Food For Families

Prince's mother and brothers with their rations.

As many of our faithful readers know, the family of Savita, an 11 year old cancer patient, have decided to discontinue her treatment and let her die a natural death. While disagreeing with their decision, we are unable to contest it. We contacted her donors and most have already agreed to transfer their donation to another needy family (pictured above).

The first on our list of families in need was the family of "Prince", a boy who attends Sandipani Muni school in 1st grade, along with his two sisters Maya and Sheetal. Prince’s younger brother, Kuldeep, was born recently with a blockage in his windpipe.

The family spent thousands of rupees without hesitation on medical expenses in order to save Kuldeep’s life but this naturally took a very heavy toll on this poor family, both financially and emotionally. Adding to the family's difficulties, from all the stress of his son's treatment, the children's father, Ramji Lal, had a nervous breakdown and has consequently been out of work for 4 months.

The family did not ask us for any help and instead took loans from neighbours and sold almost everything from their home to pay for Kuldeep’s medical expenses. We found out about their desperate situation when one of our team members made a visit to the family's house to get some background information on the family for the person who sponsors Prince's education through the 'Gift of Hope Program'.

After having sold everything, the family have nothing left and no one they can borrow from to get money for food. Fortunatly, with the agreement of our kind blog donors, we were able to provide them with rations, (starting from September 1st) and will continue this for the next year, until the family gets back on their feet.

Our Food For Families program currently provides rations to 23 needy families, but there are many more cases that we are aware of where children go home from school and get no dinner or just a few chappatis and some pickle. With your help, we would like to tackle this challenge.

Not only does this help provide basic nutrition to a family, but it also ensures that the family have a strong incentive to keep their child in the Sandipani Muni school, thus ensuring the child a good education. To feed Feed a family and provide a strong education to their children at the same time gives us a chance to really transform their lives, in the present and the future.

We can provide a month's worth of rations for a needy family for US$20 per month (Rs 840). We give them basic food stuffs - wholemeal flour, legumes, oil etc. so that they can spend the little money that they have on vegetables and milk for their children.

If you would also like to help children go to sleep with full stomachs, contribute to our Food For Families program by contacting the FFF coordinator at richard@fflvrindavan.org.