Red Cross volunteers sharpen skills to help in the event of disaster

The Belize Red Cross is constantly training volunteers to be in true form in the event of a natural disaster. Today, a group of thirty-five completed a two and half day workshop on logistics and warehouse management. The skills taught in the short course are expected to make the volunteers more efficient in reaching victims in the event of a hurricane or other disasters. Keston Flemming, the Regional Disaster Management Officer from the Red Cross Trinidad, was one of the facilitators and he says the Belize team was one of the best he’s worked with.

Keston Flemming, Regional Disaster Mgmt Officer, Red Cross (Trinidad)

keston flemming

“The training is part of a regional strategy which looks at preparing the national society, the Belize Red Cross, for an efficient and effective response given a disaster for example, it could be either the following season or the hurricane season as it is currently. This activity basically was funded by the European Commission, better known as ECO. What we did basically is looking at prepositioning items for five hundred families along with retrofitting of TMSUs or Tropical Mobile Storage Units on island or country and also logistics training.”

Delahnie Bain

“And how important are these skills for them to have in the event of a disaster?”

Keston Flemming

“These skills are very, very important because based on these skills the necessary people work and procedures will determine how effective and efficiently they reach the beneficiaries in the event that there’s a disaster. There was the theoretical side of it as well as the simulation exercises that we conducted. So we had for example, scenarios of a disaster and basically they had to add the rule and follow the necessary procedures to respond to that disaster. The volunteers were very, very interactive. We’ve done this training six national societies and so far to be quite honest this is the best group we’ve worked with. There’s a desire to learn and not just to learn but to put into practice what they have learnt.”