YOUR Donations at Work!

In May and June 2024, a series of devastating flash floods hit the Northeast, Northern, and Western regions of Afghanistan. The flooding left almost no province unscathed and resulted in the deaths of more than 300 people and the damage or destruction of more than 10,000 homes. The Northeast region was hit the hardest and accounted for approximately 75% of the destruction and nearly all of the casualties. *

UNHCR, UN Refugee Agency, (UNHCR) was on the ground immediately providing critical aid in the form of emergency tents and NFI kits. These non-food item (NFI) kits included clothing assistance and essential and basic household items.

YOUR support allowed us to contribute $50,000 to UNHCR's critical aid efforts to help alleviate the suffering of families impacted by the flooding.

Your support in 2024 allowed us to allocate over $228,000 to programs providing education, healthcare, resettlement/refugee assistance to women and children in Afghanistan, and emergency aid to vulnerable Afghans in Afghanistan.  

Courtesy of EMERGENCY USA (EUSA), we are pleased to introduce you to Mahsa, Mehruma, Mehran, and Mahnaz, quadruplets born at EMERGENCY's Maternity Centre in Anabah, Afghanistan. EMERGENCY opened the Maternity Centre in June 2003 to provide obstetric, gynecological, and neonatal care to women and babies of the Panjshir Valley and surrounding provinces.

In 2015, the centre was expanded to include four new delivery rooms, an operating theatre, neonatal intensive care ward, intensive care for women suffering birth complications, and several other critical care units. The maternity centre remains the only specialized and free facility of its kind in the area with a population of over 250,000 people. **

EUSA shared the following with us from the quadruplets mother, "being able to give birth in your hospital was a blessing. In Kabul, I would have given birth at home." In a fortuitous turn of events, she had been visiting relatives in the Panjshir Valley when she went into labor. While she was lucky to be able to safely deliver her babies at EMERGENCY's maternity centre she is now facing what countless other mothers in Afghanistan are facing, the inability to produce enough breast milk to feed her children. EUSA reports that as a result of the severe humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, they are seeing a higher number of malnourished mothers arriving at their hospital. This malnourishment directly impacts the mothers' ability to feed their babies, further exacerbating the severity of the humanitarian crisis they are facing.

This is just one example of how YOUR support helped a family at a critical time as well as how crucial humanitarian aid is in Afghanistan. In 2024, more than 23 million people, a quarter of which were women and over half of which were children, needed humanitarian assistance. Your support, kindness, and generosity allowed us to provide essential and often life-saving aid. Providing aid regardless of the amount and sharing stories to raise awareness does make a difference.

"Be like a river in generosity and giving help."

-Rumi

* Excerpt from UNHCR

** Excerpt from EUSA

Photo Credits: Photo 1 is UNICEF/Amin Meerzad, Photo 2 UNHCR/Caroline Gluck, Photos 3 and 4 EUSA