In Lebanon, food prices continue to increase while the people’s income capacity decreases, with Lebanon now considered having some of the most expensive food in the Middle East and North Africa. With more than 60% of Lebanese living below the poverty line, and the Lebanese pound losing 90% of its value, the state of Palestinian…
In East Jerusalem, children in the Shufat refugee camp have limited space to grow and to be children in the camp’s population of 80,000. Residents of the camp are considered Jerusalem citizens; however, they must adhere to stringent checkpoint monitoring, invasive searches, long lines, and the humiliation that accompanies the metal cages surrounding the camp through which…
Your support remains critical during Ramadan and beyond. Without you, our work would not be possible! When Ashwaq’s husband passed away three years ago, the 37-year-old widow struggled with the arduous challenge of caring for her seven children. Unable to find employment due to her lack of skills, yet busy with the demand of caring…
Hanin’s StoryHanin is a 30-year-old mother caring for seven children on her own, with the eldest aged seven. Her husband’s recent illness has left him incapable of participating in day-to-day activities. Hanin currently lives in a shelter provided to her out of the goodwill of others. Unfortunately, open sewage runs through the middle of the…
YOU DID IT! The ‘Water Rehabilitation’ campaign for Gaza was met thanks to the generosity of a handful of KinderUSA supporters! After a year of difficulties with accessibility and inclusion associated with remote learning, children in Gaza are finally returning to face-to-face learning with the prospect of clean drinking water and rehabilitated lavatories! Strict health…
KinderUSA is in the process of publishing an e-cookbook that will be available for purchase during the holy month of Ramadan. We are requesting all our supporters to share their favorite family recipes, and we will be making selections from these submissions to be displayed in our Ramadan cookbook! Our goal is to create a cookbook with authentic,…
The Palestinian population continues to face extraordinarily difficult conditions all of which hinder proper psychosocial development. Years of war, human rights violations, food insecurity, and extreme poverty have only been exacerbated by COVID-19. These miserable conditions have an immense psychological impact, especially for children who are now quarantined with little to no social interaction. Families…
The continued, suffocating, blockade, now approaching its 15th year, has affected every aspect of life in Gaza, severely limiting access to all essential services, while leaving more than a half-million children without access to safe drinking water. Noura Erakat, human rights attorney and an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University, was recently quoted in the Euro-Mediterranean Human…
It goes without saying that 2020 has been a year we are unlikely to forget, exposing our vulnerabilities and strengthening our humanity. We faced many challenges across the globe that we never could have anticipated. Yet, our donors showed a level of support this past year that humbled all of us at KinderUSA and our…
After the death of her husband from a high voltage shock while attempting to repair the home refrigerator, 24-year-old Sa’adia suddenly found herself widowed with five children, the youngest 3 months old. Before her husband passed away, he struggled to bring home income working in the agriculture fields until that ended along with most jobs…
In Lebanon, food prices continue to increase while the people’s income capacity decreases, with Lebanon now considered having some of the most expensive food in the Middle East and North Africa. With more than 60% of Lebanese living below the poverty line, and the Lebanese pound losing 90% of its value, the state of Palestinian and Syrian refugees is even worse and in need of urgent assistance.
Covid has thrown families into poverty across the globe, but in Lebanon the population faces an unprecedented economic crisis coupled with the fallout from the Beirut port explosion. Vulnerable Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian refugees are experiencing food shortages across Lebanon with some international agencies predicting acute hunger could be reached in weeks.
To address this urgent crisis during Ramadan, KinderUSA in partnership with FingerPrint of Change implemented a community kitchen project targeting Palestinian, Syrian, and vulnerable Lebanese families, living in Beirut and surrounding suburbs. Each family receives a freshly prepared iftar meal three days per week, with the most vulnerable families benefiting four times a week.
Through the purchase of locally grown food and ingredients, food preparers are hired from the camp population along with delivery personal which helps boost the local economy and facilitate job creation.
“We give special attention to hygiene, and to including necessary nutrients, providing fresh, hot, healthy meals on iftar time. The most important, we care about the respect and dignity of our beneficiaries,” said Loubane Tay, founder of FingerPrint of Change.
Meals change with each distribution to provide variety from Shish Taouk, Beef Shawarma, to simply spiced chicken all served with rice, salad, and yogurt. In addition, each family receives a bag of bread along with a bag of fruit and vegetables that includes tomatoes, cucumber, potatoes, apples, and more.
The distribution, ongoing throughout Ramadan, documented several of the beneficiaries expressing gratitude during this time of economic hardship. One father cried to our partners that his children would have only received yogurt and bread if not for this meal.
Our work is impossible without your continued support. The gratitude expressed by the recipients of our Ramadan program, gratitude for healthy food that sustains them during this blessed month, reminds us of how much we have to be thankful for. Thank you!
In East Jerusalem, children in the Shufat refugee camp have limited space to grow and to be children in the camp’s population of 80,000. Residents of the camp are considered Jerusalem citizens; however, they must adhere to stringent checkpoint monitoring, invasive searches, long lines, and the humiliation that accompanies the metal cages surrounding the camp through which they must pass in order to get home.
Our partnership with the Women’s Center works to provide activities that improve the morale of children in Shufat, who suffer from environmental health conditions in addition to malnourishment. “…These children are not well and lack proper nutrients in order to grow,” stated Dr. Laila Al-Marayati, MD, a practicing physician and Chairperson of KinderUSA.
Families living in the camp struggle to put just one meal a day on the table. With the addition of the COVID-19 pandemic, vulnerable children face an even higher risk of malnourishment and nutrition-related diseases. According to a UNRWA report, the prevalence of stunted growth and anemia is 22% among schoolchildren.
Approximately 84% of children in the Shufat camp live below the poverty line. Our partner on the ground, the Women’s Center, is fortunate enough to have a compassionate project manager, Muhammed Mahareq, advocating for these children. This Ramadan, with the funding of KinderUSA, he and his volunteers are distributing over 230 food baskets to families in desperate need.
“It is one of the greatest challenges for children to be without food during the holy month of Ramadan,” Mahareq says. “We show them that they have a network of emotional support and care.”
Throughout the month of Ramadan, we are actively distributing fresh food to impoverished families in Gaza, East Jerusalem, and Lebanon. Pandemic-related lockdown measures have resulted in a disproportionately increased number of poverty-stricken families in these areas. Please consider making an online donation today, so you can help feed hungry children in Shufat and beyond.
Thank you to all of our generous donors who continue to make our mission a reality. Our work is impossible without you!
When Ashwaq’s husband passed away three years ago, the 37-year-old widow struggled with the arduous challenge of caring for her seven children. Unable to find employment due to her lack of skills, yet busy with the demand of caring for all her children, there were days when Ashwaq had no food for her young family to eat. She relied on the efforts of her 14-year-old son to work the fields and provide for the family. After an injury to her son’s hand, Ashwaq struggled, once again, to provide food for the family. “Many days we just ate bread given to us,” Ashwaq explained.
The Gifts of Dignity, Empowerment, and Independence
At the beginning of 2020, Ashwaq became a beneficiary of the KinderUSA Women Empowerment Chicken Farming Project, which changed the lives of her and her family. The program provided her with the training, tools, medications, and live poultry. Ashwaq was a supplier to the Kinder USA Ramadan Food Parcel Program last year and this year, as well. The COVID-19 pandemic has reduced economic opportunities, but the women who raised and sold chickens to KinderUSA over the last 16 months were able to provide much-needed protein to their community while earning an income for their families. This program has multiple benefits in offering sustenance to families in need, stimulating the local economy, and empowering women heads of households.
Your Chance to Make a Difference
The KinderUSA Ramadan Program is distributing fresh food to impoverished families, daily, throughout the month of Ramadan. Our goal is to reach 2000 families of eight or more. However, in the past, we have successfully exceeded this goal and assisted more families year after year! This effort is only made possible with help of our generous donors. If you have not already, we urge you to make an online donation today for $130 to feed an entire family for one month. However, a thoughtful contribution in any amount will benefit the people we serve. Thank you for your humanity and compassion this Ramadan and always.
I am very happy with this project. I have an income source to care for my children. Thank you to all who support this project. Ramadan Kareem!” – Ashwaq
Hanin’s Story
Hanin is a 30-year-old mother caring for seven children on her own, with the eldest aged seven. Her husband’s recent illness has left him incapable of participating in day-to-day activities. Hanin currently lives in a shelter provided to her out of the goodwill of others. Unfortunately, open sewage runs through the middle of the room, causing floods in the winter and creating a health hazard and unsafe living space for her household. The only source of income for her family is the $40 a month stipend provided by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which she uses to buy food and other basic necessities.
A Vital Lifeline to Families in Need
Hanin is one of the KinderUSA Ramadan beneficiary families. She, along with 2,000 other families, will receive fresh food parcels twice during the month of Ramadan. Each parcel will contain fresh vegetables, fruits, live chickens, freshly prepared cheese, and other seasonal goods. Moreover, she will receive fresh eggs from the KinderUSA Women’s Cooperative. These items will ensure that she has a month’s worth of nutritious meals for her family to break their fasts during this month.
In addition to benefitting families in need, the KinderUSA Women’s Cooperative supports 30 women working in food-producing cooperatives, paying them higher than the market price in order to sustain their families and livelihoods. Also, 60 small-scale farmers are benefitting and have been working since January to fulfill the basket needs. Each of these women and farmers is financially supporting their extended family, and the means and resources they receive from KinderUSA help to stimulate the local economy.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our implementing partners have expanded on the number of distribution sites and have followed the guidelines of the Ministry of Health, as well as the World Health Organization.
You Can Make an Impact!
During this holiest of months, we ask that our generous donors support this project for as little as $130 to feed a family of eight or more during the month of Ramadan. As we strive for the Palestinians to be relieved from their suffering, we can do our part now to make a difference in their lives with our prayers and support.
Thank you and Ramadan Mubarak from the KinderUSA family to yours!
“…With every difficulty there is relief” (Quran 94:5).
YOU DID IT! The ‘Water Rehabilitation’ campaign for Gaza was met thanks to the generosity of a handful of KinderUSA supporters!
After a year of difficulties with accessibility and inclusion associated with remote learning, children in Gaza are finally returning to face-to-face learning with the prospect of clean drinking water and rehabilitated lavatories!
Strict health and safety measures have now been adapted to make face-to-face education possible for more than half a million students in Gaza and surrounding governate areas. KinderUSA with our implementing partner, the Palestinian Environmental Association, requested funding for the Water Rehabilitation project which provides water tanks, clean drinking water, rehabilitated gender-specific lavatories, handicap accessible lavatories, and basic hygiene and safety education for 35 primary schools and 15 kindergartens and you answered the call!
This ongoing project also includes Personal Protection Equipment along with education sessions that focus on raising awareness controlling the spread of COVID-19 in addition to best practices for personal hygiene, safe water, and public health preparedness.
Our donors compassion truly inspire us daily! It takes all of us working together to combat the profound inequalities facing so many children across the globe. Thank you for having our backs and having a positive impact on the lives of so many vulnerable children.
KinderUSA is in the process of publishing an e-cookbook that will be available for purchase during the holy month of Ramadan. We are requesting all our supporters to share their favorite family recipes, and we will be making selections from these submissions to be displayed in our Ramadan cookbook! Our goal is to create a cookbook with authentic, time-honored recipes that represent the unique foods and cultures of our amazing group of diverse donors, while also showcasing the love of food and family that unites us all.
In this increasingly divided globe, it is important, now more than ever, to shine a light on the many contributions our communities have shared with the world. As the Noble Quran states (49:13) “O humanity! Indeed, We created you from a male and a female, and made you into peoples and tribes so that you may know one another!”
Through our Ramadan e-cookbook, we hope to share a wide selection of diverse, international dishes. At the same time, by highlighting the delicious cuisine that can now be found in top chefs’ cookbooks and restaurants, KinderUSA hopes to amplify awareness of the culinary heritage and resilience of the Palestinian people in the face of generations of upheaval and displacement.
We encourage you to share your favorite recipes, photos, and personal stories about your special dish to create a genuine cookbook that can be shared for years to come. If you are interested in contributing to this exciting project, please email christine@kinderusa.org for the next steps.
The Palestinian population continues to face extraordinarily difficult conditions all of which hinder proper psychosocial development. Years of war, human rights violations, food insecurity, and extreme poverty have only been exacerbated by COVID-19. These miserable conditions have an immense psychological impact, especially for children who are now quarantined with little to no social interaction. Families have taken on the additional burden of having to home school children, adding to the strain of an already fragile familial system.
KinderUSA partners with Yes Theatre, a grassroots Palestinian organization, which focuses on providing a theatre-based therapeutic approach to address the growing gaps in the mental health of Palestinian children. Specifically, their program Drama4Healing, utilizes psychological interventions based on drama, theatre, therapy, and counseling to engage children in drama and art-therapy workshops.
Participation in these workshops exposes children to therapeutic teachings they would otherwise never have an opportunity to partake in. The lessons give children the chance to express their frustrations, learn coping mechanisms, and engage with their peers. Each workshop provides stabilization to children whose mental state would otherwise go unaddressed.
The goal of Yes Theatre this year is to target 200 children, both male and female, who have been previously detained and/or affected negatively by COVID-19. A total of 20 workshops will be held throughout the entire year, offering promising chances for these children to grow and find the stabilization and mental wellness they deserve. A donation of $100 will support a child throughout the entire year, allowing them access to the necessary tools needs to improve their overall mental wellbeing. Your support of $100 will provide a child access to all 20 workshops, a year worth of psychological improvement.
Your continued support throughout the years helps make all our work possible. We are able to successfully provide hope and growth for the children of Palestine because of your generosity.
The continued, suffocating, blockade, now approaching its 15th year, has affected every aspect of life in Gaza, severely limiting access to all essential services, while leaving more than a half-million children without access to safe drinking water.
Noura Erakat, human rights attorney and an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University, was recently quoted in the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, “We are now entering 2021, the fifteenth year of Israel’s naval blockade and land siege, and the global community seems unfazed by the unlivable conditions in the tiny coastal enclave…These conditions are unconscionable and have no moral, legal, or policy justification. The siege must end without preconditions and condemned to the history of atrocities never to be repeated again.”
With unemployment amongst the highest in the world, poverty rates hover above 56%. COVID has exasperated life for children further with schools closed and nearly 600,000 children lacking access to a reliable power supply and the internet, and no computer access. Many parents find the only alternative is to coordinate phone sessions with their teachers to receive their daily lessons.
After successive wars targeting the population in Gaza, post-traumatic stress disorder is common among children and now with lockdown, parents are finding their children afraid to socialize outside of their immediate family. Many in Gaza refer to it as a “double post-traumatic stress disorder.”
KinderUSA ended last year providing fresh food to families in desperate need amidst reports of children digging through garbage for food. Moving into the new year, we have already begun preparing for Ramadan incorporating female-owned farms who must care for their children and often, extended family, alone; a small scale rabbit farming project that will enlist men and women, providing them with income to care for their families; and a food processing project for female-headed households providing them with all the tools, skills, and education needed to start their own business.
This is a sampling of the work ahead we are able to do with your continued support. In the midst of the pandemic, our donors proved to be humanitarians bolding stating, the children in Palestine will not be forgotten. Working together, you empower families who want to support themselves with the goal of promoting the overall well-being of their children.
KinderUSA will continue to push for solutions that prioritize sustainability. Thank you for continuing to stand with the children in Palestine.
It goes without saying that 2020 has been a year we are unlikely to forget, exposing our vulnerabilities and strengthening our humanity. We faced many challenges across the globe that we never could have anticipated. Yet, our donors showed a level of support this past year that humbled all of us at KinderUSA and our partners in the field. While the vaccine provides a light at the end of the tunnel, we cannot let this blind us to the reality that remains ahead for the most vulnerable and poorest of families.
Closing out of the emergency food distribution this month only reminds us of the enormous need however small our contribution positively impacting the lives of 35,000+ children, women, and men. Families are desperate in many parts of the globe, and acutely in our areas of operation: Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon. The most vulnerable children in Gaza lack basic nutrition leaving a generation dependent on aid as their only lifeline. With a blockade entering its 14th year of land, air, and sea, a grim picture continues to unfold, magnifying the inability of families to access the basic services they need to survive.
Ahmed and his family have been contributing to KinderUSA since our founding 18 years ago. He took the time out of his schedule to appeal for the continued support of our work as we close out this remarkable year.
On behalf of the children we serve, our partner organizations, our board of directors, and the KinderUSA team, we thank you for your humble generosity over this past year which translates into an expression of solidarity with the world’s most vulnerable. Please be safe.
After the death of her husband from a high voltage shock while attempting to repair the home refrigerator, 24-year-old Sa’adia suddenly found herself widowed with five children, the youngest 3 months old. Before her husband passed away, he struggled to bring home income working in the agriculture fields until that ended along with most jobs in Gaza due to the pandemic.
Sa’adia now relies on charity, the goodwill of neighbors, family when they can, and organizations like KinderUSA just to feed her children. Living alone with her five children in a house that lacks the most basic needs has been a challenge and a blessing; they do have shelter unlike many female-headed households in Gaza.
“I am unable to feed my children and I wait for my relatives or my brother who has a big family to help me with the least they can, I do not know what to do to provide my children with their needs.” Said Sa’adia.
Along with 880 other families in desperate need, our partners on the ground in Gaza provided Sa’adia with enough food for a month as part of the KinderUSA Emergency Food Distribution. Each family received enough food to get them through a month which includes dried legumes, canned meats, eggs, milk, and PPE.
The parents of thousands of vulnerable children in Gaza do not know where their next meal will come from. This, at the same time COVID-19 is ravaging the country contributing to rising levels of hunger and poverty. Moving into the New Year, Gazan’s will face even more hardships as families move in a downward spiral of uncertainty.
For $75 you can feed a family such as Sa’ada’s for one month. That’s just $2.50 a day for 6 family members. Whatever amount is meaningful to you, please consider making a donation today. Thank you for your humanity and please, be safe.
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