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Los Angeles, April 21, 2008 — The Prem Rawat Foundation has donated $26,000 to Montañas de Esperanza or Mountains of Hope (MdE), a local non-profit in northern Ecuador, to provide relief to flood victims in the coastal village of Santa Lucia. The grant will supply 32 tons of vital food supplies to feed 1,500 families (c.7,500 people) for one month.
Ecuador has been battered by torrential rains since early January, which have affected 40% of the country, destroying entire towns, crops and herds of livestock, particularly in the coastal areas. As many as 300,000 people have been uprooted from their homes, and over 14,000 are still living in shelters, including at least 5,000 children. Rescue efforts have been severely hampered by the widespread flooding of roads and disruption of transportation services.
MdE has designed a unique collaborative effort to supply nutritious food for the people of Santa Lucia, one of the most severely affected areas, with the cooperation of the Ecuadorian Red Cross, Regional Andean Farmers Cooperatives, the National Emergency Operations Center, community leaders and individual volunteers. This will be one of the largest deliveries of aid to flood victims by a non-government agency on the Ecuadorian coast to date.
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Six hundred and thirty 100-pound bags of highly nutritional dried haba beans, barley rice, milled wheat and corn grown in the agricultural region of Pimampiro were repackaged at a school auditorium into 45-pound family kits by over 100 community volunteers this past weekend. Each completed family kit also includes raw organic sugar, ovo preserves (a vital fruit), and a nourishing cereal grain drink mix, along with recipes and spices for cooking the food. Other volunteers, coming from as far away as Quito, prepared meals for the helpers using some of the recipes so all could sample what they were helping to provide.
The Mayor of Pimampiro, Lic. Ivan Paredes, has arranged free use of an 18-wheel trailer truck to deliver the packages to Santa Lucia, some 17 hours away, a journey which begins tomorrow. Accompanying the food kits will be two tons of water bottles, clothes and personal sanitation kits from the Imbabura Red Cross, and school materials and art supplies funded by a grant from the Ibarra Rotary Club. On Wednesday, the food kits and emergency supplies will be delivered to 1,500 families, supplying each family with food for a month.
The distribution of the family kits is being managed by Mountains of Hope in collaboration with the Ecuadorian Red Cross, Ecuadorian Civil Defense, the Ecuadorian Ministry of Social and Economic Development, and local municipal and social service agencies.
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Photographs by Jaime Alarcón Valencia
The Prem Rawat Foundation was created in 2001 by Prem Rawat, known also as Maharaji, and has a dual mission of bringing his message of peace to people around the world and providing essential humanitarian aid to those in need. TPRF partners with other humanitarian organizations to bring food, water and rapid disaster relief where it is most needed.
