Your Legacy Without Borders

Our teams urgently scaled up our response to meet people’s escalating needs in the months that followed. In Rutshuru town we opened temporary clinics, mainly treating malaria, respiratory infections and diarrhoea, and set up mobile clinics along the roads to help those who were displaced. We built latrines and showers and improved the water system. In Rutshuru general hospital we supported the emergency and surgical wards and treated surging numbers of children in the malnutrition unit, which was 40 per cent over capacity earlier this year.

The situation in North Kivu continues to be extremely tense, with the retreat of peacekeepers at the end of November.

As an independent, neutral, impartial organisation, it’s thanks to our supporters that we can move quickly to provide what’s needed, where it’s needed. Gifts like yours, make work like this possible. Father of 13, Ponsie, was working in the fields with his family when the attacks began. They escaped with nothing but what they had on and are now living in a schoolyard in Rumangabo. For subsistence farmers like Ponsie, who depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, not being able to access their fields for weeks or even months is devastating. He said: “We eat boiled leaves from Monday to Sunday. My wife takes them from other people’s fields, asking the owners first. There is mutual help because the community know how much we are suffering. They share what little they have. This is not the first time we have had to fee. I do not know how my children can grow up in war.”

Your support enables us to continue to provide medical assistance to people in need and ensures our programs truly know no borders.