Alemanha
Caring for the Victims
• The German Navy’s largest vessel, the Berlin, has arrived off the coast of the Indonesian province Aceh. The ship has 45 hospital beds for injured people and can additionally take on board up to 100 people with minor injuries. It also has an emergency center and two fully-equipped operating rooms.
• In light of the troubling reports about the situation of children in the region, the German Government is making available 4.2 million euros ($5.5 million) for UNICEF for use in Indonesia and Sri Lanka.
• Fifty-one experts from the Federal Criminal Police Office are in the region working closely with local authorities on the identification of bodies.
• In Banda Aceh, the German Armed Forces have set up a field hospital with an initial staff of 55 to provide emergency medical treatment. Once at full capacity, this field hospital can serve up to 20,000 patients and will support the local hospital, which must be rebuilt, an effort the German Army will also support.
• The German Air Force has deployed an Airbus “MedEvac” or flying ambulance to transport more than 130 injured people – German citizens and other nationalities – from Thailand to Germany. The German military has already transported to the disaster region 6.5 tons of medical supplies, 2,500 blankets and 22,000 towels.
• Germany, Austria and Switzerland are working jointly to ensure the availability of psychological counselors for tsunami survivors. Ten doctors, psychologists, and clergy from the three countries will be on Phuket, Thailand, in the coming days and weeks to help people in need of counseling. In Germany, NOAH, an organization offering post-disaster assistance is doing an excellent job of providing initial support to returning survivors and families of missing persons.
Coming to terms with the trauma in India, rebuilding in Sri Lanka, support teams
SOS Children's Villages' work with traumatised children and attending to unaccompanied children is being further intensified. In Sri Lanka emergency efforts to assist affected families are continuing and the first steps towards rebuilding villages are underway.
Despite the difficult psychological strains the children are still suffering from, the therapeutic work with traumatised children is showing some success, being able to produce smiles and getting the children active once more. The children take part in skipping, drawing, billiards and Rangoli, a very popular form of street painting in southern India. Together they also read stories, make music and receive food. Many children clearly illustrate their experiences, banishing their horrors onto paper in the form of pictures. Step by step, this will help them for the future.
SOS Children's Villages plans to open a further 20 activity centres over the next few days, through which around 2,000 children will be reached. Five locations between Kanyakumari und Pondicherry are currently being identified. The organisation is also currently searching for volunteer youths from the area to assist in these centres.
According to estimates by the SOS Children's Villages' support team approximately 10,000 children in the badly affected area south of Chennai have lost one parent and over 300 children have lost both parents as a result of the sea surge. Children, parents and other family members are still searching for missing relatives. Following the experiences of SOS Children's Villages in similar crisis situations, it is expected that it will take up to two months before finally ascertaining how many children will require long-term care.
CWS to Provide Psychological Support for Traumatized Survivors
Church World Service is now focusing on long-term recovery programs in Indonesia’s tsunami batter Aceh province
"Banda Aceh will be the focus of CWS response in Indonesia," says Augsburger. "We are planning to assist 50,000 displaced persons in Banda Aceh, with a special emphasis on children, female-headed households, widows, the elderly, unemployed families with limited means, and people or families who have not yet received aid.”
The director added, "Part of that work will be to provide psychosocial intervention for three months as crisis intervention and then for nine months as post-crisis intervention.”
UNICEF and the World Health Organization report that providing psychological services will be critical in coming weeks for the millions who have lost family, homes, and whole communities in hard-hit Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and affected coastal areas of Africa.
"The mind can barely grasp what these people have been through and what they will need to begin to recover – especially the children," Augsburger said.
A CWS Indonesia Emergency Assessment team recently concluded that disaster survivors in that country are likely "to be living in camps longer than expected" because of the scope of the disaster. The agency said that the current living conditions is likely to aggravate what trauma the survivors may have experienced.
″We have many local volunteers caring for the traumatised people in the camps. Especially children are treated psychologically.” "Having lost their relatives, many people do not return to their homes. The psychological trauma is too great and so they cannot bear the sight of their destroyed village.” Pfeifer further estimates that there exists a "high suicidal risk”, which is not discussed openly due to a religious sense of shame.
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