Helping The Red Cross

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31704, 13 June 1968, Page 10

Helping The Red Cross

One of the striking things about the Red Cross Society is that its world-wide activities do not conform to any fixed pattern. They are constantly being expanded to meet new situations, whether attributable to natural disaster or to changes in the social structure. Thus, while emergency needs in other countries may involve calls for assistance from the society in New Zealand, local conditions, even in a country as well favoured as this, continue to make exhausting demands on resources and initiative. Tomorrow the public will be able to assist the North Canterbury Centre in its work by giving generously during the street collection and by supporting the annual market.

The appeal comes at an opportune time, when the consequences of storm and earthquake are still vivid in the memory. During the last few months the Red Cross has been more heavily preoccupied than usual with relief work. It has helped survivors of the Wahine disaster, flood sufferers in Sumner and elsewhere, and earthquake victims on the West Coast. During the last year it has had to enlarge its meals-on-wheels service to provide no fewer than 57,000 meals—at a cost of §2OOO of its carefully conserved funds. Costs, as all welfare organisations know, do not remain stable. From its own library the society regularly provides books, many of them in large print, for about 650 elderly people. It is hoped to add to this collection books in foreign languages, and to expand also the society’s hospital cards service, which gives doctors and other hospital staff information about patients who do not speak English. Many other services continue normally, as, for example, the training of young recruits to the organisation. On the national scale the Red Cross, for the first time, has been able to send a refugee welfare team to Vietnam; and this week a medical team left for Western Samoa to treat crippling diseases in children. The good neighbour tradition of the Red Cross is being well sustained in Canterbury: and a generous response by the public tomorrow will both encourage the society’s many volunteer workers and make possible improved services where these are found to be needed.