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Posts tagged with: relief
Sep 29, 2011    |       8 comments

PkRelief Update

Pakistan Floods 2011A blog post by Faisal Kapadia posted on SARelief.com summarizing the ongoing flood relief projects this week.  One can donate to SARelief by following through with this link and you may also stay updated of the accounts here

Relief initiatives completed this week (29th Sept)

  1. Abdul Sattar Ishaqani and Nishat Wellfare Organization combined with our support organized a medical relief camp in Sanghar where we supported them with 500 food hampers and necessary medical supplies . Pictures of this undertaking are available here
  2. Hamid Yahya and his team of doctors headed towards Sanghar, they were already committed with the organization of a medical camp, we only requested them to take along 300 food hampers, 450 litres of water and some antibiotics. Pictures of this undertaking are available here
  3. Al-Huda’s team lead a medical team to Sujawal and SARelief supplied them with malaria medicine for over 400 patients.
  4. We have initiated a soup kitchen In Khorwah, about an hours drive from badin with the help of our team member Salim Khan to serve cooked meals to 750 people daily. This kitchen has been working this entire last week and have catered to hundred of people with hot cooked meals daily pictures of our cooked meal distribution are available here.
  5. SA Relief has also received a generous donation from Farahnaz Zahidi, Khurram Ahmed Amin & an anonymous donor for 10,000 fruit juice packs of which half have already been sent Khorwah, Badin they will arrive and be distributed tomorrow.

Initiatives to come

  1. We plan to continue supporting the soup kitchen in Khorwah for the next ten days, with a genuine effort to increase its scope from serving hot cooked meals from 750 people to 1500 people daily
  2. We have acquired 1000 mosquito nets (self standing) and will strategically distribute them to deserving people in the flood affected regions of Sindh
  3. We are hoping to lead a team of ophthalmologists from LRBT and dermatologists to a flood relief camp in the outskirts of Karachi, if they require further medical attention SARelief has assumed the responsibility to ensure their adequate medical care.
  4. We are in liaison with field commanders from Rangers to provide relief in the shape of ready-to-eat meals to places where we as a relief team cannot reach personally or through our contacts, they have also requested raw materials like Rice, flour, sugar and daals for their camps in the deeper flood affected regions of Sindh
  5. We are planning and will organize a series of relief missions on 9th October & 16 October where we hope to organize  medical and food relief for the flood affected people in the area, confirmation of both trips remain tentative until we can put final touches to the on-ground logistics in some affected region of Sindh

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Feb 12, 2011    |       4 comments

Cure Rayan

A three year old child Rayan, was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, a fatal form of blood cancer, which causes damage and death by of normal cells in the bone marrow, and slowly spreads to other organs

Rayan is now in URGENT need of a bone marrow transplant. He has not been able to find the perfect match which will help increase his chances of survival. Once the match is identified the donation is easy, maybe slightly inconvenient but imagine the gift of life that you will give for saving the life of a 3 year old young boy

We would like to request you to take a bone marrow compatibility test, and if a match is identified then a non-surgical method to borrow some of your bone marrow cells for infusion into Rayan
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Oct 6, 2010    |       3 comments

Guidelines for Medical Clinics in Flood Affected Areas

I stumbled across this briliant document prepared by Dr. Shehla Baqi and her associates, they been doing outstanding flood relief in the region from the start and have drafted this document which can truly serve as a survival guide to managing and running a medical camp in the flood affected region of Pakistan.  I must thank the Dr. Shahla, the Infections disease society of Pakistan and the various co-authors for taking the time to prepare this amazing document and be willing to share it publicly for the greater good. The original document in DOC, PDF & TXT format can be downloaded from Scribd under a Creative Commons, Attribution-NonCommercial license


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Aug 25, 2010    |      1 comment

Pakistan Flood Relief: Field Notes from Doctors to Sukkur – Day 2

If there is anything the government should learn from this flood, it is to take education and women empowerment more seriously. The enormous task of taking care of so many IDPs iz only magnified many fold by lack of a good base. If these IDPs were a little better educated it would have been so much easier for the govt. to house them. How can a mother take care of 10-15 children? It is simply not possible. Corroborating Dr Nighats experience when told about family planning theyre responses were ‘have you no fear of Allah’ or ‘our husbands want it-they beat us’ Many females do understand but the men dont.

A woman came to one of our camps today asking for birth control pills an amazing happening, to our shame- we had none with us – I wonder if medical teams should carry IM depoprovera-council them and administer?

We went to 3 camps today All of them were tent villages

  • it is good that people are being moved from schools, not all of the desks will become firewood
  • please make a note that after the floods are over much help will be

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Aug 22, 2010    |       3 comments

Flood Relief Mission 2 – Live Tracking & Tweeting

As customary to our Relief trips to the flooded areas, Faisal Kapadia and I will be live GPS tracking and Live Tweeting all along the way. Our plan is to depart Karachi on the morning of Sunday 22nd August accompany a convoy of 8 relief good trucks, be joined by 7-8 accompanying vehicles with around 25 odd volunteers to head to Shikarpur. We hope to offload all the goods in a secure warehouse in Shikarpur and from there strategically disburse the relief to deserved people in the area.

As different from the previous CoverItLive we launched last time, our emphasis is to concentrate / share tweets from only the people taking part in this particular mission and the readers will not be bothered or overwhelmed by the other twitter chatter.

GPS Tracking will be maintained for record sake, to be transmitted every 5-10 minutes from our phones
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Aug 22, 2010    |      1 comment

Pakistan Flood Relief: Field Notes from Doctors to District Khairpur – Day 1

Dr. Nighat Shah’s brief about our trip:

Khairpur at this moment is housing huge bulk of displaced people from Larkana, Jacobabad, Shikarpur, and many smaller villages like thul, ghouspur etc. The registered displaced people are more than 50,000. Around 120 camps are housing people in small clusters. These range from 250-300 people in smaller schools to 5000-8000 in bigger schools.

In all camps, the majority is of children and the  statistics are mind boggling! In a camp at Ghari Mori, district Khairpur,  housing 280 people, there were 44 men, 67 women and 169 children. Almost all children are sick, ranging from stunted growth, severe malnourishment, diarrhoea and skin problems. Almost all women are anemic, weak, malnourished, perpetually pregnant or breast feeding, and the sad part is that there is no milk but the baby is still latched, always! More than 20-25 percent are pregnant.

Brief review of our activities- Day 1

As a team comprising of a retired pediatrician (working at SOS villages), a local gynecologist / obstetrician, 2 soon to be graduates from AKU and I, a recent Masters in Public Health graduate from Harvard and an instructor in the Dept. of General Surgery, AKU, Karachi, visited displaced peoples camps in District Khairpur.

We left around 7 a.m. for the visit but worked early in the morning to organize the medicines available in boxes so prescription would be faster. The hospitality of our hosts is of tremendous. I had to have two cups of tea in the morning (that is more than I drink in a year :-). They do not let you work until you are well provided for and do not stop asking you to drink up and eat up. Continue Reading

Aug 19, 2010    |       12 comments

Pakistan Flood Relief: Notes from Kot Addu and Sukkur

Both Awab and I recently went on separate trips to Kot Addu and Sukkur, into just some of the areas affected by the flood. I think that by now, the scale of the disaster is hitting people- even Ban Ki Moon’s statement sent everyone scurrying for ideas and strategies to deal with the flood. The food relief truck I went with was organized by Saad Sarfraz Sheikh, an inspiring photographer and friend, who pulled in food through donations, and had someone arrange for a truck to transport it all to Kot Addu. I must also mention that even now, Saad’s father remains trapped at the PARCO refinery in the Kot Addu area.

I realize that we’re going through the greatest natural disaster that we’ve gone through- ever, and what’s more important, is that the world is realizing this as well. Rather than going into the usual analysis-paralysis of why the floods were so bad this year, or why the politicians are so indifferent, this article candidly shares what Awab and I have learned from our short trips into the field (Awab is more experienced with relief work, since he also helped out with earthquake and army-operation refugees earlier). I’m also cowriting this with him so that we share experiences from different affected floodzones. If you are working in Balochistan or Khyber Pakhtunwa or any of the many, many regions that we aren’t please get in touch or just write your thoughts out as a comment. No time for formalities here.

Normally, a social worker would write this, but I wanted us, normal people with no training, to put out thoughts together on what worked, and what didn’t work based on our experiences. Why? Because the majority of Pakistanis who can help- are average people like Awab, Saad, myself and you.

NOTES/ OBSERVATIONS
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Aug 18, 2010    |       5 comments

Relief Cannot Wait – Flood Relief Mission 2 – this weekend

With a very heavy heart I write this blog post urging for immediate suport for the flood relief victims. We have been receiving word from many sources that there is dire need for food relief in the disaster stricken areas people may possibly be dying while we sit comfortably in our homes enjoying those lavish iftaris. With 20 million poeple suffering from the disaster we simply cannot wait for International donor agencie to suddenly wake up and come running, they simply are not too concerned the political leadership PPP despite being in power has zero presence in this region and all feudal lords are busy protecting their own lands while the rest can go to hell.

This last week a group of friends from OffroadPakistan and MotorSports Club of Pakistan embarked upon a relief mission to Sukkur, One team setup a small tent city of about 50 odd tents provided them with food and water, while the remaining hampers were distributed in and around the disaster area. Another team took the step to head towards Kashmore with about 1800 food hampers, went door to door and they got a first hand glimpse of what hunger and starvation has done to these dislocated people. Frantic requests have come forth to come now not later, and to come repeatedly, have emerged from all these areas, whatever we do, is at best a small drop, but help nevertheless to hopefully save our people.

OffroadPakistan was envisioning a longer planned approach with the establishment of a tent city to the likes of over 500 tents housing 5000 people with total logistical support for the next 3 months.

With the repeated pleas for help, it has compelled us not to sit back and plan, but to delivery NOW targeting remote locations where aid has not reached, being offroading enthusiasts we need to push the envelop to go further and deeper. So hence forth launches the effort for our second relief mission this weekend Saturday we depart and with the hope to return Monday evening if not sooner. To plan for this sudden trip we have some donations left over from last week which can be diverted to acquiring one truck of food hampers [600 from makro, we have commitment for a truck of bread [Papay]. We are issuing an urgent call for donation, the best way is to donate cash to me personally [23-B Sindhi Muslim Society] alternatively you can arrange for goods in-kind but preferably in pre-packaged hampers [which should be ready to depart on Friday night] as usual the entire trip will be documented via Twitter, GPS and Facebook, so everyone will have live updates of where we are and what we are doing.

Step up NOW, pakistan simply cannot wait

Aug 17, 2010    |       17 comments

PICTURES: OffroadPakistan takes Flood Relief to Sukkur

Offroadpakistan in conjunction with MotorSports Club of Pakistan and SARelief we embarked upon a relief mission to Sukkur. Offroadpakistan took charge of three trucks and distributed the goods by establishing a tent city on the outskirts of Sukkur while the MotorSports Club of Pakistan went ahead to Kashmore to distribute the remaining three trucks. Pictures from the offroad team is included here

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Aug 14, 2010    |       10 comments

Flood Relief Drive to Sindh – Live Tracking

It seems we are finally off on our mission to provide relief to the flood affected region in Sukkur, Sindh. The OffroadPakistan has collected some significant funding for taking 6 trucks of relief good valued at more then Rs. 2.4 Million – four trucks of standardized basic food valued at Rs. 16,80,000, one truck containing a mixture of food hampers acquired from Makro at a cost of Rs. 4,43,585 and the sixth truck laden with tents and water bottles valued at Rs. 6,75,000. We are also trucking 250 1-kg tin cans of read-to-eat biryani generously donated by a friend of ours. We are not taking any medicine, but hope to concentrate on a medical relief later. The cost of trucking is approximately Rs. 25,000 per truck and im sure there shall be incidentals in between for this transportation process

IIt must be remembered that all this is the effort of quite a lot of people and the generous contribution of Pakistanis wanting to help their fellow citizens who are suffering in these devastated areas. We as representatives of OffroadPakistan are headed towards Sukkur hoping to distribute three trucks there while our friends at MotorSports Club of Pakistan shall accompany three trucks with an attempt to approach Jacobabad and hope to disburse it there.

Our plans are that we do plan for a phase 2 of the relief effort which we hope shall be a larger and grander push, this first trip shall serve as a reconnaissance trip for the bigger push in 10-12 days after this.

With so much of confusion in the area we are hoping to do our best, to keep track of our progress I have installed a GPS tracker on my Blackberry which will transmit our location every 60 seconds, it will be a drain on the battery but it shall remain on as long as Mobilink service supports GPRS in the area.


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Aug 14, 2010    |       3 comments

Flood Relief Incident Reporting goes Live

The past seven days Faisal Chohan a TEDFellow has been feverishly working to establish an incident reporting website at http://pakrelief.crowdmap.com/ to monitor the flooding situation in Pakistan. This is technically a Ushahidi platform connected to an SMS shortcode allowing people with cell phones to give live updates of issue on the ground. Ideally this incident reporting portal should then be used by humanitarian relief organizations to adequately divert resources where needed.

To submit an incident all you need to do is sto end message Type FL “Your needs/ situation/emergency” and send it to FL 3441. It will cost the user Rs. 2.00 per message. You can also send the report to pkfloods@gmail.com or fill out this incident reporting form on the website. After proper verification of the incident which may even mean calling the incident reporter back it shall be shared with the world. Read more about his effort at the TED Fellows Blog. He is slowly ironing out the bugs with tremendous cooperation from the International community of technologists and an amazing team on the ground in Pakistan.

Aug 11, 2010    |       8 comments

Some thoughts into Planning for the Flood Relief in Sindh

Over the past two days our team of volunteers at Motorsports Club of Pakistan and the OffroadPakistan have been in some intense discussion on what might be the best course of action. We have been busy raising funds locally and commitments have reached to a tune of close to Rs. 2.5 million. The online drive at SARelief has touched $2278 from a few generous donors, as the message spreads im sure this easy PayPal payment option, so close to the Islamic month of Ramadan will most likely get a considerable level of funding for the devastation in Pakistan.

Flood has started to reach Sindh from the last two days, the winding Indus river which curves and twists across Sindh is likely to significantly change the terrain for a long time to come, it is anticipated that with the immense pressure of the water it is definite that the water will overrun the pre charted course of the Indus River and alter its embankments cutting a new course towards the sea spreading its wings wide across the plains of Sindh in its due course.

A few major concerns do remain, the question that lurks in the minds of many, will the barrages hold up. It seems the Sukkur barrage is as of now holding strong, credit can be equated to calculated and unplanned rupture of a few embankments upstream which have helped soften the pressure of the main flood, these leaks will continue to seep the pressure and lessen the impact in sindh, sadly it also does mean more flooding in the affected areas.
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Aug 5, 2010    |       15 comments

Army Selective in Rescuing Flood Victims

Guest Post by Moneeza Ahmed

This past week, I was stuck in Yasin Valley in Gizar District (a district next to Gilgit District) for a project and I had to trek and walk by way back to Gilgit City, which took about four days. Despite the trip being extremely scary and dangerous at times, I was glad I was there as it gave me a chance to see the situation up close. The situation in Gizar was extremely dire. I saw hundreds of houses submerged in water. Animals dead, trees fallen. Most of the bridges and the roads have been completely destroyed in the area. In the moderately affected areas of gilgit district, the water ways have over filled and caused ‘selabs’ in peoples fields and homes. Tent cities have gone up in Gupis Valley in the Gizar District. There was no army or military or government presence in any of these areas. Perhaps because Swat, Charsadda, Mardan etc have been reported to the most affected of all areas.

I reached on Gilgit city on Friday last week, I was told there was an emergency plane being flown out of Gilgit to Pindi to transport stranded families. As I got to the airport, I saw a C-130 airforce plane. As people (mostly civilians) who had managed to somehow get into the airpost past the airforce officials, rushed to the plane, we were told that the plane was full and that we should wait for 2 hours for another plane which was most likely goingto show up.
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May 22, 2009    |      1 comment

Swat Relief Update [Day 2 @ 9:00]

Its early morning, Faris arrived early at 5 am from Lahore and literally crashed out without speaking a word. Were up at 8 and are ready to head off to Mardan. Truck scenario is that two trucks were dispatched last night and will arrive very soon. Items totalling the delivery of one more truck await at Makro and we hope to have that also shipped out today to arrive in Mardan tomorrow.

First thing that we need to do today is to visit one or two more NGO’s and see their requirments once we establish our base camp we will then offload all our food items and start preparing individual family hampers and tomorrow be ready for distribution. The most arganized group for distribution is technically Jamaat Islami who have listed all refugees and have issued them ration cards, Bagheecha Deri has a decent distribution network and if we are to distibute there we might have to tap into JI’s network to ensure proper delivery. As usual these doantiona that we are disbursing are not under any political party so we will try to avoid such labelling, but lets see how things go.
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