YorkAid
Practical Help to Egypt
After the succesful campaign in aid of Gambian reforestation, the Oxfam-affiliated society, YORKAID, now turns its attention to helping provide a burns unit in the Assuit region of Egypt.
Week Seven of the Autumn tem is traditionally YORKAID week, and true to custom, various zany, money raising events will soon be springing into action around campus. This year, this will include a scavenger hunt and a blockade of Vanbrugh and Central Hall bridges. The six colleges, too, will be dedicating the proceeds from their weekly Bop and a bar quiz. The week will culminate in the Yule Ball, the highlight of the Autunm social calender, with its punch reception and three course meal. This year the entertainment will be the Graham Hearn Jazz Band, plus a disco until the early hours.
In previous years, YORKAID week has helped to raise money for a UNICEF well-digging programme in India, and a clean water project in Kampuchea. Last year £3250 was raised for the reforestation project in the Gambia, to aid the economic development of this area.
The focus of this year’s fund raising activity is the Assuit Burns Programme of rural Egypt. This is an area of great poverty and poor living standards, often with families of twelve people sharing one 3-roomed house. With cooking, living and child care taking place in one small room, accidents with kerosene stoves are frequent, often with horrific consequences to the burns victims, who tend usually to be women and children.
With treatment expensive and facilites poor, the need for improvement is obvious. Lives have already been saved and a new centre would have the potential to treat over 500 patients per year. The vital emergency treatment would be possible, plus necessary aftercare which has previously been unavailable.
It is recognised that education is important in order to help prevent such accidents, and Oxfam plans to collaborate with the Assuit University Preventative Medicine Department in order to achieve this.
YORKAID’s activities continue throughout the year with the YORKAID meals and awareness-raising of Oxfam’s concerns. Regular meetings are held in Derwent college on Wednesdays at 7.00pm, and any help is greatly appreciated.
If you can help or have suggestions, please contact YORKAID, Students Union, Goodricke College.