Aid worker Mark Snelling is in quake-hit Indonesia with the British Red Cross. He tells of the scramble to get urgent relief to thousands of survivors.

Saturday, June 3

It's a week since the earthquake struck, and four days since my team arrived in Indonesia. As is always the case in this kind of deployment, it feels like a month.

Long working days turn into long working nights. You sleep when you can and you eat when you can; in practice, not often.

The primordial challenge in any rapid onset emergency is to make some sense of the chaos. Without a clear understanding of what has been going on, there's little chance of figuring out what needs to be done.

With that process under way, the priority for the teams of Federation medics, relief specialists, logisticians, water engineers and support staff then becomes to mesh as quickly as possible with the Indonesia Red Cross operations that we are all here to support.

Several factors are working in our favour. Phone and internet are working perfectly and the roads in the region are largely undamaged. So we can get around, and we can talk to each other with ease.

Most significantly, our Indonesian colleagues had a superb operation in place within hours of the quake, having taken all the lessons learned in the Aceh tsunami response and applied them with dedication and vigour. Aside from that, they were already preparing for disaster in the area in response to the looming threat of a full eruption of nearby Mount Merapi. It might yet happen.

Some 21 Red Cross aid flights have landed since the earthquake. Almost 3,000 tents have been distributed in seven districts around Yogyakarta, providing shelter to some 15,000 people. Roughly 100,000 people will have received tents and tarpaulins by the end of the second week.

"The target that we're comfortable with," one relief delegate tells me, "is that we will have provided assistance to some 50,000 families over the next six weeks".

Shelter is going to be the key to this response. Back at the Red Cross field hospital in Bantul, which has treated 800 people since the quake, I see why.

"My daughter is recovering well and will be discharged next week, but our house was completely destroyed," says Sarju, sitting at the bedside of nine-year-old Putri.

Putri herself lies still and silent, a bandage covering the deep lacerations on her cheek that she sustained when their house collapsed around them. Her small face is still swollen and bruised.

"We will need tents to live in and then I will ask the authorities for help to rebuild my house," Sarju says. Local hospitals, backed by field clinics such as this one, have made superb progress in clearing the backlog of injuries.

But as Sarju highlights, hundreds of thousands of people need shelter.

At the nearby Indonesia Red Cross branch, I meet volunteers preparing for another distribution of tents.

"I know that people in the city are OK, but I'm still worried about people in the villages further out, I am concerned for that," says Bernadeta Sumiyan, one of the 500 volunteers who have been working flat out ever since the quake struck.

Bernadeta could be forgiven for not participating in this operation. One of her brothers was killed in the disaster.

"I was really shocked by his death, but I still wanted to help all the others," says the 20-year-old, who has just resigned from her job as a waitress to work full time * and unpaid * for the Red Cross.

Whatever the posturing that one sees from some expatriate aid workers, nothing * and I mean absolutely nothing * would happen in humanitarian response without people like Bernadeta. They make us happen.