Kerala floods | Help affected families to get back on their feet

Dears,

Most of us are involved in flood relief related activities directly or indirectly through our friends, residential associations, church and other organizations. What I understood after talking to various sources is that currently there is adequate supply of relief materials in most of the camps and it’s still pouring in. This will start reducing gradually once the current volunteers gets back to their day-to-day life. 


 

As you know, even though lot of people have started going back home from camps, there are many who have lost everything and are clue less how to re-build their lives. I’m sure you will all agree that we should definitely do our tiny bit to help some of these families to get back on their feet.

I had a discussion with with one of my friend Jinesh, who is a teacher in a govt college in Idukki. He knows at least 15-20 families who is not even able to locate where their homes were, as the entire area has been wiped out. One or two of those families lost couple of their family members as well. These are daily wage workers and they are not in a situation currently to even think about how to start building their lives from scratch, as they are still mourning for the family members they lost. I told him about our group, how we operate and how we want to get involved directly in helping some of these families. He said he will help us out in identifying few families and shortlisting some of the immediate items (building materials, furniture, other house hold stuff etc) after finding out what help they are getting from government and other organizations. It will definitely help us to have someone like him not only to identify the families who need the help, but also to make sure that it’s getting delivered correctly. Additionally, as we normally do with other cases, we have to take turns in visiting these families and buying/delivering what they need the most with Jinesh’s help.

I’m also discussing with other contacts who are in the most affected areas like Idukki, Chenghannur, Kuttanad, Chalakkudi and Aluva. I know some of you are actively involved in your personal capacity and with other groups in some of these areas. Request your help in identifying such families who are affected the most and who is not getting much help.

Let’s start raising the funds for these now itself and in the mean time we will identify the deserving ones.

As I discussed with some of you, we will definitely use at least 2 Lakhs rs (or more) from the balance that have from our internal fund.  But with that, we will be able to just help 2-3 families. What I propose is to raise another 1 to 2 lakhs internally and another 10-15 lakhs (or more) through our external sources so that we will have around 20 Lakhs at our disposal. We also have to figure out what’s the best way to collect/transfer/manage these funds.       

Please share your thoughts on these and the other suggestions that you may have in the comments below.

-pulicken