Hurricane Stan Emergency Appeal - How your donations helped
The generous support in response to our appeal has enabled us to direct resources to some of the communities worst affected by the Hurricane. A particular focus of this effort has been to meet the needs of children, many of whom have lost loved ones and are having to cope in temporary accommodation. A summary of the ways in which your money has helped is given below. As always, many thanks to all of those who have contributed to this effort.
EMERGENCY SUPPLIES
Our first response to the devastation caused by Hurricane Stan was to purchase food, fresh drinking water, milk, medicine, soap, nappies, children’s clothes, and other essentials to supply to those who had lost everything. We coordinated our efforts with others working in affected local communities to ensure that we provided the resources that were most needed.
BOXES OF THERAPEUTIC SUPPORT
In order to help support some of the many children who were bereaved
or traumatised by the impact of the storm, we put together boxes of resources
for doing
some therapeutic work with children. In each box we included a variety
of
materials in Spanish to help children to talk about and cope with bereavement
and some guidelines as to how the art and play resources in each box should
be used. These boxes were then entrusted to appropriate adults in local
communities who already had good relationships with the children affected.
They used
these resources to work with children in their community to help them to
talk about and to make sense of their experiences.
Some boxes were given to psychologists working through the Centre for Mental
Well-being in Quetzaltenango, and we continue to co-operate with them in
order to ensure that there is appropriate support available for children
who are struggling to cope with significant loss as a result of the disaster.
The reports we received back and the copies of children’s work that
we were shown were extremely moving. We were told that the resources were
also very helpful for adults caring for these children.
SCHOOL SUPPLIES
We are currently using some of the remaining funds from our emergency appeal to purchase school supplies such as books, pens, and notebooks for children whose families have been pushed further into poverty as a result of the disaster.