The Voice of the suffering in Asia

“He offered me a soft drink. It was drugged and I don’t know what happened next. I resisted him throughout, but he used to put something in the food. He would also beat me.

“We moved to a hill after the boundary wall of our mud house collapsed but it was too hot under the open sky. We are unsure of our future. The cotton crop has rotted after the first harvest, and the sugar cane is being ruined."

"every day you should touch a page of the Bible, each word of the Bible. Go line by line, line by line, and obtain this blessing with your fingers, because it is written in the Bible that there is a blessing for those who touch the Word of God.”

Rampant illness is also a concern, according to Bishop Travas: “Dengue fever and cholera are spreading. The hospitals are overwhelmed and are sending people away.”

The goal is that all religions commit to world peace. We need to clean up religion’s image, recover the true sense of religion. Pope Francis is sounding a wake-up call, not striking a hammer, he is lovingly telling us to “reopen the door to this hope” to let us show that religion is a path to peace.

As the official death toll tops 1,500, with several thousand more injured and more than six million people directly affected by the worst flooding in the past 30 years, urgent aid is needed to prevent the aftermath of the rains from being worse than the flooding itself.