Supporter: John Stephens

Yesterday I spoke to Oregon Public Broadcasting's Emily Harris about the humanitarian perspective on President Obama's decision to send more troops to Afghanistan.

My main point was that the military is only one piece of the puzzle to achieve stability in Afghanistan. Why not send 30,000 teachers to Afghanistan, or provide 30,000 microloans to women businesses there?

Listen to the full show, Think Out Loud, here. I'm interviewed about 36 minutes and 45 seconds into the program.

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The human story of suffering is slowly emerging from the stories collected from hundreds of displaced people. They tell of enormous challenges and sacrifices for those who were trapped in the fighting, caught in the crossfire and struggling to survive.

I just read some of their stories in an msnbc.com article headlined, "Civilians suffer in Pakistani war on Taliban."

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The news coming in is not good. Thousands of internally displaced people (IDPs) are still pouring out of parts of northern Pakistan where fighting is continuing between Taliban militants and military forces.

The fighting still seems to be catching headlines around the world, but the humanitarian situation is slowly fading from the spotlight. The situation for IDPs is not getting better. Of the now estimated 2.3 million IDPs, perhaps only 20 percent are residing in official camps set up by the government and mostly run by various UN agencies. Temperatures are extreme and tempers are wearing thin for IDPs stuck in these camps with few services available to them.

The other 80 percent of IDPs have flooded into towns and villages, some living with friends and relatives, others crammed into vacant school buildings. For those willing to take in IDPs into their homes, they may host as many as 20 additional people in a single-family dwelling and their reserves of extra food are dwindling.

In the schools, the situation is dire. Hundreds of families crammed into small classrooms have no privacy and the sanitary conditions are horrible as the toilets were not built to deal with a tenfold increase in people.

As the IDP crisis continues, the needs of people change. A new statistic just came in that revealed that there are around 70,000 pregnant women who will give birth in the next two months, meaning there is a critical risk being posed to them and their newborns if proper medical facilities are not set up.

Right now the extreme heat is causing many issues — but in one week the early monsoons will arrive and perhaps change all that. However, In place of heat we may find flooding, muddy camps and a new set of hygiene challenges.

Mercy Corps staff are in affected communities talking to IDPs daily and constantly recalibrating our response to fit their most pressing needs. Once the fighting is over, these 2.3 million people will return to their homes. Many will find destroyed property and ruined crops, and Mercy Corps will be there to assist them in their time of need.

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Two local farmers near the village of Velankanni, India, dig a trench as part of Mercy Corps' post-tsunami cash for work program. This program is helping local families re-establish their ruined farms. Photo: John Stephens/Mercy Corps

If necessity is the mother of invention, then perhaps calamity is the father of community. I thought about this as I stood in the full Indian sun, witnessing a scene that I never imagined could take place.

In front of me, forty men, mostly farmers, stood knee-deep in mud and water. They were Hindu, Muslim and Christian men of over a dozen different castes. Although India has a long-standing tradition of religious tolerance, a scene like this is extremely rare, especially in rural areas where religious divisions are more pronounced. They had come together to dig a mile-long trench through farmland towards the sea. Their lands had been flooded with saltwater, and nothing would grow in the fields until all of it had been drained.

The waves of the tsunami hit the shores of India on December 26, ravishing the communities along the coast. But the powerful waves didn’t stop there. Unbeknownst to most observers, the waves continued up canals and across fields, in some place moving almost a mile inland.

The water, saturated with mud and sand, covered fields and villages with a layer of silt that was over two feet thick in some places. The salt water then seeped into the soil, killing all the crops.

When Mercy Corps representatives and our local partners from the DHAN Foundation first visited these farms the damage was immense. What looked like a large beach at low tide was actually acres of rice paddies. From Mercy Corps’ long experience with farming communities, we knew that the work to repair these fields had to begin immediately if these communities were to recover. New crops needed to be planted before the new growing season started.

The trench digging is the first phase of a program to revitalize farmland destroyed by the tsunami. Later, we’ll pay community members to haul the many tons of sand off of the fields, and finally we will help them rinse the salt from the soil and replant the fields.

Once the fields are cleared and rinsed, new crops are planted and harvested and the cycle of life that sustains these farming communities is once again restored, you might think that our work is done and our mission is accomplished. But we may have accomplished something far greater on the very first day we started work - the day that men from different castes who worship different gods, live in different villages and lead different lives came together and set foot in that very first canal.

On this day, a community found common ground in the very soil that sustained them and it charted the course of a canal that would not only revitalize their land, but also redefine the boundaries of their community.

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Friends Dev and Rama. Photo: John Stephens/Mercy Corps

Pondicherry, India - In the tiny village of Kanapathichettikullum, just 15 kilometers north of Pondicherry, the sixty concrete and thatch huts that make up this community bore an unimaginable brunt. The town was decimated, and those structures that withstood the force of the original wave still succumbed to the flood of water, which soaked all their belongings and tore windows out of their frames.

The bent fronds atop twenty-foot high palm trees bear testament to the sea’s ferocity, offering a crude but undeniable high-water mark for any who would doubt the wave’s size.

When Mercy Corps and its local partners from the Disaster Management Institute (DMI) first ventured into this village on January 4th, children were absent from the streets. Only the adults - mostly men - ventured out to speak with foreigners who came offering assistance.

But on a second visit, only two weeks later, the scene is much different. We met Dev and Rama as we toured the village again to see the progress that had been made by Mercy Corps, through local partner DMI.

Dev and Rama are lucky. The sons of fishermen, they know how to swim, and managed to escape drowning. Many children in the village were not so lucky.

In less than two weeks since our first visit, Mercy Corps and DMI had provided every family who needed shelter with a temporary house, complete with cooking utensils and water storage containers. In addition, a cash-for-work program is providing both men and women with immediate financial assistance for cleaning the debris from their village.

The real change, however, is not measured by the number of structures built or by the amount of food distributed, but by the much more subtle metric of children’s laughter. Their quick smiles and eagerness to introduce themselves was symbolic of a return to normalcy. Indeed, the entire village was again full of the playful voices of children returning to the lives that were interrupted on December 26th.

Certainly more work remains to be done here. Permanent homes are to be built, and boats and motors must be repaired to restore the fishing community’s income. But, in a very important way, the signs of recovery are everywhere in the smiling faces of children like Dev and Rama.

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