Exactly a month after the devastation of Typhoon Soudelor on Saipan, there are still people who are suffering and have yet to receive help from various agencies.<\/p>\n
\u201cThings are getting better for everyone in the island,\u201d American Red Cross-NMI chapter executive director John Hirsh said. \u201cBut I do think that there are a lot of people still suffering.\u201d<\/p>\n
The ARC has received over 9,000 calls from households seeking assistance and they continue with their casework.<\/p>\n
According to Hirsh, they were able to meet the needs of over 5,000 of those who called their office but the rest are still to be assessed.<\/p>\n
For some days now, the Red Cross is doing fieldwork on the cases that they are handling. Instead of interviewing heads of households in their chapter office on Airport Road, they have been going to meet people in their homes.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we\u2019re doing is we\u2019re calling everyone up and saying we\u2019re going to be at your home,\u201d Hirsh said.<\/p>\n
\u201cInstead of interviewing them at the chapter, we\u2019re going out in their homes and interviewing them there. We\u2019re doing kind of what we call casework and outreach,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
ARC is working on about 200 cases every day. Hirsh said they have about 10 teams who are going out to talk to people who need help.<\/p>\n
He noted that there weren\u2019t a lot of cases where the Red Cross goes to a home and nobody is there.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have to also figure that there might be duplicates, people calling back for help,\u201d Hirsh said.<\/p>\n
Asked about the differences in the items that they are giving away, Hirsh said there are times when they have more to give out and times where in they have the basic needs.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs our shipments come in from the mainland, sometimes it goes up and down a little bit. Like maybe for two days we\u2019ll have T-shirts, we\u2019re going to give out the T-shirts. Then we\u2019ll get some buckets, and all of a sudden we have buckets for a week. So it\u2019s possible that some of the extra items have changed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite this, Hirsh said they are consistent with much needed supplies such as toilet supplies, hygiene kits, rice, canned food, and ramen.<\/p>\n
Hirsh said more supplies such as tarps and buckets are coming in.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have six 40-foot containers that just arrived this week,\u201d Hirsh said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Exactly a month after the devastation of Typhoon Soudelor on Saipan, there are still people…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[42,67,559,6333],"class_list":["post-209568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-food","tag-people","tag-red-cross","tag-typhoon-soudelor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209568\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}