Flood Relief in Pingnan County

Flood Relief in Pingnan County
Originally uploaded by paulbrockmann.

Massive floods hit the eastern section of Guangxi in late June. Even

in a country and a region that has known periodic flooding since

prehistory, these floods seem to have stood out in the severity of the

damage to houses and loss of property. Through our work in Nanning,

we’ve developed a pretty strong working relationship with the Public

Health Bureau of Guangxi, and they asked if there was anything we

could do to help the hundreds of thousands of people affected by the

floods. After an initial exploratory trip on which some basic supplies

were delivered, we decided to focus our efforts on one county that

contained small villages in which thousands of families had completely

lost their homes and just about everything they couldn’t carry quickly

as the evacuated in the face of the rising waters.

I had the good fortune to spend a few days helping with the relief

effort, and the next several shots will show some of our work:

distributions in villages on two different days, as well as me and

other colleagues unloading wheelbarrows and then working to assemble

them.

This first shot was taken just as we and our truck of supplies had

arrived at the roadside up above the small village where we did the

first distribution I was part of. You can see how beautiful the

countryside is!