Emergency (Page 42)

Local Nepalese staff including drivers and translators hired to support the Red Cross field hospital in Dhunche are getting first aid training this week.

It's hard to believe that I have already been in Dhunche one week. This morning when I got up, the sky was clear enough to see the snow-capped mountains in Tibet and Langtang Mountain. Usually, this region is a trekker’s paradise, but the earthquakes and ongoing instability of the landscape have changed that for now.

When pre-election violence broke out in Burundi in April, volunteers with the Burundi Red Cross were among the first to respond. The protests led to a number of casualties, and forced more than 96,000 people to seek safety in neighbouring countries.

June 20^th marked the two-year anniversary of the Alberta Floods. High River residents gathered together to celebrate how far they’ve come since that devastating day.

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.

Two years after severe flooding damaged thousands of properties across southern Alberta, the repairs on Chuck Shifflett’s historic High River home are nearly complete. But, like many in the hardest hit regions, Shifflett and his neighbours are still recovering from the disaster. Down his street, four homes were eventually torn down, and just two were rebuilt so far.

The Canadian Red Cross continues to offer a range of programs and services to people affected by the floods in 2013. This includes Red Cross funding for Samaritan’s Purse, Habitat for Humanity, Mennonite Disaster Services and World Renew to help dozens of families in High River and the Calgary area as they rebuild or repair their homes.

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.