Emergency (Page 30)

The Canadian Red Cross receives many calls for assistance, but this call, from one of the evacuees from the Alberta Fires in May, was a bit different.
Kim Matchem contacted the Red Cross for a teddy bear. Kim was eight months pregnant with her daughter Tenley when she was evacuated from Fort McMurray. 

Immediately after Hurricane Matthew struck Haiti on October 4, the Haiti Red Cross Society and other Red Cross partners rushed staff and volunteers to the worst affected communities to assess needs and deliver emergency assistance. Canadian Red Cross aid delegate Dr. Lynda Redwood-Campbell was part of an IFRC assessment team that was among the first to reach many storm-battered towns and villages and had a key role in supporting the health response that followed, in coordination with Haiti’s Ministry of Health, the Haiti Red Cross and other health responders. These are some of her reflections:

For the past week, more than 100 personnel from the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) and the ICRC have been facilitating the evacuation of people from Eastern Aleppo. As of yesterday, tens of thousands of civilians had been successfully evacuated in this complex operation.

Spirits were high from the first few moments of the aid distribution in Jérémie, Haiti, when Red Cross volunteers and staff provided residents with much-needed tarps and hygiene kits.
 
Prior to the distribution, Red Cross teams visited the city to identify those left most vulnerable after Hurricane Matthew and ensured that their immediate needs were met.

In the spring of 2016, Leonie Bree says she was happily in the process of starting her own business, and she and her husband had recently bought a home in the neighbourhood of Abasand. Her daughters, Vanessa and Katrena, who were starting their own families, had also just bought homes in Beacon Hill and Waterways. However, that all changed after wildfires swept through the city in May, forcing the family to evacuate. Unfortunately, all three homes were lost to the flames.

The Canadian Red Cross team is continuing to visit villages and remote regions of Haiti affected by Hurricane Matthew to provide medical care through the mobile health clinic. Last week, the mobile clinic visited four communities including Cap à Fou which had been previously inaccessible to aid workers due to severely damaged roads. 

“Every day I see children suffering from the after-effects of having lost their homes or close family members,” said Emilie Gauthier-Paré. Psychosocial delegate with the Canadian Red Cross in Haiti, Émilie is a member of the mobile health clinic team making daily visits to remote villages of Grande Anse in the southwest of the country that was devastated by Hurricane Matthew.

The Canadian Red Cross mobile health clinic has now been set up and operating out of Jeremie in the Grand Anse region. These photos are from when the mobile clinic was in Mouline, a remote community in the mountains which was badly affected by Hurricane Matthew. This is the first time the community is receiving health services nearly one month after the hurricane.