Fighting hunger one person at a time

Having done relief work for over two years now one thing has become plain to me, you have to focus on one thing and do it well. When the floods hit the first time round, we were all over the place providing food rations, cooked meals, tents, water proofing roofs, medicals camps, etc etc, we literally ran our selves and our group (SA relief) ragged because we felt that we should do whatever we could, wherever we could. That was because we had little or no experience in the field of relief work. However, in 2011 when the monsoon rain floods swallowed the lives of thousands again, we picked cooked meals and medical camps and just focused on those, hence making a greater impact.

Its because of this personal experience that when the chance came for me to work with an organization like the WFP, I didn’t think twice because they focus on one thing - food. They have food baskets which they use to feed people and locally produced fortified nutrition supplements to bring up nutritional levels of the malnourished all year around. So its not just one month or three months, their efforts last, its long term. Plus even though there are no floods (fingers crossed) this year, there is rampant hunger due to inflation and poverty. So much so that 58% of our nation does not have proper access to food.. imagine that number of our population. When I try to calculate how many people that is and then watch us all waste food everyday it just hurts.

The world food program will try to feed 7.4 million people this year in Pakistan, they cannot achieve this task alone. They need all of us to pitch in and its about 77.55 USD a month for a family’s food needs. Ofcourse they have not received food for a while and thus many of these poor people are malnutritioned.   Its about USD 18 per month to bring a malnutritioned kids levels back up to normal.

In order to contribute you can send your money direct to this account, if you want to volunteer to help WFP please do it here  Do whatever you can and collect any amount you can but please try to help, not just because its ramzan or because its the time to give or whatever but because these are our own countrymen. These are Pakistani’s which we can help directly, instead of talking about them or writing about them or making petitions on facebook or cursing our leaders we can make a difference in peoples lives ourselves. So make that difference. I promise you that you will never regret this decision.

One comment
  1. We have to join hands before chaos takes over our country. Hunger leads to crimes of all types. Survival is the basic need of a human being and living in a country where state has this ‘damn care’ attitude we have to save people around us.
    Nice post!

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