By Jane Manson | Fundraising
This project has for the last 5 years successfully provided emergency food rations and medical care to some of Kolkata’s most vulnerable families at times of crisis. Thanks to our generous donors our staff have been able to step in to relieve distress when help is most needed.
In India’s current COVID-19 lockdown, almost every family in ALL our target communities is hungry. Our beneficiaries across all our projects are mostly daily wage earners. So if a rickshaw driver cannot go out onto the streets to work, he earns nothing and cannot feed his family. A ragpicker, who depends on daily outings to collect paper, plastic bottle, aluminium cans, cardboard which she then sells to a dealer, cannot earn money if she is swept from the street by police enforcing the lockdown. Factories are closed; begging is impossible. Those who had small savings have used up their resources. Everyone is desperate.
But thanks to your generosity, there are some funds available to help out. Our team has been working tirelessly to purchase, to repackage and then to distribute food rations to almost 2000 families so far. Donations have come from individuals like you as well as other sources. But after this week, we don’t know where the funds for the next round of distributions will come from. The lockdown continues and so does the hunger.
Shafkat and his team of volunteers are working under the most terrible conditions in temperatures above 30 deg C. They are wearing full PPE and ALSO are fasting as it is Ramadan, so they cannot even drink water. During Saturday’s distribution one of the volunteers fainted and others felt dizzy and unwell. But they are determined to continue this work as long as there are hungry families and donors to provide the funds. So please show your support for some of India’s most vulnerable and hungry communities as well as solidarity with our volunteers on the front line and make a special donation today. Rs7500 (USD100, GBP80) buys ration packs for 4 families (of approx 6 people) for a month.
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