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News
Tuesday 29 September 2015
Shelter kits provide the tools to rebuild family homes
Losing a home, through damage or total destruction, is devastating for anyone, but for some people, their home means more than bricks, mortar and memories. For people like 21-year-old Eliza, who is blind and epileptic, home is a safe place that she can navigate by touch and feel.
When floods and heavy rains deluged towns and villages early this year, her thatched roof was weakened and a large vertical crack appeared at the back of Eliza’s home, destabilising the whole building.
Unfortunately, there was no one who could take in Eliza and her five-year-old son, or even help to fix the crack. She is a single mother and her own parents have passed away from AIDS. Her elderly grandfather and a neighbour provide Eliza and her son with food when they can, but they have little to spare.
A ShelterBox response team were told that Eliza might need assistance. They travelled through dense fields, many of which contain crops ravaged by the floodwaters, to reach Eliza’s mud hut.
When they arrived, the team decided that instead of moving Eliza and her son into a ShelterBox tent, which would be wholly unfamiliar, they would do their best to make the home habitable again.
They used the contents of a shelter kit, which includes heavy-duty tarpaulins and other tools to make repairs and create temporary shelters, to reinforce the building and weatherproof it against future bad weather.
They also provided the family with mosquito nets, blankets and insulating groundsheets to ensure that that they were safe and comfortable.
In Malawi, the ShelterBox team distributed a variety of aid, from ShelterBoxes containing sturdy tents, to shelter kits and other essentials like mosquito nets and blankets. We tailored our response to meet the different needs of communities and families to make sure that people like Eliza could move on from disaster and return to normal life.
