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With cases of Ebola still surfacing in Sierra Leone on a weekly basis, the Sierra Leone Red Cross has installed information kiosks  throughout the country to serve as a point of reference to communities.

It was an ordinary Tuesday for middle school teacher Deborah, but in a matter of seconds that all changed. By chance, Deborah was walking by the lunch room where Mike, a colleague, had been eating lunch. The pizza that he was eating had become lodged in his throat and Deborah quickly recognized that he was choking.

Each hospital bedsheet that Deki Tamang washes represents another brick in the new home that she hopes to build for her children one day. Since the Nepal earthquakes reduced her house in Dhunche to rubble, the mother of four has worked full-time at the laundry in the Canadian Red Cross field hospital operating on the site of the original damaged hospital.

Rocking and pounding for hours along a rubble-strewn road that looks more like a mountain goat trail, the Canadian Red Cross mobile medical team is on the move. Four times a week, a doctor, nurse and translator with the Canadian field hospital in Dhunche, Nepal, load heavy metal trunks filled with medical supplies and travel to surrounding villages along earthquake-ravaged roads.

In a half-constructed classroom open to the sky, about 65 Nepalese students laugh, wave their arms and carefully mimic the gestures of a young woman in a Red Cross and Red Crescent vest.

On a misty, pre-monsoon morning at the Canadian Red Cross field hospital, a colourful line-up is forming of elderly Nepalese women in traditional embroideries and heavy brass earrings, crying children, and a few proud, wiry men.

Tucked in her mother’s lap, two-year-old Sandya Tamang watches other children build blocks, count wooden beads, and tussle over stuffed toys.
It’s Sandya’s first day at the play space created by the Canadian Red Cross for children affected by the Nepal earthquakes.

Shortly before her first child was due, Diki Dolma trekked for days across mountain trails devastated by the Nepal earthquakes to reach the Canadian Red Cross field hospital in Dhunche.