Jack
1 June 2008 8am

I am working for the Provincial Government and they have set up a  disaster centre in Tygerberg. This disaster centre is  mostly dealing with the coordination of all the activities for the foreign nationals who have been displaced in the Western Cape. My role is to coordinate all the information that comes from the centre or from the camps and to compile it into a report. It is also important then if any incident happens at the camps that have been set up that we coordinate all that information and compile a report and send it to the office of the Premier so that they can make  decisions on that.

So we coordinate incidents in terms of security, needs, food, supplies, relief, all such things. It was quite amazing, when I was working through the list, I picked up that about 70% of all the places where these camps have been set up is at Churches.  There are a lot of Churches  involved. Some people are even housed in the Church and the Church looks after them.

In terms of the supplies, I'm also in the team that coordinates all the supplies. For instance, should there be any need in one of the camps, they send it through to the disaster centre and we coordinate the activity and we ensure that all the food, reliefs and medical needs they have has been supplied.  There are different role players. There are emergency services, the department of social development, home affairs and the office of the Premier on board. If they have any need we will dispatch and we will give instruction to all the role players to go out to the centers and to assess the camps. We have also made assessments of the camps to the human rights commission. The human rights commission has been sent to Youngsfield to assess the living conditions there because they realized that the conditions there are not ok for those who are staying there. They also compiled a report of the situation there.