EDITORIAL

Dear members of the Red Cross family in the Americas. You are committed to our humanitarian cause and deserve our admiration, recognition, and love.

I would like to take advantage of the first Voices of the Americas in 2020 to thank you for your efforts to adapt to these new difficult and challenging times. This edition of Voices of the Americas was intended to be different and COVID-19 teaches us every day that flexibility must be an integral part of our approach to emergencies and our programs. I invite you to have hope, faith and optimism about our humanitarian mission, which can save lives and help many people, even when we are constrained by the strict and necessary epidemic control mechanisms that force us to quarantine a large part of the Red Cross teams.

I recognize and deeply appreciate the efforts of volunteers as well as health, risk management, and administration professionals from National Societies and the IFRC who continue to work from home, offices, in communities, in pre-hospital care, in hospitals, and in essential services for the coordination of logistics and humanitarian activity.

The members of the Red Cross in the region, have at least three major tasks that we must fulfil with rigour and hard work:

AT A PERSONAL LEVEL: Be positive. Protect our families, close friends and neighbors by physical distancing and virtual solidarity, helping to generate positive behaviors in physical and mental care.

2. AT AN INSTITUTIONAL and MISSION LEVEL: Keep up our humanitarian work by holding up our principles, using technology and innovation, not giving up, and creating positive energy and clarity in the solutions that help contain, mitigate, and respond to the causes and effects of the COVID-19 crisis. From the perspective of promoting good health and risk prevention, support for epidemic control, emphasis on improving and optimizing safe response systems and with adequate protection and biosafety mechanisms. Creation of new local capacities, adapted to the new risks and closer to the communities in the short and medium term.

3. IN OUR AUXILIARY ROLE and WORKING with the SYSTEMS (public, private and community) of health, water and sanitation, risk management, environmental protection and humanitarian action, we must prepare for the immediate future, increase coordination and take advantage of opportunities to better serve countries and people in vulnerable conditions and those marginalized.

We must be ready to put our best efforts forward to reduce the impact of the pandemic at its peak and for the near future to increase the culture of risk control and make our participation in the processes of prevention, care and recovery of affected communities and society in general much more active. We must do this by improving our integrated information systems, good communication, adjusted planning, budgets and searches for flexible and innovative resources, and always thinking about practical and scalable solutions.

In these times we have to say YES to the humanitarian cause, YES to articulated work taking advantage of the extended capacity of the entire region, YES to the collective team effort, and YES to creative solutions that go beyond the traditional schemes, but with a vision of costs, implementation capacity and real impact for those who need them most.

People affected by this pandemic are counting each and every one of you, men and women, members of the Red Cross family who have done so much for those who suffer and are destined to do so much more and better. We will continue to work together and in constant contact.

Take care of yourselves and your families, your communities and let’s contribute together to the health and life of our world.

Walter Cotte W. Americas Regional Director