A mother feeding a baby at the Medical Center Lahore,…
We often think of emergency relief being required when a community is directly affected by war or natural disaster. But sometimes these emergencies can have 'knock-on' effects, like a large migration of people, and this can create emergency situations in the countries the people flee to. I found an example of this. We launched an emergency relief programme in Pakistan in October 2001 for a new wave of refugees from neighbouring Afghanistan. The refugees fled due to the military operations carried out by the USA in Afghanistan following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks.
- Lisa
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A mother feeding a baby at the Medical Center Lahore, Pakistan.
We often think of emergency relief being required when a community is directly affected by war or natural disaster. But sometimes these emergencies can have 'knock-on' effects, like a large migration of people, and this can create emergency situations in the countries the people flee to. I found an example of this. We launched an emergency relief programme in Pakistan in October 2001 for a new wave of refugees from neighbouring Afghanistan. The refugees fled due to the military operations carried out by the USA in Afghanistan following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks.
The SOS Afghan Relief Programme offered health care and education for Afghan refugee children at various camps in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan.
We provided three safe children's playgrounds, two paediatric basic health care units, two schools and a medical centre in Peshawar.
The SOS Schools at the Badaber and Shamshatoo refugee camps welcomed 1,000 girls who hadn't received any form of education until then. The girls, between the ages of four and thirteen, were given free books and other school essentials.
The playgrounds were built at the camps in Azakhel, Badaber and Shamshatoo. Ms Souriya Anwar, president of SOS Pakistan, said the Afghan refugee children had never before seen such a site and had to be 'taught' to play. The SOS basic health units at Badaber and Shamshatoo provided free medical care and medicine to 2,000 children per month.
Seriously ill children were transported to the SOS Medical Centre in the outskirts of Peshawar which has equipment for surgery as well as 50 in-patient beds. Most of the children treated were under the age of five.
All in all, the SOS Afghan Relief Programme had the capacity to cater some 6,000 refugees at the different sites. The programme ran successfully until 2007 when the camps were shut down and the refugees were repatriated to their own country.
- Mary
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Emergency Relief Programme due to Hurricane Stan
This is another story of one of the locations where emergency relief was given.
Hurricane Stan struck Central America on Tuesday 4th October 2005. It left a trail of destruction and claimed hundreds of lives. In Guatemala alone, over 130,000 people were affected by the hurricane. .
SOS Children's Villages in the area were fortunate. A local SOS Children co-worker in Guatemala reported that the main damage was to the SOS Vocational Training Centre Panajachel, which suffered from minor floods. At the time the hurricane struck no children were at the SOS Vocational Training centre. Due to landslides, telephone lines and access roads to the SOS Vocational Training Centre were interrupted.
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