In each of the major natural disasters of the past few years –- the 2010 Earthquake in Haiti, the 2004 Asian Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the devastating earthquake in Pakistan, the cyclone in Burma — a unique band of volunteers have responded. They are graduates and faculty of a decade-old training program on the special needs of children in disasters, which HF has helped to establish and support.

Millions of children around the world are caught in humanitarian disasters, due to nature, war, or terror. Often, their special needs are not fully recognized in relief efforts.

A five-day interactive training curriculum on these needs was first developed in 1995 by HF Medical Director Karen Olness and a volunteer group of colleagues at the Rainbow Center for Global Child Health at Case Western Reserve University. The course has been offered annually at CWRU, and replicated in several overseas locations. It has drawn many sponsors, including Health Frontiers.

In Thailand, they helped organize national training courses for health professionals and teachers on the long term psycho-social needs of the Tsunami children. They continue a long term commitment to several destitute villages.  Health Frontiers was also the principal sponsor of a course addressing the aftermath of the cyclone in Burma.  Thai colleagues, long active in this project, did the teaching in this course.

In the US, they helped organize a training course for health teams heading to the Gulf after Hurricane Katrina.  In Pakistan, courses on the immediate and long term psycho-social needs of the earthquake were held in early 2006.  In 2008, HF supported presentations of the workshop in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.

The 15th Annual Management of Humanitarian Emergencies: Focus on Children and Families, will be held at CWRU in spring, 2012. For more information visit the Case Western CME website.

The second edition of How to Help the Children in Humanitarian Disasters was published in 2006.  This book has been translated and published in Arabic, and is also being translated into

Creole by Haitians living in the US . To order this book, please contact Health Frontiers.