Save the children

Press, 25 September 1980, Page 10

Save the children

The New Zealand Save the Children Fund is holding its annual appeal on Saturday, September 27. It has m'ade relieving the plight of refugees its special target for this year. “The major part of our work at present is being carried out in areas where Save the Children staff continue the difficult task of assiting refugees — people without homes, money, food or adequate health care — and often without hope of returning to their own country.” says the fund’s New Zealand president (Mrs W. D. Foster).

“It is sad that following such strong efforts to help children during the 1970 International Year of the Child, the actual year was such a bad one for refugee children: in Kampuchea, Pakistan, Hong Kong — ‘The Boat People’ — Thailand, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Djibouti, The Sudan, Somalia and Uganda.”

Save the Children Fund teams were in direct operation in all these areas as well as in many other of the world’s trouble spots. “Their work involves only feeding,' clothing and looking after the health of these people — but also

the daunting job of trying to reunite refugee children with their families.”

Amongst the Save the Children Fund workers in Africa — an area badlv affected by refugee problems and severe drought — four young New Zealanders are working to help restore order. Olwyn Gillespie, a Christchurch nurse, is the fund’s most recent posting. A former Red Cross worker in Thailand, she left New Zealand in August to join a fund emergency medical team in famine-ridden Uganda. Per head of population, New Zealand has raised more for the Save the Children Fund than anv other country. The fund’s contribution to its London headquarters in early 1980 was the largest single amount ever presented to the fund in its sixty-one year history. For the first time the New Zealand Fund sent the London headquarters a cheque for more than a million dollars —• $1,092,147.90 to be exact. “We want to thank the New Zealand public for their most generous support,” Mrs Foster says, “and to remind them that,

unfortunately, the work of the Save the Children Fund is just as important and demanding this year as it has been in the past. “Each year a sad succession of human disasters require our help and support. We can not ever do everything we would like to do. but can confidently

say that each year the support of people like New Zealanders helps us to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of children in distress.”

This year a great deal of the work of the fund was being concentrated on helping to alleviate the effects of a disastrous

drought in Eastern and Central Africa. “Millions of refugees are moving into the area. This is overloading already stretched resources which, in may cases, could not even support the lives of the original population."