South Sudan Red Cross on Wednesday concluded a three-day training of its staff on the restoration of family link in Torit.
South Sudan Red Cross Tracing Coordinator, Noah Ahiib, said the training aimed at educating its staff and volunteers on how to reunite families separated by conflicts, Radio Emmanuel reports.
He encouraged the staff and volunteers to disseminate the knowledge gained to people at grassroots.
‘We are here in Torit to train our volunteers in restoring family link. You know South Sudan Red Cross Society is a national organization working within the country and South Sudan has been having a lot of displaced communities within and in the neighbouring countries. So one of the activities that we are doing is to train volunteers so that they can also go to the community then disseminate and tell what we are doing. What we are doing is to restore the contact. Once people are separated, some do not know how they can contact their family members. So through training the volunteers, they will go back and educate the community’, he explained.
Ahiib called on the local population to visit and report any case of a lost member of their community.
He said his office is working hard to trace and make contacts to findtheir lost ones.
‘Am urging our communities to come out, especially those who feel that their loved ones are missing, do not know how to contact them and they know where they are, but have no means of communicating to them. So they have to come to South Sudan Red Cross offices in all the counties that we have, we have branches in all these counties’, Ahiib disclosed.
They can contact these offices then they can also come then we also have our hot link. If they also call it can help a lot, so we have our hot line that you can call and also reach all the branches that we have in South Sudan, the number is 0914992755′, he added.
Mercy Lillian Simon, a participant working for South Sudan Red Cross, said uniting lost families helps reduce stress and build relationships.
She reiterated the need to create more training to the local population to unite communities with their loved ones.
‘So the training is very helpful because it is teaching us on how we can re-unite the separated families to their relatives, it very important to unite families who are separated because we believe that our joy comes when we live with our families and we live together with them so when we get separated with them we have that stress that we go through because we miss them and they are our dear beloved ones so when we are united with them it gives us that pleasure to be able to be in contact with them’, the participant expressed
The three-day training that concluded on Wednesday at Torit Guest House brought together over 28 staff and volunteers of South Sudan Red Cross from Magwi, Pageri and Ikwoto Counties of Torit.