Cyclone Idai crashed into Mozambique on March 14, causing catastrophic flooding which has killed more than 500 people in the country and affected over 1 million survivors. For the past week, an AMURT team has been working in partnership with the Maputo Rizwan Adatia Foundation from Maputo in distributing food and hygiene kits to some of the 90,000 Mozambicans who have taken refuge in temporary shelters.
Paul Ziade is AMURT’s Rural Programs Coordinator, and runs the Cash-for-Work (CFW) program. Initiated by AMURT and joint-funded by the UN’s Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, it is primarily a response to economic desperation exacerbated by the influx of displaced persons into two of Haiti's most impoverished communes.
AMURT’s Food For All (FFA) program in Washington DC has seen a four-fold increase in demand for food over the past four weeks, increasing from 140 weekly food recipients in late March to 503 in late April. The new clients include senior citizens with underlying health issues, people with disabilities, single parents with children to feed all day at home and the recently unemployed, especially those laid off from restaurants.
From March to October 2010 AMURT ran 10 Child-Friendly Spaces in Port-au-Prince. The purpose of the centers was to help children affected by the earthquake restore normalcy and improve overall well-being in their lives with psycho-social and educational support. Besides motivational and creative activities, children in the Child-Friendly Spaces program received a hot meal and nutritional support. In all 4,000 children and child minders have benefited.
Extremely severe cyclonic storm Fani was the strongest tropical cyclone to strike the Indian state of Odisha (formerly Orissa) since Phailin in 2013. AMURT's relief team jumped into action immediately after the storm made landfall on May 2nd, 2019. They started by clearing trees from the roads and went on to distributed food and non-food items.