Story type: Story

Rajab is exhausted, and so his family. They are on their way to home from the middle of nowhere. The flood had forced them to leave their village, their belongings and their home.

On the banks of a shaded pier, the few pirogues (local canoe) are still motionless in the sunny morning of yet another October day. Soon, the silence of the sandy piers will be replaced by a happy hubbub and conversations of women who will step over the many hulls to leave dry land and head back to their flooded village.

Eight months after the earthquake in Haiti, what are the main difficulties for aid organizations in preparing the population to better face future disasters?

On a pebbled beach, Vietnamese fishermen scratch barnacles from the hulls of vessels propped up on wooden blocks. They scour their bottoms using stones and chisels, picking at the tiny crustaceans trapped between the planks of wood, before reapplying a waterproof seal.

Gray clouds pass by above gray barracks. Chapped paint at the house walls, broken window panes, next to it a huge pile of rubbish where a scrubby dog is searching for food remains. Only the colourful bed varnishes are a sign that someone still lives here.

Can a woman in New York, the cultural and financial centre, have anything in common with a woman from a village in Chattisgarh, a state where the maternal mortality rate is 335 per 100,000 live births and 75 out of every thousand babies die before their first birthday? Yes! The common denominator among two women who live in two extremes is the passion to bring change and their determination in not letting business as usual continue.

Floods in Pakistan have impacted an estimated 13.8 million people - of which some six million are displaced. 1.5 million people have lost their houses. CARE is responding to the emergency by distributing shelters, mosquito nets, plastic floor mats, water purification tabs, hygiene kits and kitchen sets and other emergency supplies to families.

Two images of Shirley flash intermittently back and forth in my head: one, of Shirley smiling, laughing with tsunami survivors in Indonesia; the other, of a bloodied Shirley, slumped against the door of a bullet-riddled car in Afghanistan. I never saw the second image, but it’s in my head anyway. For the past two years, it hasn’t left.

Yes, it’s been 10 years in CARE for me – I still remember the day the HR Director of CARE India told me after the interview, that I was selected for the job. It was part of the campus placement in a social science institute. That day changed my life. Coming from a working class family with a rural background in India, the biggest gift my parents could give me was a good education.