means, in the jargon of disaster management, increasing the resilience of our infrastructure, economies and communities. In Pakistan greater resilience would include better emergency warning and evacuation systems, better flood protection for key infrastructure (cities, and schools and other community buildings that can serve as flood shelters), and plans to help communities recover once the waters recede.

Third, the way we have (mis)managed the Indus -- and countless other rivers around the world -- for the past century has provided various short-term benefits, but at a major long-term cost that we are now having to pay.

Read the entire expert article with links on reducing flood risks to worldwide damage prevention here This group appears to be an outstanding organization which give immediate aid to victims as well.

Other groups doing good work in Pakistan and highly respected:

The International Rescue Committee here Pakistan Flood Crisis

The International Committee of the Red Cross/Red Crescent here

For an earlier Timeline of the flood since it's conception, GO here

VERY Haunting/Moving Video by Peshawar Students for The Edhi Foundation and their fellow citizens here Where you will also see how to contribute from anywhere in the world.

Reuters

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