Laura Garrioch just got back from India last week. Today she’s getting ready to take off again.
“We care, we do this because we care,” Garrioch said.
She’s leading a team from Canada bringing supplies and help to people in Indonesia.
“There have been 350,000 people that have been seriously affected by this disaster,” Garrioch said. “We know they need clean drinking water, so that’s what we are going there to do.”
Friday’s earthquake and resulting tsunami have left parts of the country in ruins.
The landscape is filled with flooding water, piles of debris and crumbling buildings.
WATCH: Indonesia earthquake: huge surge in death toll
The death toll continues to rise every day.
World vision has a team on the ground.
They say the devastation is hard to imagine.
The biggest challenge is getting people access to food, water and medical treatment.
“The market is still closed, the store is still closed, and the clean water pipeline is broken, that is a fact.” Priscilla Christin with World Vision told Global News.
“And another thing is that the hospital is also broken, and they are overloaded, so they built a temporary health shelter to do their health service.”
The group going from GlobalMedic has two primary goals.
WATCH: Aid distributed in hard-hit areas of Indonesia after earthquake and tsunami
They will use drones to map the area and give that information to local authorities, and also provide access to clean drinking water through filtration systems.
The portable units can produce about 12 litres of clean water every minute.
“This type of unit is the difference between life and death for a lot of folks,” Rahul Singh, the founder of GlobalMedic, said. “When our teams arrive and get into these areas where there is damaged infrastructure where masses are gathering and there’s no water this will really make a difference.”
WATCH: Clean-up efforts underway after Indonesia hit with devastating earthquake and tsunami
The six member Canadian team that consists of firefighters, medics and staff will be there for at least a few weeks.
They know it’s not going to be easy, but say the work is critical.
“It’s an isolated area, it’s hard to get to, we can’t just necessarily drive there once we get into the country, we have to take military flights forward and get into the zone,” Singh said.
“Once we are in the zone we have to drive to the different areas and install these units in. These are heartbreaking images and the thing is the dead are the dead. We just got to focus on the living and keeping them alive.”
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