News
Food support for porters
Just a quick update to let our donors all know where their generous donations are going.
#foodfornepal
Second Food Campaign
We are happy to announce that we have successfully conducted food distribution programs in different places of Nepal.
Following are highlights of the programs in Dang, Western part of Nepal (Sarangi player group), Pokhara (Female porters), Sunsari Jhapa (extremely poor families), Sindhupalchok, and extremely poor families in Kathmandu valley as well.
First Food Campaign
Our first food campaign provided for 15 needy families in Dang Ghorahi located about 360 km from Kathmandu city.
With the country in lockdown people can not work or leave their homes and many are having difficulty surviving with enough food to feed their family. Due to the lockdown, many daily wage workers were jobless which have created different problems in their day to day life. Fortunately, our team have contributed emergency food packages to the neediest of these people (Sarangi players). They usually earn money through playing Sarangi (Nepali violin) and traveling to different areas.
Second Food Campaign @portersupport community
Another day, another successful food distribution program, this time in Pokhara Kaski District, located about 200 km from Kathmandu city. All porters have been working as trekking porters in the Annapurna area. They have had no work since the beginning of the nationwide lockdown. We were able to provide emergency food packages for 13 families in dire need, including the elderly couples as well.
They are from the Solu Khumbhu Everest area valley. We have selected the most needy porters who have been facing difficulties in this hard time, and each received a food assistance package to the value of 3000 NRS.
Third Food Campaign
We are trying our best to bring some happiness to underprivileged families in Sunsari Jhapa. We identified with local government and leaders an additional 21 families in need of help in Sunsari Jhapa. We decided to spread the food relief over more families and provided food to last for a month to these families. All the extremely poor families have no land and are living close to the riverside with simple tin roofed houses. With so many of the people in Sunsari living below the poverty line, and being unable to work, the risk of becoming ill or dying of hunger is a bigger concern to them than Coronavirus.
Helping to needy families Door to Door in Kathmandu city (30 families )
As we know, food problems do not only exist in rural areas in Nepal, but also in the cities as well. That’s why we have received many requests from different parts of the Kathmandu valley. We have found so many needy families, including students, and village workers who have been facing difficulties without food, and who have been living in the city to work in construction, building the road, working at hotel, restaurant shop etc. They actually didn’t want to report their issues to others because they don’t like to share problems. Some of them didn’t even want to take a picture with food package. Many have troubles, not only with food, but also with other expenses. Some of the people shared their stories of being unable to pay their room rent since the government announced the national wide lockdown. Whilst we discovered so many problems like this, we could only help by providing one month emergency food package for 77 extremely needy families as well as 2 gas cylinders for the neediest families as well. We hope our small support can give some relief to them for a while.
Sindhupalchok
We are happy we were able to provide food assistance to four families in Sindhupalchok also. They were very appreciative to receive this help.
Throughout all our food distributions we have had discussions with the local chairmen and leaders, and they have identified the families most in need. We collaborated with local friends and volunteers, who all helped us to make our campaign successful.
With the help of LCUN volunteers and local volunteers, during the campaign we have also provided education about how to prevent Coronavirus. All volunteers attending to help us had to wash their hands, wear masks and gloves while working and distributing food, and maintain social distance.
We requested all villagers and city people bring their own old bags to put food items in, as we considered not buying and providing any plastic bags to them in order to take care of the environment. We tried our best but unfortunately we had to use some plastic. However we requested to all the food recipients to bring back all the plastic bags and give them back to the shops where we brought food items to be reused or recycled. Some we have collected and will reuse again for future food distribution programs. We kept spreading the message of plastic pollution. We gave lessons to all the recipients how to refuse, reduce, reuse and recycle the plastic bags etc. We tried to educate them all not to throw plastic bags into nature or burn. At the same time we made them aware that plastic pollution now will bring us disaster in the coming years if we don’t change our habits. We tell them together we need to Act Now For A better Tomorrow. Everyone was happy to learn about preventing plastic pollution.
We would like to express our extreme gratitude to @maudeberthoud and friends for donations to this second #foodfornepal campaign.
So far, 79 families have benefited from this second version of the #foodfornepal campaign. And in total Let’s Clean up Nepal has been able to help 493 families. Of course this would not be possible without the generous donors, wonderful volunteers, and of course Raj and the LCUN Team.
All the recipients of the food packages were very happy to receive this help and all said ‘Thank you to the wonderful supporters and donors to this campaign’. We, at Let’s Clean Up Nepal, say ‘Thank you’ so much to all our beautiful friends who have been supporting us to make this #FoodforNepal campaign worth it and making such a positive impact on those in need. Without your generous donations, we could not do this.
Thank you
Let’s Clean Up Nepal Team
http://www.letscleanupnepal.org