ABOUT THIS AID APPEAL
This initiative started in August 2014 with an email to the mothers in Samara Levy's son’s year group, appealing for winter clothes and shoes to send to the people displaced in Iraq who lost everything when IS took their towns, cities and villages.
It has quickly grown into a larger project which provides medical and humanitarian aid, currently focused on Syria. We have sent 110 consignments (artic lorries to Iraq, and 40’ containers and ambulances shipped to Syria) carrying clothes, shoes, bedding, toiletries/hygiene items, essential medical equipment, ambulances and school equipment. We have also provided four small emergency field hospitals in different locations, at different times during the conflict. We also support food farming projects and run an outreach centre for orphans and widows in Syria which feeds and educates 40-70 orphans every day as well as providing livelihood training for widows. The centre has proved such a success that we are building a second in a different location. We are also about to open our first permanent medical centre, which is the first stage towards designing and building a new hospital.
The aid we provide serves vulnerable people, and our teams serve everyone in need regardless of their faith, political views, gender, ethnicity or other defining categories. Our aim is to demonstrate the unconditional love of God to people who are in great need.
November 2017, Syria. A displaced woman, visited by Samara, with learning difficulties. She was barefoot and in tattered clothes, living in a tent-like structure in an informal settlement, having fled fighting in Aleppo. We provided boots, clothes and a dignity bag for her.
Although some displaced people live in tents or similar informal structures, there are many more who live in houses, informal settlements which include unfinished or damaged buildings with no windows and sometimes no doors with walls missing, also caravans, animal sheds, schools and other public buildings.
In Syria there are also many families living in damaged and abandoned buildings. There are around 6 million internally displaced people in Syria, and many of them have had to flee their homes but when it is safe enough to return they find that their homes have been either destroyed or looted and they have to start again with nothing.
Local partners distributing aid at a camp in the Kirkuk area in Iraq.
Sometimes host communities take families into their own homes, to live with their families. Our aid serves people living in a wide variety of situations and shelter arrangements.
Recently all our aid has been directed to Syria and, with partners on the ground, have served many different areas including Damascus, Ghouta, Aleppo, Deir Ez-zor, Homs, Hama, Latakia, Tartus, and Sweida. Our aid has served significant numbers of people living in post-siege areas in Syria, and has been distributed in these places after the sieges were broken - when it became possible to safely take aid into these areas, ensuring that it reached the people who need it. We have also historically distributed aid in Iraq including Dohuk, Erbil, Kirkuk, Karbala, Baghdad, Sinjar and Akra in addition to Jordan and Lebanon.
We rely completely on people like you volunteering your time and giving what you can to make this work happen. None of us in the UK get paid for doing this, we do it simply because it needs to be done, and these people need to know that they have not been forgotten.
Families have been living in this construction site with young children through freezing winter snow