One of the biggest problems the Red Cross movement faces in the wake of natural disasters, such as the devastation left by the recent hurricanes in Haiti, is coping with vast amounts of temporarily displaced people.
With three hurricanes slamming Haiti in a two-week period, this year’s hurricane season – which is still active - is a lot worse than usual, and the whole country has felt the effects. The ferocious winds and torrential floods have destroyed over 10,000 homes and damaged 44,000 more, leaving more than 100,000 people in temporary shelters across this developing Caribbean nation of eight million people.
Many of these shelters are schools or churches or community halls, welcome refuge in the short-term, but wholly inadequate in the long term to perform a function they were not designed for.
So when Peter Francis was sent by the IFRC as part of a FACT (Field Assessment and Coordination Team) to help out with shelter solutions, part of his brief was to help implement a program that would teach local Red Cross volunteers the basics of temporary shelter building.
“We selected sixteen volunteers who work with the Haitian Red Cross regularly, from all parts of Haiti, and brought them here to Port-au-Prince to teach them some basic techniques in the erection of a temporary shelter,” said Peter, an architect from Jamaica now living in Geneva.
The volunteers learnt the basic principles of what constitutes a temporary shelter, the various methodologies that can be used to erect one, the minimum size of a dwelling, and what site selection criteria to use.
The course, which was prepared and delivered by Emeline Decoray, part of the FACT shelter delegation, took the students through both theoretical and more practical aspects of shelter construction by looking at how a timber structures can be strengthened using wind bracing, and how to fix a tarpaulin to a frame so that it is more resistant to wind, rain and other stresses. Frederic Blas, the third member of the Shelter Delegation, contributed many practical aspects to the training.
The volunteers were then split into groups, given a standard Red Cross shelter kit and access to a stock of materials, and asked to construct temporary shelters using the knowledge they had gained.
The shelter kit is a standard pack that contains hammers and nails, a saw, a shovel, snips, wire and rope and other such items useful in the repair of damaged houses.
“The idea,” says Peter, “is that the volunteers have all that it takes to construct a basic shelter in less than a day”.
The students are encouraged to work out their own designs rather than use standard designs, on the basis that each country has it’s own idea of what constitutes an acceptable shelter, and people from different cultures will approach the project from a different perspective, with a different set of challenges. It is important that they learn to innovate, to discover for themselves what works and what doesn’t.
And the Red Cross, too, learns from watching how the volunteers approach the task of constructing a shelter, gaining valuable insight into how Red Cross volunteers work on their own initiative.
“We are trying to learn from their intuition, to determine the good things and the not-so-good things,” says Peter. “We learn both from their mistakes and their successes”.
Upon completion of the course the volunteers return to their own communities to pass on the knowledge and experiences they have acquired. Thus they will become trainers themselves, equipping the other members of local Red Cross societies around Haiti to be better prepared to provide shelter when it is most needed.
“In effect they become a cadre of experts on temporary shelter to assist us in our program of delivering temporary shelter”.
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The course took the students through both theoretical and more practical aspects of shelter construction by looking at how a timber structures can be strengthened using wind bracing, and how to fix a tarpaulin to a frame so that it is more resistant to wind, rain and other stresses. (p18306)
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Haitian Red Cross volunteers attending a course in temporary shelter construction given by the IFRC in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, attempt to construct their own shelter using a standard Shelter Kit and some timber. (p18305)
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Peter Francis, an IFRC FACT Shelter delegate, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, tasked with helping Haitian Red Cross volunteers learn the basics of temporary shelter construction. (p18304)
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