Dafa Campaign Stands Next to People in Need While Lebanon Goes on Fire
On Monday October 14, 2019, Lebanon faced one of the wildest fires in its known history, where it lasted around four consecutive days. The fires caused hundreds of citizens to be displaced and on shortage of food and supplies. Acknowledging the crucial humanitarian situation, Dafa Campaign could not stand still, and took the initiative to help every person in need.
Starting from Tuesday, October 14, Dafa established an operations room at Paula Yacoubian’s office located in Achrafieh, to gather different types of donations such as food, medications, diapers, blankets… However, the campaign insisted on the matter that financial donations are not accepted.
The campaign shared a poster on their social media platforms calling people to volunteer and help the victims of the fires, and attached the poster with a hot number.
Ramona El Khoury, a member of Paula’s office team and a volunteer at Dafa affirms in an interview conducted on the day of the happenings that the campaign was established 7 years ago and was able to help over 100 000 families in need last year during its main event that usually takes place at the beginning of December in Martyr’s Square. Ramona proceeds “we started by calling restaurants to see what they can offer; at the very beginning we thought no one was willing to help, but in the next few hours we received enormous quantities of supplies from generous people”.
A systematic procedure was organized to gather the supplies and distribute them later on. Donations are collected by volunteers directly from cars in front of the office, then sorted by type (food-blankets-medications-hygiene products…). Each type was also sorted again; for example cans were separated from sandwiches that should be delivered on spot.
After all the supplies are well arranged, another group of volunteers dispose these donations in their personnel vehicles and head to the damaged area to deliver the supplies to the people in need. This delivery occurs with collaboration with other members of Dafa already placed in the catastrophe zones.
Abed El Rahman Jaber, also a volunteer at Dafa, sums up the hard work of three days with these few words “although we were exhausted, we couldn’t be happier when seeing the smile of all those who needed our help”. On Tuesday night, the minister of interior and municipalities Raya El Hassan affirmed that all fires were extinguished. On the other hand, two people died, 18 were hospitalized and 88 received emergency medical care according to the Lebanese Red Cross.
Sources:
https://www.vox.com/2019/10/17/20916314/lebanon-fires-experts-saw-it-coming
https://www.nogarlicnoonions.com/dafa-campaign-providing-assistance-to-unpriviliged-people/
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/21/lebanon-sectarian-protests-forest-fires-self-immolation/
https://www.the961.com/news/lebanon-just-announced-that-all-the-fires-are-finally-extinguished
