By Elijah Ugani: Health Correspondent
No fewer than 200 victims of the 2018 flood victims in Cross River State have received relief materials from the Nigerian Red Cross Society.
Presenting the materials to the flood victims in Calabar at its Office, the National Coordinator, Restoring Family Links, Mrs. Angela Francis said the donation was in line with the Red Cross goals.
“Red Cross Society is a humanitarian organisation that is passionate about the hard to reach (and) vulnerable in the society. It is not a religious, political or governmental organisation,” Francis said.
She told CrossRiverWatch in an interview that: “Sometimes in July, August and September, reports were coming to the national secretariat from disaster affected States like Cross River, Edo, Enugu, Abia which caused an emergency meeting to be held (at) the national headquarters and we came up with a flood appeal to response to flood victims.
“People were requested to compute reports. As a result, an appeal document was put together to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, which in turn put up an appeal to the British, Italian and the American societies that made this donations that we have to distribute this items.”
On the comparison between the National and State Emergency Management Agencies (NEMA and SEMA) with the Red Cross, Mrs. Francis noted that Red Cross is only complimenting their efforts.
According to her, while NEMA and SEMA concentrates on the victims who were camps, Red Cross is very interested in the vulnerable who are in the hard to reach areas.
On his part, the Cross River State Branch Secretary of the Nigerian Red Cross Society, Mr. Godfrey Bisong noted that: “Need assessment was done in two phases. We did the first one in August when the flood occurred and September when we were ready for the intervention.
“We were able to identity 200 flood victims across the state in five local governments area and have been distributing these items. We started from Yala, moved to Abi, Biase and Odukpani and today we are here for Calabar Municipal and Calabar South local governments.”
He called on the beneficiaries to find a way in their various local governments to support the society either by volunteering or making contributions to reach out to other victims in the future.
Responding on behalf of the beneficiaries, Elder Paul Ante thanked the Red Cross Society of Nigeria and the Donor Agencies for the show of love and solidarity.
Statistics obtained by CrossRiverWatch shows that Yala had 35 beneficiaries, Abi had 35, Biase topped the list with 80 while Odukpani had 35 with Calabar Municipal and Calabar South having 10 each.
The beneficiaries were each presented with two bags of beans, three bags of corn soya blended with sugar, two sachets of Dangote salt, 10 litres of golden Penny pure soya oil and eight sachets of Aqua tabs use for water treatment.
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