With all your donations, CORE provided funds to support efforts by five Nepali NGOS to assist with isolation centres in rural communities and offering food packages to families who are without their daily wages during the very strict lock down. Your help and assistance helped us to help people stay healthy and to help the health workers stay safe while working with their patients.

With these organizations, we determined the priority needs and getting cost estimates for items to help households improve their hygiene and to provide protective equipment for health workers and medical staff working with Covid patients. Many professional Nepalis have taken the lead with numerous groups helping, especially in Kathmandu. However, there is less support in rural areas and a couple of districts, Dolakha and Chitwan, where CORE has worked before show the potential to become hotspots. So far, we have provided support these organizations:

• Himalayan Human Rights Monitors in Makawanpur district, where CORE has an ongoing educational program for marginalized children. We distributed hygiene materials (mask, soap) to 4,622 families, PPE with health materials to local health workers, extra food rations to the families of the 100 scholarship students, and a special art class for the students on the prevention of Covid and human trafficking, which has become a problem in families without income during the lock downs.
• Faselung Social Service Committee in Dolakha, where distribution of hygiene materials (mask, soap, sanitizer, medicine) to 1,260 families in rural villages and PPE with health materials was given to the 24 local health workers.
• Clinic Nepal in Chitwan, where CORE provided funds for PPE for medical personnel at a cancer hospital being converted into covid wards.
• Stories of Nepal, which provided food relief and hygiene materials in many districts of Nepal, with CORE’s support targeted over 500 families in extremely poor villages near the Indian border in Saptari district.
• The Partners Nepal in Mahakulung municipality (far SE corner of SoluKhumbu district) for provisions and oxygen cylinders for local health posts. The fears here were that when the many locals working on climbing expeditions as kitchen staff and porters, returned to their villages, they will spread Covid contracted at the base camps.

In 2020, the COVID -19 pandemic brought extreme challenges and a very complex crisis for the poorest people who mostly earn day wages. For many of these people, if they do not earn that day, they do not eat that day.

While public health is a vital concern, businesses were closed with the lockdowns resulting in lost livelihoods. These months were devastating for poor families living on daily wages. When shopping in the small local shops, I  heard people say that they are more afraid of starving than of the virus. The financial pressures in villages are reportedly resulting in earlier marriages of girls.

CORE responded by providing extra funds to our regular partner HimRights for Chepang families to the south of Kathmandu, whose children we support for scholarships, and another very active organisation, Heart Beat, to provide additional food supplies to Chepang families in dire need.