FamKit™

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), there were over 6 million people living in refugee camps worldwide, the victims of civil wars, famine, natural and other disasters. These numbers are likely to increase dramatically in the years to come. The DMS Foundation has developed a rapid deployment temporary shelter and survival Kit for a family of six. These FamKits™ are ideal for use in refugee camps, and post a disaster scenario.

Donate a FamKit™ to a needy family entering a refugee camp. This will help the DMS Foundation as well as other charitable organizations, Foundations and agencies involved in disaster mitigation and refugee relief operations anywhere in the world.     

Wheel Chairs

There are tens of thousands of disenfranchised amputees in Mozambique and elsewhere in Africa, the victims of civil wars, land mines and other disasters. The DMS Foundation has launched a “donate a wheel chair campaign” to elevate the dignity of these amputees and make them productive members of their communities.

Mobile Clinics

 DMS Centres in Ecuador, South Africa, Mozambique and Mexico will provide as part of its social and health services medical assistance members of the various local communities that are unable to seek medical assistance for themselves or their families, with the introduction of “Mobile Clinics” using Canadian medical and nursing volunteers as well as local community doctors and nurses who volunteer their time and services to their respective community. In order to fund these Mobile Clinics DMS is launching a “donate a Mobile Clinic campaign”.  

Zodiac Search and Rescue Inflatable Vessels

For use in Canada, the USA, Mozambique, Mexico, and Ecuador during flood search and rescue operations. These boats are easy to transport and combine the security, stability, light weight and ease of operations during the harshest of flood conditions and DMS is launching a “donate a Zodiac Campaign”.  

Of all the forces of nature, no natural disaster causes greater grief, loss of life, untold economic losses and loss of livelihoods than floods.  

The most severe flood in Canadian history occurred on October 14 and 15, 1954, when Hurricane Hazel brought 214 millimetres of rain in the Toronto region in just 72 hours.  More recently, Manitoba’s Red River flood of May 1997 also left its undeniable mark.

Rescuing trapped flood victims is a dangerous job, and in most cases municipalities or even a coalition of municipalities is unable to cope with the demand to rescue people from certain death. DMS sees this role as a critical one among its services to communities in peril everywhere.

Year after year, like a Swiss clock, seasonal floods would kill on average of between 800 to 1,000 people over a span of less than 200 kilometres of rivers and their tributaries. 

These people were primarily tribal people and made a living fishing, hunting and harvesting their meager crops along these rivers and exchanging the fruit of their labour for much-needed commodities like salt, cooking oil, matches and other necessary items. But when you ask a family why they remain so close to the river when only a year earlier it had lost a son, the year before, a parent and this year, a wife to the floods, the gesture was unsurprisingly familiar. As we had encountered on other continents, these people made a “hand to the mouth” gesture as if to say, “We must feed our families.”

So what did we do? How did we work with people who could not read or write?

We set up a base station in the capital to monitor weather reports, and created a database using data mining and prediction tools. With the help of the tribeswomen and using old World War II solar-powered portable telephones, we eliminated the numbers and replaced them with illustrations of animals that they could identify in a feeding order and asked the tribeswomen to punch in those animals in sequence, which they did dutifully. We explained to them that a magic voice would answer them. We asked that they repeat this action three times daily, at sunrise, mid-day sun and sunset and report to the voice on the state of a series of river gauges that had been set up every two kilometers along the course of these rivers.  

Each gauge had a picture of a plant at the top that each villager could recognize and from which we could establish its location; these gauges in turn had no numeral height measurement indicators, but rather fish well-known in the area.  In addition, we gave these women an eye drop tube with three markings—green, yellow and red—so that they could measure the dew collected at sunrise from their vegetable patches.

With their collective feedback, which was transmitted daily without failure, we were able, over a seven-month period, to provide a trend analysis so detailed and exacting that we could predict almost exactly to the hour and location where the river would crest.

This foresight allowed local authorities to move in and evacuate everyone from harm’s way before the floods struck; none would lose their parcel of land tenure that they occupied at river’s edge.

I am happy to report that in the last six years, no one in the area has lost a life to a flood. This entire exercise cost less than $235,000 to implement and maintain.

The need to empower people and get them involved in their own flood mitigation programs is pivotal to reducing flood deaths, damage to property and the environment, not only in tribal regions of the world, but in our own highly developed cities. Success cannot consist only of the authority’s timely response; it must include programs in which each member of a community works hand-in-hand with the authorities.

In 2007, there was some 6.2 million people worldwide living in refugee camps.