Tag: disaster

Emergency Response

A Decade after 9/11, Is Your State Prepared to Protect Children?

• Save the Children

Kaleba_head shot Jen Kaleba, Director, Marketing and Communications

September 9, 2011

Westport, CT


On September 11, 2001, Donna Fowler was running her own in-home daycare in a suburb of Washington, D.C. In her care were eight children, several of whom had parents working at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. While children were playing, Donna answered the persistent ringing of her phone.

“Turn on the TV,” her friend gasped.

And like millions of Americans, Donna watched as the second plane hit the World Trade Center.

She turned off the TV quickly, put on a composed face for the children, and turned the radio on in the background so she could keep tabs on the situation without alarming the kids.

And then a plane struck the Pentagon. Close to home and where one parent worked.

“I thought, oh my god, I have these eight little people in my care and what am I going to do with them if their parents don’t come back today?” Donna remembers. “I had absolutely no plans in place. They were talking about evacuation and I thought, ‘Where do I go? How would parents know where I was going?’ The feeling inside was of total dread not knowing if parents were going to come back and what I would do if they did not.”

The thing is, if you’d asked Donna the day before 9/11, she would have told you she thought she was prepared for an emergency.

“I knew that I had emergency numbers for children and I knew where their parents worked. I felt very comfortable up until that point,” she recalls. Then, reflecting on the irony, “I didn’t realize how unprepared I really was; how prepared I should have been.”

Javits_day_care_evacuation_use_0829_through_11_29 (2)Children are evacuated from a daycare outside the Javits Center in New York after the August 23, 2011 earthquake.    (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

Not only did Donna not have an adequate plan, but across the country, states didn’t require the plans in the first place. Today, those very requirements are outlined in Save the Children’s just-released fourth annual National Report Card on Protecting Children During Disasters.

In it, we look at all 50 states and the District of Columbia to see what states have adopted four very basic standards of preparedness for kids in child care and schools—basics like evacuation and relocation plans, or plans to reunite kids with their families. Today, only 17 states meet all four requirements.

You can read about the standards here, check out how your state stacks up, and download our “School & Child Care Check List” that you can take to your kid’s caregivers or school administrators and ask, “Do you have a plan?”

As for Donna, her life changed on 9/11. After the children were reunited with their families (the father who was supposed to be at the Pentagon forgot some papers at his house and was late to work; it took the mother on Capitol Hill 20 hours to get back to her daughter) Donna swore to herself that she would never let another child care worker feel the way she felt that day.

She became a staunch advocate for disaster preparedness for child care facilities, testifying before the Maryland legislature on behalf of Save the Children to get our standards passed. Today she is the Vice President of the National Association for Family Child Care, pushing for Maryland to go even further in its readiness to keep kids safe during disasters.

More than 67 million children spend approximately 2,000 hours in schools and child care every year. Let’s work together, with people like Donna and you, to make sure more states get an A+ next year.

Emergency Response

Balloon Dogs Aid Children’s Recovery

• Save the Children

Amy richmond

Amy Richmond, Child Protection Specialist, Save the Children

Tokyo, Japan

Monday, April 11, 2011


I arrived in Japan more than a week ago to work with our Child Protection Team in the northeast of Japan. The team is working tirelessly to reach children who have lost everything in the tsunami. 

Our main concern is the physical safety of children and their well-being after experiencing such an event – with tens of thousands of children living in evacuation centers after the tsunami with no place to play our top priority is to give them a space to just be children. 

One of our immediate response interventions was setting up Child Friendly Spaces within the evacuation centers – offering children a safe place to play in order to continue to learn and develop after the disaster.

I visited one of our Child Friendly Spaces right outside Ishinomaki this week where the children were making balloon animals.

Two young girls had twisted their balloons into little dogs and shared these with me with such delight as they giggled out the word ‘dog,’ in English.  When I responded with a smile and nod signaling they had the word correct, we laughed as they repeated the word in song while their dogs did a little dance. 

It was a happier moment than the day before, when a young boy in our Child Friendly Space had drawn a picture of his pet, one of our Child Friendly Space volunteers asked him who he was drawing and he replied it was his dog but he didn’t know where he was. It was a reminder of the huge loss children had faced – but now we see children are beginning to reflect and deal with what they have gone through. 

It will be a long recovery. 

We hope to continuously engage children within the Child Friendly Spaces with activities held by trained volunteers that allow children to express themselves freely to help with this process.

Child Friendly Space activities also offer a routine and structure to the daily lives of children living in evacuation centers which helps create some sense of normalcy while their environment is constantly changing. 

This builds on the natural resilience of children at the same time helping them identify positive coping strategies through interacting with other children. 

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Learn more about our recovery response to the earthquake in Japan.

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Emergency Response

His Sister Lost to the Tsunami, Boy Clings to His Mother, Longing for a Place to Call Home

• Save the Children

Iwoolverton Ian Woolverton, Save the Children Media Manager

Ishinomaki, Japan

Tuesday, March 22, 2011


Seina, 9, shelters with his mother, Yuriko, in the sports hall of a junior high school not far from Ishinomaki, where up to 15,000 people died. Sadly, his older sister is among the dead, washed away by the tsunami.   

Seina has been living at this evacuation center for nine days, and really wants to go home. “I sleep here on a mattress inside this hall. My older sister has been lost to the tsunami. Now it’s just me and mom left,” Seina says, wiping tears from his eyes. 

Yuriko_Seina_Ishinomaki_JapanSeina and his mother Yuriko at the evacuation center where they have been living since the tsunami
Photo Credit: Ian Woolverton – Save the Children

“I really want to go home. In here, I play cards and read books with other children, but I would really like to play computer games.” But Seina cannot go home, or play his computer games. His home, and everything in it, was destroyed by the tsunami.

“The one thing I’m really worried about,” Seina says, “is what’s going to happen to us, and can we get enough money together to have a new house and have a life. The biggest thing that we want, and the biggest thing that we need, is to have a house and to live safe.” 

Apart from wanting a place to call home, Seina would like to have a bath. “We have water, but we cannot have a bath. I really would like a bath.” 

With nowhere else to go, Seina and his mother Yuriko will have to spend weeks in the evacuation center. Despite the dreadful events in his life, Seina is grateful for one thing. “I feel very safe being with my mom. I am really glad that she is here with me.”

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Emergency Response

Child Friendly Spaces – A Primer

• Save the Children

Dhheadshot Dave Hartman, Save the Children, Internet Marketing and Communications Specialist

Westport, CT

Tuesday, March 22, 2011


If you've been following our social media updates or watching news coverage of the disasters in Japan you may have heard that we've set up "Child Friendly Spaces."

While the term is somewhat self-explanatory we thought it'd be nice to give you a quick crash course so you can understand precisely what kind of work we are doing in Japan, and in other disaster or conflict-affected areas for that matter.

CFS_003_85313 Yasu, age 10, playing in a Child Friendly Space inside an evacuation center in Sendai, Japan.
Photo by Jensen Walker/Getty Images for Save the Children

 While the spaces have slight variations depending on the country there are a few basic tenets that remain the same.

The spaces are always a clearly designated area in a shelter. In some cases this will be a classroom in a school or specific tent while in others it will simply be a roped-off section of a room. 

The areas are monitored by specially trained Save the Children staff and local volunteers who lead activities for the children. Activities are culturally relevant and something the children are familiar with, in Japan children have been making origami crafts while in other countries children may play tug-of-war or sing songs and dance. 

RO.KGZ.2010.09.206_82243Children form a train at a Save the Children Child Friendly Space in Osh, Kyrgyzstan.
Photo Credit: Rodrigo Ordonez

Our staff is trained to identify children who may be particularly vulnerable by the incident. The staff and volunteers try to ensure that children with disabilities, those who come from different ethnic or gender groups are involved in the activities and that everything is age and gender appropriate. Local volunteers are also continually trained throughout the time that we run CFS so that they are better able to help organize more interactive activities and help prepare children to return to school, once they reopen.

RO.KGZ.2010.09.183_80971A boy participates in a sack race at the Save the Children Child Friendly Space in Osh, Kyrgyzstan.
Photo Credit: Rodrigo Ordonez

As Mike Penrose, Save the Children Australia's Director of Emergency Response, explains Child Friendly Spaces have benefits for both parents and children.

"They enable parents to have time to register for emergency assistance and start to re-establish their lives while simultaneously providing children with a sense of normality and community when their lives are disrupted by disasters."

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Learn more about our recovery response to the earthquake in Japan.

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Emergency Response

Child Friendly Space Brings Smiles to the Faces of Anxious Children

• Save the Children

Stephen_McDonald Stephen McDonald, Save the Children Senior Emergency Adviser

Tokyo, Japan

Thursday, March 17, 2011


We have finally commenced our operation in Sendai, after a ten-hour overnight trek, some rapid assessments, and agreement with one of the evacuation centers to set up our first Child Friendly Space in Nanagou.  

When we were there yesterday, the children were tired, anxious and stressed. There weren’t many smiles, with some of them quietly following their parents around, others sitting in the stairwells, and a few young boys running up and down the corridors of what last week was their primary school.  

Letters and messages are posted on the walls, some to tell people that the author was safe, others, sadly, asking if people had seen relatives or friends. With our Child Friendly Space established, the first group of children came in to start activities like drawing and colouring with our enthusiastic and committed Japanese staff.  

It didn’t take long for the first smiles to break out, smiles that hadn’t been there the day before when we came to assess the situation. At the same time I had sent a team some 40miles north of Sendai to the town of Ishinomaki, where they found a scene of utter devastation. Ian Woolverton, my close colleague and friend who went with the team called me and said, “We’ve got to get up here. The needs of the children are massive.” 

I asked him to get as much information as he could, but he went one step further, and got some good intel for me about the possibility of setting up some Child Friendly Spaces. I hope to get up there tomorrow or the next day to get it set up. We face multiple challenges here. We are faced with fuel, food and water shortages. So it is tremendously difficult to establish supply lines, especially since staff are fatigued and stressed.  

This emergency is proving much more complex than I thought when I left home, giving my wife and two sleeping children a kiss goodbye, and heading to the airport only six hours after the quake struck. Add to this the anxiety amongst the population and our staff about the Fukushima Nuclear Reactor, and this is proving to be one of the most difficult tasks I’ve ever undertaken.  

Despite these frustrations, the long days, and the yearning to be home with my own children there is one thing I can say about today. We put smiles on the faces of 33 children. That’s what I love about this job. 

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Emergency Response

How to Help Children Cope with the Emergency in Japan: Ten Tips from Save the Children

• Save the Children

CMac Charles MacCormack, Save the Children president and CEO 

Westport, Connecticut

March 17, 2011


The dramatic images of the past week impact children not only in the immediate area where the destruction has taken place but also children throughout the country, and world, who are watching the images on television. 

Concerned about the emotional well-being of their children, many parents, teachers, grandparents and caregivers are looking for advice on how to respond to questions from children about unsettling and upsetting events that continue to be shown in the media about the disaster and the impact on homes, families and neighborhoods.  

Children often ask the adults in their lives to explain what they are seeing and reassure them about what will happen next: "Will everything be OK? Why is this happening? What will happen to the children who have lost so much?"

 How do we respond to these questions? 

Following 9/11 – and again after Hurricane Katrina – Save the Children prepared the following 10 tips to help adults support children through times of crisis. These tips are based upon Save the Children's years of national and international experience and can be used as a guide for adults to support children through this current crisis. The relevancy of different tips may vary upon issues such as a child's previous experience, age and where he or she lives in the world. 

1.Limit television time for children.  While it is important to parents and adults to stay informed, the images and messages being transmitted may be confusing and frightening for children. Watching television reports on disasters may overwhelm younger children. They may not understand that the tape of an event is being replayed, and instead think the disaster is happening over and over again. Overexposure to coverage of the events affects teenagers and adults as well. Television limits should be set for both you and your children. 

2.Listen to your children carefully. Before responding, get a clear picture of what it is that they understand and what is leading to their questions. Emotional stress results in part when a child cannot give meaning to dangerous experiences. Find out what he or she understands about what has happened. Their knowledge will be determined by their age and their previous exposure to such events. Begin a dialog to help them gain a basic understanding that is appropriate for their age and responds to their underlying concerns. 

3.Give children reassurance and psychological first-aid. Assure them about all that is being done to protect children who have been directly affected by this crisis. Take this opportunity to let them know that if any emergency or crisis should occur, your primary concern will be their safety. Make sure they know they are being protected.

4.Be alert for significant changes. Parents should be alert to any significant changes in sleeping patterns, eating habits, concentration, wide emotional swings or frequent physical complaints without apparent illness. If present, these will likely subside within a short time. If prolonged, however, we encourage you to seek professional support and counseling. For children directly affected by this crisis – such as children who have lost a loved one – parents should consult their pediatrician or family doctor and consider counseling, not just for the child, but also for the entire family. It may be an important preventative measure. But other children also may be affected by the images they see and stories they hear. 

5.Expect the unexpected. Not every child will experience these events in the same way. As children develop, their intellectual, physical and emotional capacities change. Younger children will depend largely on their parents to interpret events, while older children and teenagers will get information from a variety of sources that may not be as reliable. Understand that older teenagers, because of their greater capacity for understanding, may be more affected by these stories. While teenagers seem to have more adult capacities to recover, they still need extra love, understanding and support to process these events. 

6.Give your children extra time and attention. They need your close, personal involvement to comprehend that they are safe and secure. Talk, play and, most important, listen to them. Find time to engage in special activities for children of all ages. Read bedtime stories and sing songs to help younger children fall asleep. 

7.Be a model for your child. Your child will learn how to deal with these events by seeing how you deal with them. Base the amount of self-disclosure on the age and developmental level of each of your children. Explain your feelings but remember to do so calmly. 

8.Watch your own behavior. Make a point of showing sensitivity toward those impacted by the disaster. This is an opportunity to teach your children that we all need to help each other. 

9.Help your children return to normal activities. Children almost always benefit from activity, goal orientation and sociability. Ensure that your child's school environment is also returning to normal patterns and not spending great amounts of time discussing the crisis.  

10.Encourage your child to do volunteer work. Helping others can give your child a sense of control, security and empathy. Indeed, in the midst of crisis, adolescents and youth can emerge as active agents of positive change. Encourage your children to help support local charities that assist children in need.

Save the Children urges adults to seek out and follow the guidance of Emergency Management and Public Health Officials to help ensure the safety of their children.

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Emergency Response

Japanese Family Huddles in Emergency Shelter

• Save the Children

Iwoolverton Ian Woolverton, Save the Children Media Manager

Tokyo, Japan

Monday, March 14, 2011


Save the Children's Ian Woolverton reports from Japan where he is one of several staff spearheading our relief efforts. Ian met the Takane family, who are among the thousands of families displaced by the tragic disasters in recent days. Here he shares their touching story.

Yuto Takane, 8, and his mother Mariko, siblings Aiki, 7, Kanato, 1, and newborn Amihi have sought shelter at IIzuka Primary School in Asahi City. They were made homeless by the devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck Honshu, Japan's most densely populated island, on Friday.

YUTO_AIKI_AMIHI_KANATO_85039Yuto, Aiki and Kanato pose for the camera.
Photo Credit: Ian Wolverton

Forced to live on a classroom floor Yuto is missing his home and his friends. "I would like to be with my friends in school. I like sports and playing soccer."

"I have been living in the classroom and want to go home."

His mother Mariko is anxious for the family to return home, but there is no water supply at their house, so she cannot bathe the children.

"The problem is the water. All the water is gone, so everything is very dirty."

She is also anxious because her eldest children cannot sleep. "Before the earthquake they never minded, but now they cannot sleep."

Mariko says her children are restless and have nothing to do in the school. "They needs books, toys and DVDs to keep them happy."

Yuto's sister Aika says she would like to play but does not know whether she should since everyone is afraid. "At the weekend we play, but today we can't because everyone is sad."

Save the Children plans to establish Child Friendly Spaces in earthquake and tsunami affected areas to give children a safe place to play with their friends, while allowing parents to focus on other priorities such as registering for emergency assistance.

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Emergency Response

Sad news from home, heartfelt messages from friends all over the world

• Save the Children

London, England

Monday, March 14, 2011

This post was written by Yuka, a 27-year-old studying at the Institute of Education in London. She is currently volunteering with Save the Children.


A happy Friday morning turned out to be one of the scariest moments since I came to study in the UK. The news of this massive earthquake in north-eastern Japan shocked me to the core.

Being Japanese, I have to say that we are used to having earthquakes. You will experience at least one earthquake if you stay in Japan for half a year. However, this level of earthquake is something that we have never experienced before.

A number of aftershocks seem to be still occurring even three days after the earthquake happened, which continues to frighten people living in the affected areas.

I didn’t know about the earthquake until my colleagues at Save the Children told me on Friday when I came in to work.

My sister lives in the prefecture of Fukushima, the region now threatened by a nuclear fall out and earthquake. I desperately tried for hours, to reach her by mobile but the phone lines were down and I was only able to get a 100 character text message to her by a phone service set up by the Japanese government. My sister had registered my mother as one of her 5 emergency contacts so I received the message that they had found my sister through my mother.

These were very anxious hours for me as I couldn’t reach her. My sister who is 25 years old is just recently married and is due to celebrate her one year anniversary this week. She was due to go back to Tokyo in 10 days times.

And she was ok. Very shaken, but ok.

Yuka

Yuka's brother-in-law, sister, a friend and Yuka on her sister's wedding day. 

And last night I managed to have my first phone conversation with her. She told me that she felt like she was living in a ship since the ground has continued to shake.

My sister lives on the on the second floor of a house that she shares with the landlady. The staircase was separated from the main part of the house by the earthquake, and her parking spot is now on two different levels. Most of her belongings crashed to the floor.

My sister received the emergency alert on her mobile about 10 seconds before the tsunami so she ran to the window and opened it so she would have a clear path of escape and then she hid under the table but the table was moving so she ran and crouched between the sofa and the table while she hid and listened to the radio broadcasts. She said that it currently is very difficult to get food or water because most of shops were either closed or nothing remained even they were open.

The telephone lines have either been too busy or remain down since the earthquake and young people seem to be communicating through Twitter or Facebook in order to confirm each other’s safety.

However, children have neither mobile phones nor internet access. Considering that the earthquake happened on Friday afternoon, most children must have been in school and away from their parents. They have must have been so scared to have been away from their parents.I t reminds me of the homework we always had when in primary school marked for September 1st.

September 1st is the Disaster Risk Reduction Prevention Day which was established to mark the Great Kanto Earthquake that took place in 1923.

On that day, emergency drills are organised throughout the country. At school, we also learn how to protect ourselves in case of earthquakes and how to evacuate quickly. At the end of the day, as a part of homework, we are told to decide the “meeting point” with our family members in case all communication means are down.

A friend of mine told me that after the earthquake these words of wisdom were crucial. She met up with her family at the meeting point which as a family they decided on a long time ago.

While Japan is a highly efficient country and we have prepared for the BIG one for many years no one would have been able to withstand the force of this quake and tsunami. I am lucky that my family is ok and my best wishes and solidarity go out to those who have lost their loved ones.

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Emergency Response

Surveying the Destructive Force of the Japan Earthquake and Tsunami

• Save the Children

Iwoolverton Ian Woolverton, Save the Children Media Manager

Tokyo, Japan

Sunday, March 13, 2011


Landing at Tokyo's international airport this morning after a long flight from Sydney, Australia, I looked up at a television screen to see images of a nuclear reactor with a headline, "Explosion at Fukushima reactor."

Add to that an aftershock or two (there have been 400-500 aftershocks since Friday's devastating earthquake and tsunami), and I started to question why I was here.

But as the world's leading independent organization for children, we are in the business of helping children and their families affected by disasters at home and overseas as well as in developed and less developed countries.

By now we've all seen the images of the awesome destructive power of the tsunami that wreaked havoc along the east coast of Japan's most densely populated Honshu island, home to famous cities like Tokyo and for all the wrong reasons, Sendai, the city that was smashed to pieces by the tsunami.

But what's less well reported is the damage caused to other centers of population like Asahi City, where I'm headed now. Here the authorities estimate nearly 19,000 households have been affected by the earthquake and tsunami.

Sitting in the back of a Save the Children vehicle on a beautiful spring Sunday morning we speed toward the city.At this point I could be lulled into a false sense of security. There are no signs that we're headed to a disaster area. I can honestly say I have not seen any earthquake damage to buildings and homes. This is testament to Japan's strict building codes that ensure all buildings are built to withstand even the most severe earthquakes.

But no government, however wealthy, can be expected to prevent, in some areas, 10 metre tsunami waves gobbling up everything from articulated trucks to houses, schools and, tragically, people.

And it is this new reality that I fear will greet us as we draw closer to Asahi City.

So, why have we come here? Why aren't we up north in Sendai? Fact is, there has been so much attention on Sendai, and the Japanese authorities are so good at disaster response that we want to focus our attention on meeting the unmet needs of children and their families in other areas that might get overlooked. I'm not suggesting we will put the needs of children in Sendai to one side. Of course we won't since the needs there are massive, but we want to ensure children up and down the east coast get the help they need as well.

Our ambition in tsunami-affected areas is to open what's known as Child Friendly Spaces, effectively a play space where children can play with other children of a similar age under close supervision from responsible adults. The idea is to relieve the stress on parents and to give them a break from childcare duties as they register for emergency assistance.

But there's another reason to run Child Friendly Spaces, and that's to allow children to return to as normal an environment as possible (given the circumstances).

Our experience in decades of disaster response shows us that children must be returned to a normal routine as quickly as possible to help ward off the risk of long-term psychological problems.

Arriving in Asahi it is clear many children and their families need help.

Along the sea front, homes have been decimated and become caked in mud. I met people sweeping mud from their homes, without much success it has to be said.

The streets nearest the beach are full of bizarre sights like overturned vehicles wedged in houses or leaning on walls. I've seen these scenes before in places like Aceh following the tsunami in Indonesia, but I'm always in awe of how brutal mother nature can be.

The most distressing experience for me was meeting Natsumi (10) and Nao (11) Nakazawa who were afraid of the water and desperate to return to school to be with friends they'd not seen since the earthquake and tsunami.

I also met the Takane family who, along with hundreds of families, had sought shelter in one of 17 classrooms at IIzuka Primary School.

Mom Mariko and her four children Yuto (8), Aika (7), Kanato (1) and newborn Amihi had been living in a small classroom since Friday.'

At first they were afraid to go home, but once they summoned the courage to return they found there was no water supply, leaving them little choice but to return to the school for shelter.

Sadly, I suspect that the Takane's story is one playing out up and down the east coast of Japan's most densely populated island.

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Learn more about our recovery response to the earthquake in Japan.

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Emergency Response

Education and psychosocial support to the most vulnerable children

• Save the Children

Faris-headshot Faris Kasim, Pakistan Senior Communications Coordinator, Save the Children

Islamabad, Pakistan

Friday, January 28, 2011


Six months since the floods struck Pakistan, Save the Children’s relief work has reached the most remote and distant corners of the affected areas. From the cold, mountainous hamlets of northern Swat to the devastated plains of Dadu in Sindh, our teams are working diligently to assist people across the length and breadth of the world’s sixth most populous country. More than 2.6 million men, women and children have benefitted since August 2010 from our work. Last week, I had the opportunity to travel to one of the worst affected places in Pakistan, district Rajanpur in south Punjab.

Rajanpur is a narrow, 20 kilometers wide strip of land sandwiched between the Indus River on the East and the Sulaiman Mountain range on the West. Monsoon floods occur almost every year in Rajanpur, but in 2010 the scale and impact was much more severe. The local people were not prepared at all. In August last year, floods struck the district from both sides – banks of the Indus bursting on the east and hill torrents from the west – inundating 33 out of the 44 union councils in the district.

Overnight, a vast majority of the population in Rajanpur found themselves engulfed on all sides by an unending expanse of water, five to ten feet high. Currently, Save the Children is the only organization providing wide scale humanitarian assistance in Rajanpur. In an area called Bosangang, Save the Children’s mobile health teams have walked for several kilometers in knee deep floodwaters to provide people with basic healthcare services. I was visiting temporary schools built in places where public schools were completely destroyed.

As the ‘Psychological Assessment’ of flood affected children, conducted by Save the Children reveals, I realized how many students were facing several child protection issues, especially behavioral and psychological problems. Of all the children I met during the visit, I distinctly remember 9-year-old Jamshed at the government boys’ primary school in village Shahnawaz. Like other children in the school, he was busy writing Urdu from the blackboard but unlike others he seemed oblivious when one student began reciting a poem in front of the class. I walked towards him and asked him his name. I received no response. I foolishly asked louder and learned the reason for his indifference from the teacher.

J at school
Jamshed, along with two older siblings, is deaf. His father is a poor farmer who cannot afford special education for his children. Jamshed has been attending the primary school for two years and even without any hearing abilities, has learned how to write alphabets, grasp the meaning of basic words and make simple sentences.

The floods had submerged his village in six feet of water and displaced the people two kilometers away to a higher and safer ground. Jamshed stayed on this small patch of dry land with his family for over forty days, cut off from the rest of the world. With nowhere else to go, his family depended on helicopters and boats to provide food and drinking water. After the floodwater receded, Jamshed’s home suffered minor damages however the classrooms of his school were destroyed, furniture ruined and the teachers unable to reach the school due to destruction of the roads.

Jamshed’s cousin was incidentally near the school and helped me communicate with him using sign language. I was surprised to learn that Jamshed is a natural artist; he had made a television, cell-phone, bull cart and books from clay while his notebook was full of beautiful rural landscapes. He wishes to study till 12th grade and become an artist when he grows up. However, his cousin mentioned that since the floods Jamshed has become more shy and expressionless. He hesitates going to the nearby town of Kotla for errands with his father and is terrified whenever he hears about rain. Save the Children’s Child Protection team has also set up a Child Friendly Space in the vicinity of the school in village Shahnawaz. Specific psychosocial support is being provided to flood affected children at the CFS and identified child protection cases are also referred to service providers in the district.

Jamshed was very pleased to show me the handmade models of electronic items he had made. Like any other 9-year-old, he smiled at every question I asked, interpreted by his cousin and replied fervently with calculated hand gestures. J holding art

I thought about all the hard work Save the Children has done in Rajanpur since the floods: dispensing huge amounts of aid, distributing tons of relief goods and putting in thousands of man hours. We work in areas that have been neglected for decades. Education is rare and seldom do families escape the harsh cycle of poverty and deprivation. Our effort to educate one such poor child to gain even primary level education makes it all worthwhile. Like Jamshed’s cousin said, ‘If education is promoted here, there is still hope for children like Jamshed.’

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