I want to come now to Samantha Power, the Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, here with me in New York tonight. Administrator, so, catastrophic flooding, you’ve got two rival governments – a very dysfunctional situation. The UN’s now saying 4,000 dead, which is a technical cut in the number that they had said, but still, 9,000 people are missing. It’s been a week – the numbers could be astronomical. Do they really have a sense of how many people could be dead?
I mean, it’s not for us to speculate. You’ve seen the wild number ranges. But that number of missing is a searing one, because, you know, they’re saying more than 11,000 people are missing, as you said – it’s a week later. So, President Biden announced today an additional $11 million, bringing what we’re investing there in supporting them to $12 million – I’m sure those needs are gonna go way up. The risk of diseases after something like this goes up. The shelter needs, the food needs. These were communities that were very self-sufficient until this happened. It really was a beautiful patch of land, and these communities just so tight, and those communities will come together. But it’s going to be a brutal reckoning here these next days.
Source: USAID
