We explore the many challenges that have faced volunteers in Ukraine, and we talk with an artist and volunteer from Syria about the connection between art and humanity.
In our second episode, hosts Malcolm Lucard and Irina Ruano talk with Oleksii Cherednichenko, who shares his perspective on some of the most inspiring work done by volunteers during the conflict. One of the first examples, says Cherednichenko, volunteer coordinator for the Ukraine Red Cross, was when the Ukraine Red Cross emergency response teams delivered humanitarian aid to people sheltering from air raids in underground metro stations in Kyiv.
“Our emergency response teams received permission to get inside and they distributed food and water, among others things, to hundreds of people in 18 metro stations,” he recalled. “Another example is when our volunteers delivered supplies with bicycles, travelling up to 50 kilometres in one direction to deliver medicine and food to people in need.”
Cherednichenko says the challenges have been enormous but the volunteers are undaunted. “Their response to the misery created by the armed conflict remains our top priority,” says. “But we won’t allow our future and our dreams to be dictated by war and war alone.”
We also talk with Basil Flayes, who was studying at the University of Aleppo in the Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts when the conflict broke out. After graduating with an art degree in 2014, he volunteered at the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) doing art and design work for their communications team. In 2016, RCRC magazine asked him to design a cover for the magazine. He produced this powerful comic book style image for our cover story entitled “Humanity under fire,” which examined attacks against humanitarians and health care workers in conflict situations. The image shows a SARC volunteer rescuing a wounded person while raising the Red Crescent emblem in hopes of ensuring the person’s safety — something he saw his friends at SARC do almost every day.
“My friends who were the volunteers in the Red Crescent were working hard and risking their lives to save the sick and injured in that area, and transport food supplies and medical materials,” he says. “So the cover of the magazine was talking about the idea of crossing the area that separated the conflicted areas in Aleppo. At the time, I called it ‘The crossing of life.’”
“Humanity and art have a deeply intertwined relationship that has existed for thousands of years,” he tells us. “You feel the suffering of others, so you go to help. This is humanity, to feel the pain of others, and art conveys those feelings.”
It’s the stuff of science fiction: machines that make decisions about who and when to kill. Referred to as “autonomous weapons”, they’re already in use to some degree. But as more sophisticated systems are being developed we wanted to an expert in the field about whether such systems comply with international humanitarian law and what it means for humanity to give machines the power over human life and death.
In this episode, we talk with humanitarian communicator Kathy Mueller who produced our first magazine podcast series, The Wildfire Diaries, about massive wildfires in Northern Canada in 2017. We talk about that series, her many international missions, and the big changes in humanitarian communications since she began with the Canadian Red Cross almost 20 years ago.
In this episode, we talk about the power of storytelling to inform and inspire. “Storytelling is a fundamental aspect of human communication,” says our guest Prodip, a volunteer and multi-media storyteller for the Bangladesh Red Crescent. “It inspires us to be a hero of our own community.” We also speak with one such community hero, Dalal al-Taji, a longtime volunteer and advocate for inclusion of people with disabilities in emergencies response. “In disasters. persons with disabilities sometimes get forgotten.”
In Honduran communities at high risk of disasters, a Red Cross project helps families strengthen resilience and increase income through enterprises such as coffee production.
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