CWS News

CWS volunteers have begun visiting families in the area of Sungai Limau. Within the first month, they plan to talk to 10 families, conduct three visits and provided emotional support to 150 families. 

The newly-trained volunteers listen to feelings, experiences and unmet needs of the affected families to help ease their burden and restore their peace of mind. In addition, they will also promote the Children Friendly Space activity that CWS is currently managing in tents.

Having contaminated well water, CWS trained two groups in Sibaruas village, West Sumatra to clean the well properly. This activity also serves as opportunity to support their livelihoods in quake’s aftermath.

The groups aimed at restoring 20 wells in the next three months. CWS has provided three water pumps as a tool to clean the wells. However, more water pumps are needed to speed up the work.

The water testing at French Army’s laboratory the other day has revealed the presence of E. coli in villagers’ well water, along with dramatically increased pH and iron levels; although the concentration of two latter elements are still within safe threshold of drinking water.

Juni of Cangkeh in Sibaruas village is a mother of two young adults and two younger children. The family of six lives in a hamlet where the access of water is a river 200 meters away downhill from their house. Juni and her neighbors could only fetch water in the river during dry season. The swelling river during rainy season prompts the villagers to gather rain water at home. Using simple sand filtering, they managed to obtain clean water free from large contaminants.

Having considered the rapid assessment, level of damage, presence and capacity of international aid assistance as well as the breadth of assistance requested by the Government of Indonesia, CWS is looking at conducting 2 months of crisis intervention and another 10 months of post-crisis intervention in Padang Pariaman district.  The area is one of the most damaged areas due to the 7.9-magnitude earthquake that hit West Sumatra province around two weeks ago.

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The sense of normalcy and the feeling of safety need to be maintained among children who experienced disaster such as the recent earthquake in West Sumatra. CWS paid special care for disaster-affected children through its training on Psychosocial Care for Children on October 12-13, 2009. Fifteen volunteers took part in the training, which aimed at providing knowledge to care for earthquake-affected children and creative ways to conduct fun and educative activities in tents.

There are several steps to restore a contaminated well. First, water must be pumped out from the well. After it dried up, the well has to be cleaned out from the mud. It takes a few hours to get the well refilled with water. Simple water testing is essential to determine the water quality. Chlorine can be used to quickly purify the water to avoid water-borne diseases. These steps need to be repeated in order to ensure better water quality.

Church World Service continues distributing clean water to the people in eight villages in Sungai Limau sub-district. A total of 12,000 liters of water has reached 10,520 individuals in three villages, while another 70 households have received 700 liters of water bags.

Food item and non-food item distribution would be the first response in most natural disaster such as earthquake. Both are important in meeting the basic needs of affected community. However, many feelings and emotional or physical reaction are shared after the earthquake. Fears of future disaster or events associated with disaster, regresssive behavior, or sleep disturbances and nightmares are common among people who experienced disaster, children in particular.  Thus, making children one of the most vulnerable group in emergency setting. Therefore, psychosocial response holds an important role in tackling this matter.

Water is essential for all aspects of life. People need water to sustain their lives. In normal situation, people take it for granted that clean water will flow out from their tabs or wells. However, for people in emergency setting such as earthquake effected community where most of the infrastructure has been destroyed, clean water becomes scarce and hard to get.