And while the rivers were on the rise, The Red Cross still remained active in the South within those communities impacted by the Toledo wildfires in August.
Director General Bowman says that they will be closing off their relief stream before the end of the year. She gave us an update on what their final relief efforts are looking like.
Lily Bowman, Director General, Belize Red Cross Society
"We actually worked with assisting 25 communities although we were really assigned 9 but we ended up supporting 25. Don't ask me numbers because I don't have that here with me now but we provided food after conducting some assessments because in the beginning we were using NEMOs assessments because by the time they called us to support they were already in the field conducting assessments because with the fires it's different we cannot go to the affected site which is the farms we cannot go into those areas so we assess the families of the farmers that were affected. Mostly the affectation was livelihoods as we know because a lot of the farms were subsistence farm which the farmers used to feed their families so we provided food. As I told you earlier we did 2 rounds of food. Our target was for 200 families we had passed that target with a cash and voucher program we issued vouchers through the support of our international federation and the inter American development bank IDB We supported the people with vouchers to purchase seeds and to purchase you know small equipment they need to restart their farming and we are still in the area looking to engage in another round of food distribution to end our response there but we have been in their since May and we should be finished until the second or first week of December."
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