Annual report - Australian Red Cross

Tracing
Image: Jackson and Red Cross case
worker Amy Lees.
Restoring family links for people
separated by conflict and disaster
Where family members have been
separated as a result of armed conflict
or disaster, Australian Red Cross aims
to provide assistance and support
through restoring contact and providing
information about the fate of missing
persons. To achieve this, we work with
180 tracing agencies around the world,
all part of the International Red Cross
and Red Crescent Movement.
In the past twelve months, eleven
Red Cross aid workers have been
deployed in places such as Sudan,
East Timor, Pakistan, Angola, Balkans
and Eritrea.
Case study
Mum found thanks to Australian Red Cross message
When Jackson first spoke to his mother he could hardly understand her through
the crying. ‘She was crying because she was hoping that maybe one day I would
come back – every day she was expecting I would come back and now I was on
the phone.’ Thanks to the Australian Red Cross International Tracing Refugee and
Asylum Seekers Service in Adelaide, Jackson’s family was able to piece together
their lives and reconnect after years of separation brought about by civil war.
Jackson and his mother were separated in 1993 when, with his mother unable to
afford schooling after his father’s death in the Congo conflict, Jackson went to live
with his uncle. They escaped more fighting and fled to a refugee camp in Uganda
in 2001, but lost touch with Jackson’s mother and siblings. Jackson migrated to
Australia as a refugee in 2004 with his uncle’s family and with no knowledge of the
welfare of the family he left behind.
After a school visit from the Red Cross, Jackson asked for their help to trace
his mother. A case was opened and eventually Red Cross messages found their
way across war-ravaged and fractured communities to his sister and mother
in a remote village in Goma, on the border of Rwanda and the Congo, and then
back to Jackson in Adelaide.
Jackson is now able to make phone calls, send and receive Red Cross messages
and photographs from his family in the Congo. To Jackson, this means everything.
Now he is set on a career in medicine, is focussed on helping to support his family
and he hopes to see them all again in the future. ‘And I’m learning to drive!’ he
says with a cheeky grin.
Australian Red Cross
P28