Since December last year, the South American nation of Peru has been battered by devastating floods and mudslides amid heavy rains caused by the sudden and abnormal warming of Pacific waters, reports say.
According to the U.S. Agency for International Development, the still continuing severe weather and related natural disasters have affected 1.1 million people. As of April 19, the Peruvian government reported that the disasters have killed more than 110 people, injured over 400 others, and displaced as many as 184,000 people.
The disasters brought about by a local El Nino phenomenon, or the warming of surface sea temperatures in the Pacific, will likely continue along Peru's northern coast at least through April, a Peruvian scientist told Reuters.
Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski said his country will need some US$9 billion (S$12.5 billion) to rebuild and modernize the affected areas, according to Agence France Presse.
Amid the devastation, the residents of one of the badly hit areas of Peru made a surprising request when a Catholic leader visited them to ask what they need most.
Instead of asking for food and other essential goods, flood victims in Baja Piura told visiting Archbishop José Antonio Eguren last week that they need Bibles because the ones they had were lost in the flood, the Catholic News Agency reported.
"They said that the Word of God is essential for them and for the continuity of their family catechetical programs and ongoing catechesis they have implemented in their village," a statement from the archdiocese of Piura said.
Eguren promised to send them Bibles and assured them that "the love of God does not abandon them nor has he forgotten them."
The archbishop, accompanied by volunteers and officials from the charitable group Caritas, brought three tons of food supplies for the more than 300 families in the area, who were badly affected when the Piura River overflowed just recently.
The rampaging river waters engulfed the village, with floods reaching a level of five feet, destroying homes, ranches, farm fields and other infrastructures.
The sudden floods caught the villagers flatfooted, forcing them to leave everything behind and flee with nothing but the clothes they were wearing to stay alive.
Most parts of the village were buried in a thick layer of mud. Some 80 percent of the homes were demolished, while rice and cotton fields were destroyed, reports said.
Some 1,800 inhabitants of the village now "spend the day in makeshift and uncomfortable tents, without basic services, living together with sickness and extreme poverty," the Archdiocese of Piura said
"They are people of deep faith and despite everything they have suffered they have not lost hope or the desire to go on, since they're sure that with the help of the love of God, their desire to work, and [with] our aid, they will be able to again see their people better off than before," the statement said.
According to The World Factbook, 81.3 percent of the people of Peru are Roman Catholic, 12.5 percent Evangelical, 3.3 percent other, and 2.9 percent with no religion in the latest census made in 2007.
