Written by Mikhael Sianturi, Content Writer Intern of Project Child Indonesia
The world has been in a constant cycle of disaster, either naturally or unnaturally. The neverending war in the middle-eastern, lack of proper healthcare here and there, sexual violence, Covid-19 pandemic, and many more play in the role of this world’ piles of problems.
Many of these issues are addressed by the very organization mentioned in the title: the ICRC, or International Committee of the Red Cross. They are the people who are rarely credited for their service in the field. People would read their appearances on news articles but never credit their effort for cleaning the debris of the issue they’re in. So, in order to commemorate the World Red Cross Day on the 8th of May, let us see and appreciate what these men and women have done throughout the time.
Covid-19
One of the very appreciated aspects of how ICRC works is their transparency. On their website, people can access their reports regarding their work. One of the reports is about the organization’s response to covid-19 in the near and middle east.
The organization had provided support in the form of food, hygiene, water, tents, and many more to countries such as Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Yemen, and Lebanon.
War and its victims
ICRC also works with blood, by not spilling them but by collecting them. One of ICRC’s programs is body retrieval of the victims of conflicts. A conflict that they had mentioned in their website is the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict that ended in the middle of November last year. Indeed, a conflict that not a lot of us paid attention to.
A story that the ICRC covered to highlight just how devastating the debris that the conflict had caused was the story of a missing person. He was the son of Ahmad, who fought in the conflict and was presumed dead.
And that is the most bitter part, Ahmad’s son was presumed dead due to the lack of his body.
“To this day, we have no news, not even a body to cry over. My son’s fiancée has promised to visit his grave in a wedding dress, if his remains are ever to be found,” Ahmad claimed.
To this date, the ICRC has been involved in more than 170 retrieval missions. To retrieve a body, it is not a simple case of finding the body and bagging it. The terrain in which the bodies are located, matching the GPS location of which the bodies are with the military, placing individuals in individual bags, and the very possible case of bodies no longer intact. This is not an easy task.
To bring the article to a more local level, of course, we need to remind ourselves that our own country has a Red Cross organization, too, namely Palang Merah Indonesia.
Palang Merah Indonesia has been busy dealing with the logistics needed to aid those who are suffering from the flood in West and East Nusa Tenggara. The numbers are staggering: 938 families or 2.655 individuals are affected in East Nusa Tenggara, 28.808 in the West. Over 9000 houses damaged in West Nusa Tenggara along with 319 hectares of rice field in the same fate. In the East, more than 800 houses were damaged.
To aid the situation, Palang Merah Indonesia sent over a cargo weighing over 4 ton worth of medicines and daily needs that people over in West and East Nusa Tenggara do not possess. Authority says that the entirety of the cargo is worth over Rp 267.600.000 and will send periodically to April 10.
With that said, let’s appreciate those who work for the Red Cross organization more for they have done a lot and are not credited enough. We hope that these listed events have peeled your eyes a little more to the chaos of the world before us and those who collect the debris of it.
