International 2

What does it mean to live through a year of armed conflict? For some, it means having to leave behind everything they know for somewhere safer. For others, it means spending hours in bomb shelters, or hours without electricity. For too many it means being separated from family, struggling to access basic medical care and not knowing what will happen next. 

Guy Choquet, the Red Cross Director of Operations, Alberta Fire Recovery in Fort McMurray was one of thousands of people evacuated when flood waters came into the downtown area on April 26, 2020.
Choquet was also instrumental in supporting the Flood Collaborative, a group of local community organizations that formed to identify and address any gaps in services as residents began the recovery process.

Sarah Parisio's role within the Canadian Red Cross involves supporting people impacted by disasters through leading teams of fellow humanitarians who respond to emergencies in Canada and around the world. Discover how she brought with her skills developed through responding to emergencies in Canada to an international context and what new knowledge she brought back home in return.

Last November, a delegation from the Canadian Red Cross visited the Mexican Red Cross team in Nogales, a city in the state of Sonora bordering the U.S. state of Arizona. Many of the residents of this arid desert town came from other parts of the country to work in one of the numerous cross-border manufacturing plants, or maquiladoras, that produce goods for international export.

In honour of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, the Canadian Red Cross is highlighting our efforts to prevent and fight gender-based violence in our communities and around the world.

Lebanon has been facing an evolving and complex humanitarian crisis for several years, generating widespread and growing needs for humanitarian assistance. The people of Lebanon are the ones bearing the brunt of the impact of a series of devastating crises: a complex economic and financial crisis, which has been exacerbated by COVID-19 and the explosion that rocked the Port of Beirut on August 4, 2020.

Monsoon rainfall in Pakistan is causing catastrophic landslides and flash flooding across the country. The record-breaking rains are nearly three times higher than the past 30-year average and have impacted an estimated 33 million people – for scale, the population of Canada is just over 38.6 million. 

In East Africa, tens of millions of people are in dire need of food as a series of disasters from climate change, conflict, the COVID-19 pandemic, a locust invasion, and longstanding vulnerabilities have converged into a humanitarian crisis. Time is running out to avert starvation. Unless urgent action is taken, the continued drought in East Africa could come to resemble the one in 2011, which killed about 260,000 people in Somalia.