Corona Diaries June 1 2020

Corona Diaries June 1 2020 

It has been a few  weeks since I have updated and I apologize for that, but these past weeks have been overwhelming and challenging.

Medical cases have now added to our ongoing normal case work, cases that break your heart and leave you wondering how this can happen in this day and age.

Imagine banishing your 75 year old father to a palm leaf shack because he is annoying the family with his cries of discomfort...no words can express how very deeply this affected me.

To date, we have serviced 3,775 families with food packs, no mean feat, but we still need to keep on with this and donations are drying up, not just for us, but for all aid here. This is normal, it is called donor fatigue and it is scary. With 22,873 people out here and some yet to receive any help, we are hesitant to start round 3 with the Desas unless we are confident that we can cover them all.

Let alone start going back to the original recipients and getting a second pack to them.

Government aid is trickling in, but not every family gets food packs or qualifies for the financial payment of 600,000 IDR a month for 3 months.

This is truly overwhelming,but we press on looking for solutions to this . We have become part of an alliance with Taman Saja, an initiative that provides seeds and instructions to people so that they can start to grow their own food. This is great for areas that have water readily available, but so many of our population do not.

We have also been offered some land to sharecrop from one of the families that we support with assistance with their young baby who has been in and out of hospital for the last 4 months.

This is exciting, we can grow for our regular cases, the family can grow for themselves and then we can sell and split the profits for the remaining crops and replant once Covid is over. In the meantime, we can grow to provide for the community that has no access to vegetables unless they buy them.