Emergency Supply Kits for the Contact Center
During this difficult time of the COVID-19 pandemic, I am reaching out to update you on what is happening with our Nepal programs. First, we are in good communication with our partner organization BSF, and they are working hard to prepare while Nepal undergoes similar changes as we are experiencing here in USA. Nepal is closing its borders with India and China and schools, offices, and public places are closing. The government is instituting voluntary social distancing but that could become required later on as it has in other Asian countries.
Our main concern is the health and welfare of our children, their families, and BSF staff as Nepal faces heightened challenges from its lack in infrastructure including water and healthcare facilities. BSF staff are in daily cellphone communication with children in the program. Many children are being sent back to their villages as boarding schools close or are being moved to our 2 small group facilities. Older children in the program are also part of the emergency call system, helping BSF staff remain connected with all the children. If you hear from your child through Facebook, you can expect that they are going through big changes in their living situations.
BSF staff are maintaining a skeleton crew at work and mostly working from home. Our Contact Center is closed, and BSF staff have distributed many items from the Contact Center’s store of supplies to the families of these most at-risk children, including food and educational materials.. In Nepal, healthcare is only given if you pay first. Our families have no ability to take care of such expenses, so we will be reallocating some of our funds to be able to meet these needs in anticipation that some of our children and staff will need hospital care. BSF is also prepared to take on extra health expenses due to the virus.
We are so grateful for BSF staff who demonstrate their dedication to our children and their leadership in managing this crisis. I hope you will join me in sending good thoughts and prayers of health and safety to BSF staff all the children and our dear friends in Nepal. Leena has sent me the following letter, which I would like to share with you:
“A big shout-out to all of the BSF team members for swinging into immediate action and connecting with our children and their families and swiftly checking in on them and educating them on WHO prescribed prevention measures and healthy habits!
Thank you everyone for wholeheartedly embracing and committing yourselves to the emergency work plan we collectively developed two days ago.
On March 20, we began distributed the relief packages to the Contact Center children’s families and also to the families of our other kids attending Vibhuti School, who live in the immediate vicinity of the Contact Center.
The relief packages contain ready-to-eat or easy-to-make nutritious food supplies and also soaps for hand washing and masks. The packages also contained children books, note copybooks, and toys to keep the children creatively engaged at home during this indefinite break.
It also gave us the opportunity to interact with the kids, their parents, and guardians and exchange some important information with one another as we may not be able see each other very soon again for weeks. Some of the kids and their families will even leave for their villages and stay on over there before it is safe to return to Kathmandu.
We are practicing social distancing by educating everyone on these simple but highly essential life saving habits and by scheduling appointments to keep the group sizes as small as possible and the interactions focused and brief. We guided individual families separately through some of the key preventive measures that they should understand and practice as most of our children’s parents and guardians are illiterate or severely under-educated.
After we finished handing out the relief packages, we sat down for a quick staff meeting to take stock on our work progress and the overall situation. While we may not hold asimilar in-person group meeting like this one anytime soon, we will stay connected remotely and might even start scheduling virtual meetings in due time.
My heart swells that I get to work with such dedicated and devoted colleagues and that we have such a supportive, encouraging, and empathetic partner like Mitrata.
Stay safe, and stay positive!
— Leena Satyal, Executive Director, BSF
We hope you are staying well in this time, and if you would like to make a donation to Mitrata to help us create and distribute emergency supply kits to the families of our Contact Center children, please follow the link below.
— Dr. Christine Schutz, Executive Director and Founder
