Just at the moment when Christians, Jews and Muslims around the world were celebrating festivals of joy and life, the visiting church leaders were faced with death. They are either unemployed or must work for two or three U.S. dollars a month, which is not enough. A woman doing her best to clean a hospital floor with a dirty mop and no disinfectants. Leaking, pooling, stinking sewage, breeding grounds for water-borne diseases. It's not the politicians who are suffering, but the children, the women, the poor, the sick, the elderly.
Many children suffer wasting or stunting.
Calcium, protein and vitamin deficiencies are widespread. The group members from Church World Service also found it gratifying to see blankets from the CWS Blanket Program on almost every hospital bed, and on beds in orphanages and other institutions that they visited. CWS has provided enough blankets to cover every hospital bed in Iraq, Dr. Page said. We want to blanket the world with love. During their six days in Iraq, the church leaders met with Christian and Muslim religious leaders, humanitarian aid workers and government ministers of health, education and religious affairs, and visited Christian and Muslim holy sites.