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HM: This is Red Cross Radio. My name is Henry Makiwa and I’d like to welcome you to this podcast about how the Red Cross is helping people in Myanmar six months after the devastating Cyclone Nargis.
HM: For the past six months, the Red Cross has been distributing relief to people affected by the disaster, as well as putting separated families back in touch. Nicole Batch, who works for the Red Cross’ tracing and message services, is in Myanmar to help Red Cross volunteers there set up systems to find missing family members. She describes how people were separated when the cyclone hit and how the Red Cross is helping them.
NB: Many people have described to us the effect of the cyclone and how they lost their family members, with descriptions of ten-foot and 20-foot waves coming through their villages and completely washing people away. Often times it’s been the children and women and elderly people who were washed away and who remain missing in many cases.
NB: With the size of the delta that was affected and the spread of the villages across a massive area, we have decided to use a number of techniques to try and restore family links for people. We use lists of people who are safe and well so we collect messages from people who want to let others know that they have survived and we display these publicly and take them to villages when we go for field trips. We also register unaccompanied and separated children in the hope that we can trace their parents or other family members.
NB: We have accepted a number of tracing cases from parents who are looking for their missing children. When we’ve got some information then we can start investigating where the children might be but it’s very difficult where the movement of people has continued, especially with children. They’ve often been moved through several camps and been taken care by other people.
NB: One of the positive things, I guess, is how well the population looks after people in need so a lot of children who are separated from their families, in fact, nearly all of them are well cared for by other relatives or other villagers, which is quite extraordinary in the circumstances.
HM: The Red Cross is now working through local volunteers and village representatives to assess people’s long-term needs. Liz Hughes, the Red Cross operational manager in charge of the recovery effort in Myanmar, tells us about the assessments.
LH: We are just coming to the end of the relief stage of the operation, which means that we’ve come to end of giving out essential non-food items and tarpaulins and shelter protection to people. And now what we’re moving into is planning for the longer term. How we get people back on their feet with their livelihoods, how we ensure that they’ve got sufficient water supplies for the longer term and that sort of thing so we’re in a stage of planning at this point and we’ve been doing that for the last month.
LH: We’ve started by doing assessments of each of the village tracks that we’re going to be working in and have managed to complete till now I think 100 of 152 assessments. These assessments would typically be four days long. They’d have their team of volunteers under the leadership of somebody from the Myanmar office branches and they’d be going into the community spending four days talking to lots of different people in the community about what the issues are, about what has happened to them till now and about what has been destroyed as a result of the cyclone and needs to be rebuilt. Our job will then be to work with the community to put together a plan and help them put those things back in place.
HM: Over the next two-and-a-half years, the Red Cross will helping people recover from the disaster. Dr Ang Kaw Htut, chief co-ordinator of the Myanmar Red Cross Society, explains the main priorities for the recovery phase.
AKH: The main topics, the issues we are now planning is, one is for the water and sanitation, so we must be aware of and worry about the dry seasons for the water and sanitation in these affected areas. Because the salty water came in they cannot get the water resources, all the ponds dried up, so they need the water for their survival in these affected areas, usually this happens, but after Nargis this environment is totally changed.
AKH: The next thing is the shelter. Now they are living in the summer they are living in a temporary shelter. They need better more appropriate shelter for them, and now we are planning this.
AKH: Next is their livelihoods. Everything was lost in the cyclones so they need the livelihoods programme especially main things most of the people in the delta are the farmers and the fishing business so they need boats, nets and seeds.
AKH: The last thing is the health programmes. This is related environmental and personal hygiene and the water so that’s why we are now on our Red Cross contacts we are making health promotion and health prevention activities for example like Dengue, personal hygiene, malaria programmes, distributing the long lasting bed nets.
Also community-based first aid is now running and also psychosocial programme. Everybody is now much afraid of the strong winds and the weather and they’re worried to be happen again.
HM: For more information and to see a video about the Red Cross’ work in Myanmar, please visit www.redcross.org.uk/myanmar.
Thank you for listening to Red Cross Radio. If you have any comments or suggestions, please email us at podcasts@redcross.org.uk.
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