Disaster Response (Page 34)

The Canadian Red Cross is deploying its Emergency Health Clinic and a team of nine aid workers to Haiti jointly with the French Red Cross in collaboration with the Haitian Red Cross and the Haitian Ministry of Health. 

Fire races through a picturesque valley in southeast B.C. People flee the charging flames, some in just their bathing suits after a swim in the Kettle River. In just a few hours, in August 2015, a raging wildfire forced people from Rock Creek to Westbridge to drop everything, and evacuate.

Elmita Nodeis sits on the ground in the courtyard of Philippe Guerrier school in the town of Les Cayes in Haiti. The school's been turned into an evacuation centre since Hurricane Matthew hit, and she's been sleeping there with eight members of her family ever since.  The 51-year-old has a few buckets in front of her, and she's busy scrubbing clothes. 

The Guay-Bourbonnais family home, in Marieville, Quebec, was completely destroyed by a violent fire. 
“I didn’t want help. I just couldn’t accept that I was a disaster victim,” recalls the mother of the family, Caroline. However, in the midst of the chaos, two Red Cross volunteers approached her and said “This disaster has affected you. It’s okay to let yourself be helped.”

Glass and debris flew through the air as a tornado tore the roof from a section of the home that Arnold Brown rented with a friend in LaSalle, Ontario. Now, more than a month later, the 60-year-old is still trying to put the pieces of his life back together after it was quite literally torn apart.

What does it mean when we say we are responding to a silent disaster?

Thanks to social media and 24-hour news it’s pretty easy to stay informed. But despite all this media coverage around the world there are events that happen every day that are not reported, or are underreported. Some of these events are serious, like famine and outbreaks of disease. We call an event like this a silent disaster.
 

The Democratic Republic of Congo is currently dealing with three epidemics at once: cholera, measles and yellow fever. The Democratic Republic of Congo Red Cross has been a key partner of their government in the fight against these recurrent epidemics, with hundreds of volunteers raising community-level awareness about preventative measures.

The Round-up offers a weekly sample of what our sister Red Cross Societies are working on around the world. Here is an update on Red Cross response to flooding in the United States, and earthquakes in Italy and Myanmar.