Rash of Disasters Leaves
Aid Groups Depleted

WASHINGTON (RNS)--Kenton Moody has never seen his home crumble in an earthquake. He has never watched flood waters sweep away his possessions, nor seen his neighborhood buried under avalanches of mud.

But time and time again he has cast his lot with those who have.

As director of international relief for Convoy of Hope, an independent international relief ministry that draws much support from the Assemblies of God, he has visited nearly a dozen countries in as many years, each time in the aftermath of some disaster.

"I went with a team to Venezuela after the flood, and we saw literally hundreds of homes buried under mud," said Moody, referring to the mudslides and record rainfall that killed as many as 30,000 people in Venezuela in December.

"We had just finished touring one of the neighborhoods out beyond the airport in Caracas and we were getting ready to go back to the van, and one missionary wandered over to the cliff. He saw a severed human hand lying in the mud. Just lying there. Things like that bring back the reality of how real these disasters are."

Real indeed.

In the last four months of 1999 alone, more than a half-dozen natural disasters left trails of devastation around the globe--from floods and mudslides in Mexico, Vietnam and Venezuela, to cyclones in India, to earthquakes in Turkey and Colombia, to the hurricanes that swept through the Caribbean and eastern seaboard of the United States.

In the wake of each calamity, faith-based organizations sprang into action.

For example, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's International Disaster Response team launched a $275,000 disaster relief effort in China, Nicaragua and Venezuela providing food, medicine, drinking water and emergency shelter.

Southern Baptists dispatched aid to Kosovo, distributing wood-burning stoves to families and helping build roofs on homes damaged during the war. In West Timor, the Adventist Development and Relief Agency set up temporary housing for East Timor refugees fleeing violence.

It also distributed blankets to Turkish earthquake victims and teamed up with Turkish Protestant Churches to deliver food packages.

Earthquake survivors in Turkey also got a helping hand from the United Methodist Committee on Relief, which built temporary housing near the earthquake's epicenter at Izmit.

Continued on page 2: »