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Helping Flood Survivors

The Blue and Red Buckets

BY DEBBIE TOMASOWA | February 12, 2007

Country: Indonesia

Topic: Emergencies

Victor Sigilipu, a Mercy Corps staffer, loads hygiene kits onto a truck for delivery. Photo: Debbie Tomasowa/Mercy Corps

Jakarta, Indonesia - Thousands of items laid on the floor on a cloudy Saturday afternoon. Toothbrushes, towels, soaps, and t-shirts were stacked in separate piles at Mercy Corps' warehouse at North Jakarta. Bright blue and red stacks of plastic buckets added a splash of color to the front part of the warehouse where thousands of wrapped bundles of supplies were stacked neatly on wooden palettes. Fifteen people sat on the concrete floor, earnestly engaged in putting specific items into the plastic buckets.

"We are assembling what is called a hygiene kit," said Victor Sigilipu, one of the Jakarta flood emergency response team members. "This hygiene kit includes household items needed to survive at least for the first few days after their houses got flooded."

Each hygiene kit includes a bucket, two towels, three sarongs, four t-shirts, three toothbrushes with toothpaste, water purification packets, two bars of soap, one package of feminine sanitary napkins and ten packages of mosquito repellent.

For Mercy Corps staff, emergency response means long hours and a different kind of work environment - but many welcome the change.

"It's such a change from working inside at the office," said Karen Pesjak, Mercy Corps' Monitoring and Evaluation Manager who joined the packing crew on the second day. "It gives you a sense of reality about the people we're trying to help. Especially during this flood, you see a lot of women, children and people with disheartening conditions after their homes were flooded. This is just a little part that we can do to speed up the recovery process."

"For this first distribution, we gave around 500 hygiene kits to families in need in the Kapuk Muara area of North Jakarta," said Helmi Urzais, who came all the way from Indonesia's northern provinces to join the emergency team in Jakarta. "We chose that neighborhood because we're operating a program there, and it is also one of the areas worst affected by the flood."

"Mercy Corps decided to distribute hygiene kits because they can help keep diseases from spreading," said Lynn Renken, Mercy Corps Indonesia's Program Director. "It is also essential that we work with the local government authorities and existing systems to deliver and distribute these items to the people that need them most."

Over the course of several days, the stacks of blue and red buckes steadily diminished as they were filled with critical supplies.

As of February 7, more than 6,000 flood-affected people had opened a red or blue plastic bucket to serve the immediate needs of their families. And, as the floodwaters persist and needs remain in Jakarta, Mercy Corps will continue to fill and deliver them.