Jasmina Petrovic
It is Friday, the day when 15 members of the Mali Red Cross team from Kouremale meet regularly. The village of 2,000 inhabitants is located 130 km south-west of the capital Bamako on the border with Guinea.
Kouremale will soon become an important border crossing for all goods shipped via the port of Conakry in Guinea to Mali as soon as the remaining 50 km of asphalt has been laid on the road linking Bamako to the Guinean border.
“We organized first aid training in February 2006, but this is not enough. If we want to be ready, we have to practice the techniques regularly. So we meet every Friday and we practice“ says Lassana Camara, secretary of the local branch established in 2005 in Kouremale.
“In 2003, our community responded spontaneously to emergency needs of two waves of refugees. We assisted 350 and 860 people respectively. They had traveled on board trucks and buses all the way from Cote d’Ivoire via Guinea to reach Mali at this very border crossing” continues Lassana Camara. The Red Cross volunteers used a door-to-door system to alert all the teams and provide basic necessities like food, water and first aid to the displaced people.
“Although we were Red Cross volunteers, we lacked skills, tools and equipment. We were able to provide only limited assistance. We helped people to get out of the trucks and buses, brought some water, and cleaned the wounds that looked the worst,” explains Red Cross volunteer Mamadou Bagayoko.
Already in 2000, communities along the Mali border with Cote d’Ivoire, and especially Zegoua in the Sikasso region, witnessed the first arrivals of people fleeing the neighboring country. The persistent instability in the region made it clear that Red Cross societies of the countries neighboring Cote d’Ivoire should increase their capacities to assist refugees. Unfortunately, funding for strengthening preparedness was difficult to find.
The first aid training that took place in February 2006 and the provision of basic equipment consisting of jackets, three first aid bags and a stretcher for the Red Cross team in Kouremale was made possible with the thematic funding that the European Commission Humanitarian Aid department (ECHO) allocated to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in October 2005.
The support of ECHO to this and other activities across the region is particularly important because it has enabled national societies to build preparedness capacities at the community level, and also at sub-regional and regional levels and to integrate them into a coherent response system.
“We used geo-strategic analysis of developments in neighboring countries as a basis for our contingency planning and the selection of communities in which we need to strengthen capacities through training, development of early warning and alert procedures and communication and coordination mechanisms,” says Idrissa Traore, disaster management coordinator of Mali Red Cross and first aid instructor.
In some countries like Mali and Burkina Faso, trained volunteers are organized into “brigades.” In others, like Guinea, they are called GAPU (Groupe d’assistance de premieres urgences). In all cases, these grass-roots Red Cross units have similar tasks and a similar internal organization.
The number of team members varies between 10 and 35 depending on the size of the community. Team members play different roles and the team leader coordinates and liaises with the regional Red Cross branch and from there to the headquarters. Sometimes, in remote communities it is the role of one of the volunteers to go by bicycle to reach a radio or pay a telephone call in a public place and give early warning of the arrival of refugees.
This early warning system has been developed by the Red Cross all around the border with Ivory Coast and Guinea Conakry and allows them to estimate if the situation is normal or if immediate response is needed to support the most vulnerable. The community teams are the eyes and ears for the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and other organizations like UN OCHA and UN HCR.
National intervention or response teams (NDRT) are the link between the community-based response units (SBRT) and regional disaster response teams (RDRT), a disaster management tool for regional deployments developed by the International Federation.
“We feel so comfortable now in performing first aid and team roles that if needed we are ready to go to assist as far as in Indonesia,” comments Moussa Keita. “We can be deployed elsewhere because we are farmers and we can make ourselves available. Large families allow sharing the burden of the work,” he adds.
Members of the community units were part of the seven-day national training which took place in both Mali and Burkina Faso in June 2006. The training covers many aspects of disaster response and ends with a simulation exercise. Selected members from national intervention teams will attend later in August the RDRT training to be organized in Dakar by the regional delegation of the International Federation.
The next step in increasing the efficiency of early warning is to build links between Red Cross teams from both sides of the borders. The trans-border co-operation and co-operation between disaster management coordinators of Cote d’Ivoire and four neighboring national societies started recently during a meeting organized by Mali Red Cross at the end of April 2006 with the support of ECHO thematic funding.
In the meantime, Moussa Keita and other members of community-based Red Cross teams still have much to do in Mali. This Friday, the village chief and a nurse have joined the meeting to pay respect to guests coming from Mali Red Cross headquarters in Bamako and the Dakar Regional delegation of the International Federation.
While the Red Cross units across the region prepare to provide assistance to refugees or to victims of other disasters, their own communities and families can benefit from their life saving skills in first aid.
“My child was suffocating after swallowing a large piece of meat. Thanks to my knowledge of appropriate first aid techniques, I probably saved his life without having to see a nurse,” explains Mamadou Bagayoko.
According to the nurse, Mr. Dadouda Doumbia, this is also how one can contribute to poverty reduction. “If you had to ask for my services you would have to pay. But you didn’t and you will use the money you saved that way to cover other needs of your family”. The access to the Health Services is expensive for the population and sometimes impossible to reach.
The Mali Red Cross slogan “One trained mother one family saved” should apply to fathers as well.
The road passing though Kouremale will bring development as well as new dangers. In future, road safety could become another activity of the Red Cross community response team.