My niece, Erin Lea, lives in new Orleans with her husband Derek. Three years ago, Hurricane Katrina forced them out of their homes and tonight, it looks as if Hurricane Gustave is going to put them through it again. She’s smiling in the picture, but though she is a cheerful, optimistic person, I doubt she’s got much to smile about today.

Even if their own home and business is spared (as happened with Katrina) so many of their friends and neighbors lost, and will lose, everything.

Here in India, the Kosi River in Bihar is also flooding and the situation is grim for thousands of people whose lives were already precarious in the extreme. Ravi has worked very hard for many years with his good friend D K Misra, India’s leading expert on floods, particularly in Bihar. Mishraji’s book, “Trapped! Between the Devil and Deep Waters” (translated and edited by Ravi, you can order it from PSI) will be released this Sunday in Delhi. The book explains in great detail how droughts and floods are inextricably linked and how badly human beings mis-manage nature.

While Erin Lea and Derek have much to lose and little support from the US government, I think they would be among the first to admit that their situation is as nothing compared to what the residents of the villagers from the banks of the Kosi face. Starvation, disease and drowning are only three of the calamities the people of Bihar confront.With food and medicines being dropped from helicopters  sporadically, one can only imagine the specific needs of a person like Moy Moy, who requires anticonvulsants and formula G-tube feeds three times a day.

As Moy Moy’s mother, it is a situation I often reflect upon, and, to date, I have no answers.  I place Erin Lea, Derek, the people of Bihar and our own Moy Moy in your thoughts and prayers tonight. May the good Lord save us all.