International 48

Ebola has been one of the most talked about health emergencies in the past year, but unless you’ve been in close contact with an infected person, you are very unlikely to contract the virus. There are many myths and fears surrounding the Ebola outbreak, both in the affected region of West Africa and in our own country. These fears are hampering efforts to fight the disease.

Social worker Lindsay Jones has just recently returned home to Ottawa after working at the Red Cross Ebola treatment centre in Kenema, Sierra Leone. She was there to provide psychosocial support to patients being treated for the virus. She’s been describing her experiences on her blog and recently in this CBC interview. We share this excerpt.

It was the largest Red Cross response ever to a single country. The Red Cross helped one in two Haitians, about five million people. After the 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti in 2010, individual Canadians and governments generously donated $222 million to the Canadian Red Cross to support the tremendous emergency and recovery efforts. 

While much of the attention around the current Ebola outbreak has been on treating patients, combating the fears, stigma and myths associated with the virus is another important component of the Red Cross response.

I’ll admit it. I’m not much of a hiker. If I had to choose, I would pick reading a book on the beach to hiking mountains any day. But I just came back from hiking through the mountains for seven hours in Honduras and even though my legs are sore, I wouldn’t trade that experience for the world.

You may have heard about Typhoon Ruby (also known as Typhoon Hagupit), a typhoon that had the potential to bring about damages of a similar scale to the infamous Typhoon Haiyan, which affected more than 10 million people in November 2013. Fortunately, Typhoon Ruby is not to be compared to Haiyan but there are still a lot of people who have lost their homes and livelihood, and to them, this is as severe as it can get. The typhoon has now left the country but so did the news coverage.

As an administrator of a series of emergency-type hospitals in remote parts of the world, Erwan Cheneval has had to supervise, plan, develop, and monitor them and maintain appropriate standards of care. Meeting these challenges in abnormal circumstances is doubly hard.

Five years ago, a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Haiti impacting millions of lives, and leading to the largest single-country emergency response in Red Cross history. Today, the work continues through long-term projects to support communities on their path to recovery.

Recently, Canadian Red Cross volunteer and photographer Johan Hallberg-Campbell travelled to Haiti to document that progress. His work, Haiti five years on: An Fòm!, is a stunning collection of images of some of the people and places that tell the story of Haiti’s recovery.