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Responding to Their Plight

Responding to Their Plight

Date: 2019-08-30

Every winter, informal settlements across the country are blighted with fires which tear through the shacks erected perilously close to each other and which many of the communities' residents call "home". Disaster struck families in Blackburn Village, Cornubia, at the end of July when a conflagration was started through unsafe and illegal electrical connections. The Domino Foundation's Disaster Relief Unit (DRU) responded to the plight of the people who lost their homes and virtually all their belongings. The families were given a two weeks' supply of beans, rice, oil and hygiene products to meet some of their immediate needs.

Cathy Whittle who heads up the Relief Unit, said, "The Domino Foundation is already working in Blackburn Village through a number of our programmes. So, we have a connection with this community. When a calamity like this happens, we are very aware of the added hardship which suddenly comes into the lives of people who are battling enormous odds."

Earlier this year, when Cyclone Idai slammed into the area around the port city of Beira in Mozambique's Sofala province, the Domino #DRUSquad partnered with JAM International and the United Nations to supply on-the-ground emergency assistance to those affected by Idai, providing food, water, sanitation and hygiene support and emergency shelter and housing support. This was the second time the Relief Unit had responded to the call for help from Mozambique: in 2017, a team went to the aid of those affected by tropical storm Dineo in Inhambane Province.

Back home in the Ethekwini area, the Unit and the Ethekwini's Disaster Response management committee established a partnership when together they provided relief in the aftermath of the KZN flooding in April and cemented that relationship now, working together to support families after the Blackburn Village shack fires.

Newly appointed CEO at The Domino Foundation, Shaun Tait, commented, "The Disaster Response Unit is an outworking of our vision. We are working towards social Justice and social entrepreneurship but we have to first meet people's immediate needs during times of crisis and so charitable acts will always form the foundation of holistic interventions, before long-term development can take place. We are excited to work with the city and identify ways in which mitigation and risk-reduction strategies can be achieved."

Cathy invited interested businesses and individuals to get involved and to sign up to the Domino mailing list. "We will add their names to our database so that when a disaster strikes, we can alert them to the ways in which they can get involved."