These photos show the magnitude of the disaster.
Excerpts from a letter dated March 19th from Camu Durand rscj, Provincial of Peru:
The Province of Peru would like to thank each one of you most sincerely for your prayer and concern at this time when we are undergoing a tragedy of nature’s making.
We are living today what the Pope affirms in his Encyclical Laudato Si: “a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor”. (No 49; 53) It is the poor who most suffer the effects of climate change.
In spite of the disaster, the fear, the insecurity, HOPE carries us forward, reveals our creativity: the young are organising themselves to help, people are organising among themselves to be able to withstand the rising waters in the rivers, and to save those trapped in their homes, because the streets have turned into rivers of water and mud reaches up as far as their knees.
At this point, one of the Chapter calls has great currency among us: “Go out, embark, as Society, and together with others go to the ends of the earth”.
I end with these words from Eduardo Galeano: “ A lot of small people in small places, doing small things can change the world”.