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Local Nepalese staff including drivers and translators hired to support the Red Cross field hospital in Dhunche are getting first aid training this week.

It's hard to believe that I have already been in Dhunche one week. This morning when I got up, the sky was clear enough to see the snow-capped mountains in Tibet and Langtang Mountain. Usually, this region is a trekker’s paradise, but the earthquakes and ongoing instability of the landscape have changed that for now.

It was an ordinary Tuesday for middle school teacher Deborah, but in a matter of seconds that all changed. By chance, Deborah was walking by the lunch room where Mike, a colleague, had been eating lunch. The pizza that he was eating had become lodged in his throat and Deborah quickly recognized that he was choking.

When pre-election violence broke out in Burundi in April, volunteers with the Burundi Red Cross were among the first to respond. The protests led to a number of casualties, and forced more than 96,000 people to seek safety in neighbouring countries.

The Round-up offers a weekly sample of what our sister Red Cross Societies are working on around the world.

June 20^th marked the two-year anniversary of the Alberta Floods. High River residents gathered together to celebrate how far they’ve come since that devastating day.

Each hospital bedsheet that Deki Tamang washes represents another brick in the new home that she hopes to build for her children one day. Since the Nepal earthquakes reduced her house in Dhunche to rubble, the mother of four has worked full-time at the laundry in the Canadian Red Cross field hospital operating on the site of the original damaged hospital.

Two years after severe flooding damaged thousands of properties across southern Alberta, the repairs on Chuck Shifflett’s historic High River home are nearly complete. But, like many in the hardest hit regions, Shifflett and his neighbours are still recovering from the disaster. Down his street, four homes were eventually torn down, and just two were rebuilt so far.

The Canadian Red Cross continues to offer a range of programs and services to people affected by the floods in 2013. This includes Red Cross funding for Samaritan’s Purse, Habitat for Humanity, Mennonite Disaster Services and World Renew to help dozens of families in High River and the Calgary area as they rebuild or repair their homes.