International (Page 46)

The Round-up offers a weekly sample of what our sister Red Cross Societies are working on around the world.

Eight colourfully dressed Tamang women sit in the community health post in Goljung in Rasua district, high in the Himalayas of Nepal. They’re the local community health volunteers and they usually take care of 10 to 15 patients a day in the remote community of 1,000. Today they’ve gathered around to meet the Canadian Red Cross health team.

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.

The Round-up offers a weekly sample of what our sister Red Cross Societies are working on around the world.

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.

Losing contact with family members can cause enormous anxiety, especially in the midst of disaster or conflict. Sometimes separation will last for days or months and sometimes it will last for years, as it did for Sadia and her siblings.