Round-up: Updates from Guatemala and Central African Republic

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

GUATEMALA: The Red Cross continues to respond following a landslide in El Cambray II in the municipality of Santa Catarina Pinula.  The Guatemalan Red Cross is participating in the National Emergency Operation Center (EOC) organized by the Guatemalan government and continues to operate their own EOC. A team has been mobilized to provide psychosocial support, temporary housing, pre hospital care, and register names of the people missing with family member and provide calls to survivors.  Additionally Guatemalan Red Cross is conducting emergency health evaluations, and damage and needs assessments in the disaster area.

CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC: Local and international humanitarian agencies have been forced to stop providing life-saving services to thousands of Central Africans, as a result of escalating violence in the capital, Bangui. Since the violence began on September 26, the Red Cross has been the only humanitarian agency able to move inside the city of three quarters of a million people, providing life-saving first aid in the streets, transporting the severely wounded to health facilities, and collecting the bodies of those killed in the fighting. However, as the violence ebbs and flows, even the Red Cross and its network of volunteers is being prevented from reaching all areas.  With street-level, door-to-door fighting in the city’s residential neighbourhoods, the Central African Red Cross has called on armed groups to ensure the Red Cross is able to access the wounded in all parts of the city.  The renewed violence has forced 27,000 people to flee their homes in Bangui over a period of only six days, adding to the 365,000 Central Africans already internally displaced by the three-year-old conflict in the country.