April 2020: "Arequipa COVID19 Refugee Emergency"

“Please pray for me.  Pray for my children and my family.”  This request came from Oriana, a woman we are helping through our Venzuelan Refugee Project.  Oriana came to Peru as part of a group of 5 families who belonged to the same church in Venezuela.  She has a 5-month old baby boy who was suffering from fever, and an online doctor had advised antibiotics.  (Antibiotics are sadly very over-prescribed here.)  She was asking for help in buying the antibiotics.  I had her talk to a colleague who is also a doctor, and he advised her to simply treat the fev

What started as a project to help feed 150 families through this critical time has exploded. This week, we’re delivering these care packages to almost 500 families and we’re looking at ways we can continue to expand to meet the need. Estimates are that there are over 12,000 Venezuelan refugees in our city.

 

Here’s an example of what we put into one package to give to each family.

We started Saturday needing a miracle.  We had coordinated with a two groups of Venezuelans to deliver food bags to them that afternoon.  The second group was quite large, and we feared we wouldn’t have quite enough bags.  Matthias read the story of the feeding of the 5,000 from the Bible, and we prayed that God would once again provide so that these hungry people could be fed.

 

A team of 8 people spent the morning packaging the different food items and making bags; they came to 85.  The bags were then packed into two waiting vehicles. &n

We've just started a project to support some of the most vulnerable people in this crisis in Peru. There are thousands of Venezuelan refugees who normally make a living selling on the streets. But now the streets are empty and they have no source of income.

 

We buy food in bulk.