BGR Donates to Help Puerto Rico and Rohingya Refugees

By BGR Staff

This past week the BGR Board voted to approve emergency grants of $5,000 each to two organizations working with people in distress: to Oxfam America, which is hard at work in Puerto Rico, filling in where the U.S. government effort has been slow and inadequate; and to the World Food Programme, which has been providing urgently needed food aid to the Rohingya refugees who have fled violence in their native Myanmar and taken refuge in neighboring Bangladesh. The statements that follow have been adopted from reports by the two organizations.

From Oxfam America, on the situation in Puerto Rico

Since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, millions of its residents, who are U.S. citizens, have been struggling to survive without food, clean water, or electricity. Although they have the resources, the U.S. government’s emergency response has been slow and inadequate. For this reason, Oxfam America has stepped in to make sure the island’s 3.4 million residents receive immediate aid.

More than half of the island is without clean water. The threat of deadly waterborne diseases hangs heavily over rural communities. Millions of residents are currently without electricity due to a downed electrical grid. Food and fuel are in desperately short supply. The elderly and the sick are at grave risk as hospitals run out of fuel to keep generators running. Families need help.

It’s rare that Oxfam America engages in disaster relief efforts in places where the government has the capacity to respond appropriately. But this case is different. Unwilling to wait on the U.S. government’s slow and inadequate response when people are in desperate need, Oxfam has been doing everything it can to support local organizations to meet Puerto Ricans’ most urgent needs right now. Oxfam will also be supporting the people of Puerto Rico to advocate in Congress for more resources to rebuild the island and fortify it to meet future disasters more effectively.

From the World Food Programme, on the Rohingya refugees

The Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), David Beasley, affirmed WFP’s commitment to supporting people fleeing violence in Myanmar as he met refugee families and saw WFP relief activities in the new settlements in the Cox’s Bazaar area of Bangladesh.

Beasley said: “I have heard heartbreaking stories today, speaking to people who ran for their lives and saw loved ones killed before their eyes. These horrors must stop. Many of these people were receiving WFP food assistance in Myanmar. Now, they will receive WFP food assistance in Bangladesh, until they are able to return home safely.”

WFP started distributing food as soon as the influx began, and has scaled up operations to reach almost half a million refugees in the past month with life-saving assistance. WFP has distributed rice to some 460,000 refugees, and has also been providing high-energy biscuits to more than 200,000 people as a one-off emergency measure when they arrive in the settlements and at border crossing points.

As the situation stabilizes, WFP plans to transition to more sophisticated programs, especially with a view to supporting the nutritional needs of women and children and developing electronic voucher programs that integrate with markets.

The food for new arrivals comes in addition to assistance that WFP provides through e-vouchers to 34,000 registered refugees living in official camps. Another 72,500 undocumented refugees living in makeshift camps, who arrived after the last outbreak of violence in October 2016, before the present influx, receive rice and nutrition support.