Red Cross Blogs

Posts tagged ‘water and sanitation’

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I think I’m probably in the same boat as most people when I say that starting a new job can be a wee bit daunting. But for most of us on our first day in a new job we’re unlikely to be faced with the mammoth challenge of ensuring your nation recovers from its most devastating disaster in half a century – so spare a thought for Sebastián Piñera as he begins his new job as president of Chile.

It’s been almost two weeks since the earthquake and tsunami in Chile and there have been more than 200 subsequent aftershocks which continue to shake damaged buildings and infrastructure.

The number of people thought to have died has been fluctuating but government figures from 7 March report the loss of 528 lives.

Although the Chilean government has restored electricity and water in many regions, the people in the hardest hit areas are still facing big challenges to get access to these basic services. The reopening of some of the country’s main thoroughfares has begun in a government-sponsored effort to ensure connections between regions.

The Chilean Red Cross has been responding to the emergency since day one. Volunteers and staff, with support from other Red Cross National Societies, such as Spain and Japan, are active in the hardest hit regions of Maule and Biobío.

Initial assessments to identify the humanitarian needs show that health services, emergency and transitional shelter, and water and sanitation continue to be high priorities.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies has launched an appeal for £8.5 million to help people recover over the next year. This includes:

•    emergency supplies for 75,000 people
•    water and sanitation for up to 10,000 households
•    emergency and/or transitional shelter for 50,000 people
•    preventative community-based health care for at least 90,000 people.

So far, the British Red Cross appeal has raised £165,000 and the money is being used to support the Chilean Red Cross emergency response operation.

Images © IFRC

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I was at a dinner party in Copenhagen when I heard about the earthquake in Chile. After my initial disbelief and shock that another huge disaster was happening so soon after Haiti I  immediately wanted to jump on a computer and do my job, which involves writing all the copy for our website when we launch an appeal.

But I was on holiday and it would have been a bit rude to abandon my friend’s party and despite my itching fingers I knew my colleagues would have the appeal covered.

Instead, I stayed and enjoyed my dinner and fielded a whole host of questions from my friends about how the Red Cross works. One of them had donated to the Red Cross after the Haiti quake and she wanted to find out what I knew about the situation and how effective I thought the Red Cross was in responding to disasters.

So – and feel free to accuse me of having fallen for the party line pretty much hook, line and sinker here – I set about explaining that what makes the Red Cross really unique when it comes to responding to disasters is that it is the biggest humanitarian organisation in the world with a Red Cross National Society in 186 countries. And since there are 196 countries in the world it means there’s rarely going to be a disaster where the Red Cross is not already present and able to respond. Call me a Red Cross geek, but I’m pretty impressed by that.

So it’s not surprising that, in Haiti, it was stunned local Red Cross workers who were some of the first to get the message out.

When I got to the office the morning after the quake, I already had emails with reports from Red Cross people in Port-au-Prince. And throughout the day the picture began to unfold. They said that amid crying and wailing, people were spending the night outside, frightened of further aftershocks. But even as they comforted people in the streets and treated the injured, it was clear they knew surviving the quake would be just the beginning of the ordeal. Their message was clear: we need help, send everything you’ve got.

We’ve all seen the extensive media coverage of this catastrophic disaster – a city completely decimated and millions of lives devastated. International assistance has poured into Port-au-Prince, but a few reports have implied that the response is chaotic with aid agencies being competitive and uncoordinated.

And it’s true that it is a crazy chaotic situation. But there are two sides to every story.

What I want to explain is that amidst the chaos there is in fact a systematic approach to provide the most effective and timely help possible.

There are more than 700 aid agencies currently working in Haiti, and to ensure the operation is as effective as possible, the United Nations is co-ordinating the response through its ‘cluster system’.

This works by bringing agencies into a ‘cluster’ according to the sector in which they specialise. For example, the World Health Organisation co-ordinates agencies specialising in health and the World Food Programme leads on logistics. The only cluster not co-ordinated by a UN organisation is shelter, which is led by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

Each cluster of agencies works to ensure efforts are not being duplicated and gaps are being filled. Unicef – who leads on water, sanitation and hygiene – has brought together the main agencies working in this field and divided up Port-au-Prince. Each district is assigned an aid agency lead, who co-ordinates the response in that area.

I know there are some frustrations that aid isn’t getting out to everyone fast enough and that’s understandable, but disasters on this scale can’t be sorted out within a few weeks. What’s important initially is search and rescue, providing medical aid then basic food and water – in that order.

And as I explained at the dinner party last weekend, I think search and rescue teams did a good job and it’s only after this that the pressing needs of helping people restart household living can be started, so people can cook their own food and have a tarpaulin to rig up shelter. It’s all important but it comes next.

Right now, we are focusing on sanitation and shelter. We need to innovate to meet the huge needs. Water and sanitation teams are currently doing a phenomenal job and the Red Cross is now distributing clean drinking water to 320,000 people a day. We have also distributed shelter materials to thousands of people.

The rainy season has already started and the hurricane season is due in a couple of months. Sanitation conditions are a high concern. With rain and poor sanitation there’s a very real risk of cholera, diarrhoea and malarial increase.

Having blurted all this out over dinner, I eventually shut up realising I may have ‘over-shared’.

But then one of my friends piped up with another question, ‘But what about Chile? If there are all these needs in Haiti what will happen to the people in Chile?’

It’s true that there is a massive response in Haiti with more than 600 Red Cross workers. But as a global organisation we still have many more resources to draw on to help people in Chile.

Whenever a natural disaster happens, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies co-ordinates the emergency response of all 186 Red Cross National Societies from around the world.

I know that many of the Red Cross National Societies in Latin America have already offered assistance and the Spanish Red Cross has deployed its basic health care unit. You can find out more on the Federation’s website.

You can also donate to our appeal for Chile on our website.

Images © Claudia Janke/BRC

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Cathy Ayer is part of a British Red Cross team in Haiti helping improve sanitation for earthquake survivors. She sent back this story on some of the more unusual ways they’ve found to make toilets fun.

Clowns. Funny guys that fall over a lot. Baggy pants. Little tricycles. Honking. More likely to be found in a circus than a camp for earthquake affected people. That was my experience of clowns until this morning when I attended a Red Cross hygiene promotion session in Automeca camp in Port Au Prince.

Automeca camp is currently home to approximately 10,000 people, densely populated in the centre of town with ramshshackle shelters squeezed tightly together. The British Red Cross sanitation team has been working in this camp for over 4 weeks for people made homeless by the earthquake. We have erected latrines and hand washing facilities so that people now have a safe and secure place to go to the loo. We have also undertaken a large hygiene promotion campaign with the residents of the camp. Hygiene promotion is all about delivering essential messages on how to maintain good hygiene to keep you and your family healthy, such as correct use of latrines, hand washing and storage of water. These things are absolutely vital…but is talking about going to the toilet sexy?

This is why hygiene promoters have to be extremely creative. They have to get the key messages out in such a way that it is interesting, engaging, clear, easily understood and makes people want to tell their friends and practice good hygiene. Today I saw Red Cross volunteers conducting a hygiene promotion session using glitter on people’s hands to demonstrate how harmful bacteria can be spread from person to person if they don’t wash their hands. They taught the people songs about why hygiene is good and everyone joined in singing and clapping their hands!

I then wandered over in to the centre of Automeca camp for the main attraction…the clowns! Liz, our hygiene promoter had found a group of local, professional performers, living in another camp in Port Au Prince, who have a clown act and she asked if they would join us to speak to the people in Automeca to promote hygiene. I was not sure what to expect…red noses? make up? Twirling bow ties? Instead I found something much more hilarious. A young guy dressed as an old man complete with white beard, an old man dressed as a baby (man size nappy included) and a scruffy clown with comedy breeches.

Hundreds of people gathered to see what was going to happen with these odd individuals. They had a loud speaker, and the girls in the group explained to the audience that they were here with the Red Cross to give them important information on health and hygiene, then the guys launched in to their fast paced comedy Creole routine. The “baby clown” spoke in a high pitched baby voice and had the crowd in hysterical laughter! The old man scolded the baby for not knowing how to use a latrine properly and instead invited the audience to contribute ideas on how it should be done properly. Members of the audience were pulled in to the act and everyone participated in agreeing what was good hygiene and what wasn’t.

Empowering people with the knowledge to keep themselves healthy in very difficult circumstances in these camps is very rewarding but what really touched me was the reaction of the kids to the clowns. Thousands of kids live in these camps across Haiti. Many will have lost parents and guardians, all are vulnerable and the trauma they experienced during the earthquake and since is hard to imagine. A group of hygiene promoting clowns is not going to take away all that trauma but if they can make them smile and laugh and perhaps forget their situation for a short time, it is a wonderful thing.

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Alastair Burnett, our recovery manger, just sent this candid account of what he’s been seeing in Haiti:

So it is 0530 and I am in my tent in the Red Cross base camp close to the airport in Port au Prince. I wouldn’t ideally be up at this time, but the noises of the aircraft taking off, the noises from others within the tent and the heat means that once you are awake at this time, there is no going back to sleep.

I arrived here from Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. Flying over Port-au-Prince was fascinating. In must have been a very striking looking city even before the earthquake, with hills to the back and the sea to the front, but flying in what strikes you is the clearly massive destruction many parts of this city has experienced. This was further compounded over the course of my first day as I visited camp after camp of internally displaced people (IDP). Discussing with colleagues, and many of us have seen a lot of areas of destruction whether that be in Africa, Asia or Europe, we all agreed that none of us have seen anything like this. The only way to really describe it is to think back to old black and white footage of cities like Berlin and Dresden at the end of the Second World War. This city looks as though it has had a war fought through it.

The Red Cross has a camp, in the grounds of what was destined to be the Hilton Hotel, close to the airport. The shell of the Hilton building is now our offices. Don’t get me wrong, there is no breakfast in bed here – it is a concrete shell with no windows or proper floors, functioning sanitation, water or power. However, people have done a great job getting this area operational and it is now home to over 250 Red Cross staff from across the world, ranging from doctors and nurses to logisticians and water engineers. There are two canteens, toilet and shower blocks and wireless internet access.  Scores of tents are neatly arranged around the concrete structure. It is far from 5 star but it provides safe and secure location for people to work from, which of course is so important in these situations. The camp empties out during the day but begins to fill up again from 1800 as it begins to get dark and the curfew that we apply to staff comes into force.

I spent yesterday with one of the sanitation engineers the British Red Cross has provided to the relief operation. He was carrying out a survey of some of the camps in which people have gathered, there are about 800 of them now ranging in size from a few hundred people to tens of thousands.  The situation in these camps is terrible. People lack adequate materials for shelter and for some people their shelter consists of little more than a bed sheet strung over a piece of string. Some of the lucky few have received some tarpaulin, which provides greater protection from the sun and the rain, as well as a better degree of privacy, and an even smaller minority a tent, although these are relatively few and far between, for a range of reasons.

The work of the Red Cross is largely evident in the water it is providing to these camps, a huge amount has clearly been done in this area. We are currently trucking in large amounts of water on a daily basis and, through the emergency water facilities we have brought into the country, providing about a million litres of water a day to these camps. We have also provided some basic household items for people (cooking sets, soap etc) as well as some sanitation facilities.

The sanitation situation is very poor.  In many places people simply have no where to go to the toilet. Some camps have a small hole in the ground that needs to be shared by hundreds of people.  Other camps, some in the grounds of schools or colleges, may have one toilet but these rapidly become blocked and unusable. Piles of rubbish can be seen around these camps, as well as growing amounts of standing water.

The rainy season will start in a couple of months, and we have to see how we can do more to address some of these immediate issues. I came here with shelter in mind as a priority. In fact I was wrong, it is the sanitation needs that are the greatest, although everything here at the moment is urgent.

Without improved sanitation there is a high risk of the outbreak of disease in the densely packed camps people are living in. Cholera in particular could spread very quickly. One camp I went to today had eight toilets for 2,000 people. But of course for many people those facilities are inaccessible as they are located on just one side of the camp. There are many issues to consider in regard to location of toilets – not just health and hygiene, but also protection for women and children if such facilities are not easily available. People have a good understanding of basic hygiene issues – you can see that around you when you walk around – but lack the hardware to be able to put that into practice, and again, you can see that when you walk around. So – toilets, and lots more of them, as soon as possible.

Waste management also needs to be addressed – piles of waste attract rats. Rats spread disease.  We have to look at how peoples waste can be better managed and work with the communities to help them on that. Again, many people understand that and have asked us for the tools to enable them to improve their current squalid living environments.

Vector control is also an issue – ensuring there are no pools of standing water is pretty much the number one thing in this to stop mosquitoes breeding. In a country where malaria and dengue fever is endemic we have to work with the communities to minimise the risk of major outbreaks.

Shelter here will be a nightmare. People are displaced in a number of different ways. I went to one location where many houses are still standing but there are just thousands of people camped in the road outside their homes as they do not want to return inside. Others are camped by the ruins of their homes in small groups. Others, gathering in their hundreds, in the grounds of churches or schools. The big camps, containing up to 10,000 people are located in former parks or other public spaces. Some people who fled the city in search of work are now returning and new camps of people are springing up all the time. People’s shelters are very basic and back to back – there is no security, there is no privacy and there is no dignity for the occupants. The risk of fire is huge and the space so cramped it is hard to think of ways to improve the conditions. For people who have endured years of political and social unrest, as well as in many cases chronic poverty I personally feel they deserve better. Despite the challenges this country has faced, and its poor image to the outside world, many of these people still maintain a level of pride in themselves that they should not be allowed to lose. It may be one of the most important things to help them through the years to come, and rebuilding their lives will take years.

Well, it is getting light and I have things to do. I will write more when I get a chance later.

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On Friday, my colleague Sarah wrote about the importance of toilets after a disaster like the Haiti earthquake. David Peppiatt, our international director, is in Haiti now and has sent back a vivid description of why they’re so needed.

Some early reflections at the end of my first day, which was spent mostly at base camp meeting with Red Cross and Red Crescent delegates and then a visit to La Piste camp, where our  mass sanitation emergency response unit is working.

I cannot emphasise enough the enormous scale of this operation. There are 500 Red Cross delegates on the ground with more on their way.  There’s a constant flow of people through base camp coming from Red Cross and Red Crescent National Societies around the world..  Base camp infrastructure and coordination are huge tasks alone – can you imagine having to provide tents, food, water and toilets for a few hundred aid workers on the edge of a city of rubble?

Conditions in the camps earthquake survivors are living in are shocking.  Overcrowded.  Filthy.  People sleeping under scraps of plastic, old sheets draped over some precarious frame of wood,  pieces of timber or whatever they have recovered from the rubble.  What struck me most was the human waste scattered throughout the camp.  The stench in places was repulsive.

Our mass sanitation team is working around the clock to dig latrines in the camp. It’s encouraging to see some already up and in use. They’re working to get 100 up by the end of next week.  The public health team went in today to deliver hygiene promotion messages – translated into Creole and posters put up on toilets about washing hands.  They’ve sent out thousands of SMS messages with public health advice and also launched a public health campaign on the radio.

Shelter is proving very problematic. People are extremely vulnerable in these makeshift shelters for long – little protection, unsafe and no dignity. The looming rainy season followed by hurricanes make this a matter of urgency and huge responsibility for the Red Cross as we lead the shelter response in Haiti.

As for the earthquake damage and destruction, words fail to describe what you see. It is like those desperate images of a bombed city where huge swathes have been decimated, destroyed and turned into mountains of rubble and debris.  It will surely take many months, if not years in some places, to clear the damage and debris before the rebuilding can begin.

Follow updates from the mass sanitation team on the British Red Cross international blog.

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Okay so toilets may not be the first thing you think of when it comes to life-saving equipment, but think again. Without decent sanitation facilities, diseases like cholera can spread like wild fire and as was seen in the Zimbabwe crisis last year – thousands of people can die as a result.

In an article on Reuters AlertNet, the UN reports that 7,000 latrines are urgently needed in Haiti to help prevent the spread of disease.

My colleague, Sharon Reader, is currently in Port-au-Prince with our sanitation emergency response unit. Listen in as I speak to her and find out how it’s all going.

Image © Joe Lowry/IFRC

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Moved office to the warehouse, which is great for me as I don’t get disturbed by the hustle and bustle of the operations centre. However, I am getting to know the Dominican Republic mosquitos well.. Those of you who know me won’t be surprised to hear that I have various welt-like bites even on my face! Don’t worry I am taking my malaria tablets…

So, our team has added a few more countries to it. Kenny from Scotland who is managing one of our warehouses and Gareth from Wales who is doing a recce of one of the seaports. We’ve also had the Logs Coordinator over from Haiti for the last few days. He said that the other emergency response units (ERU) such as the hospital ERUs and water ERUs are reaching thousands with medical care and the production of millions of litres of clean water a day. It feels good to hear that the things we move are helping people.

Image © BRC

Donate now to the British Red Cross Haiti Earthquake Appeal.

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I always watch BBC breakfast, while eating my muesli, both to enjoy Bill’s quips and to keep up-to-date on the latest international news so I’m ready to hit the ground running when I get to the office. Obviously in the last two weeks, Haiti has dominated the headlines and I’ve seen many a report including interviews with my colleagues and footage with glimpses of the Red Cross emblem in action.

This morning, there was the amazing story of the man pulled alive from the rubble, just as the search and rescue phase has been declared over. However, it’s clear that Haiti is not going to dominate the headlines for much longer, although it will continue to be a huge part of our Red Cross work for the following weeks, months and years.

The first thing I did when I got to work this morning, was read Sharon Reader’s blog. Sharon’s a colleague I usually work pretty closely with as her day job is in our London press office. But she’s also a trained member of our mass sanitation emergency response unit. She’s currently in Haiti helping provide toilets. It’s certainly not a glamorous job – and you can’t be shy to talk about things such as ‘wild defecation’ – but it’s an important job and as Sharon points out, it certainly makes you think twice before complaining about the toilets at Glastonbury!

As well as loos, logistics is another area of British Red Cross expertise. Yesterday, we sent two more logs delegates – Kenny Hamilton and Gareth Morgan – to the Dominican Republic. They are joining Emily Knox and David Stephens who are helping receive the aid that is being flown into Santo Domingo before being trucked on to Haiti.

Gareth said: “I got the call 20 minutes before Osprey’s v Leicester on Saturday. It was a bit of a distraction, but I said yes and I can’t wait to get out there. I’ve been following what’s been happening on the news, and also I have been in contact with some colleagues on the ground, and reading their accounts on the Red Cross website, so I know it’s not going to be tough but however difficult conditions are for me, I will be able to come home afterwards, which is a luxury many of those affected by the disaster don’t have.”

Kenny, whose day job with the Red Cross is head of refugee services in Scotland also had experience in transport and warehousing and was involved in responding to the floods in Gloucester in 2007. He said:“ This is my first international deployment, but I’ve done a lot of training for this role and I’m looking forward to going out and using the skills I’ve learned. There’s no better organisation in the world to learn from and use these skills with, and this is such an important cause. The fact that more people with logistics skills are being sent out to expand the existing team is a real sign that the flow of aid getting into the country is growing.”

This morning, another colleague is flying out to Haiti. Paul Jenkins will be helping co-ordinate the Red Cross emergency response operation. This means linking up the different areas of the response and considering all a community’s needs, such as linking where new homes are built to future sources of livelihoods, as well as access to safe water and sanitation, and providing people with the skills, cash or assets to get back on their feet. Read more about long-term recovery on our website.

Before he left, I caught up with Paul to find out more about what he will be doing. Listen to the interview.

Donate now to the British Red Cross Haiti Appeal.

Image 1 © Marko Kokic/IFRC

Image 2 © Lloyd Sturdy/BRC

Image 3 © Sarah Oughton/BRC

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