07/23/2023
This was a collaborative effort with several Days For Girls teams in California, to send 1,000 Days For Girls kits for distribution in Oromia Ethiopia with our team member Obse, who works as a surgical nurse at Stanford Medical Center and also runs the medical non-profit East African Medical Relief Foundation (EAMRF.org). She was originally scheduled to travel in January 2023 and had to postpone until late March for safety reasons. Having done this humanitarian work for over 12 years, she shared that this was by far the most difficult trip to Ethiopia for her. The Tigray War occurred between November 2020 and November 2022 and killed over half a million people, and over 1.5 million people are still internally displaced from it, living in refugee camps within Ethiopia.
Here are Nurse Obse Lubo's own words about her recent humanitarian efforts in Ethiopia:
"The repeated attacks by the “Fanno” paramilitary armed group from the neighboring Amhara region, has caused hundreds of thousands of civilians in the border districts of Western Oromia, Ethiopia to flee from their homes and live in displaced makeshift shelters. These makeshift shelters are set up by the Zonal Authorities in different parts of the region; there are over 1.5 million of Internally Displaced People or IDPs all over the region.
These IDP camps often lack necessities, including medical services, access to sanitation/hygiene supplies, they have extremely limited resources, lack of water, are often overcrowded and children have no access to continued education. They are the bare minimum of a shelter for people who have been traumatized and forced to escape the heinous attacks, often arriving with nothing, some without even the clothes on their back. ... There are about 17 IDP camps in Western Oromia, we visited 3 of the camps. ... Arriving at camps, I was overwhelmed, feeling unprepared for what I was facing and how I was feeling. However, I knew along with the colleagues I was traveling with, listening to the stories and providing the donations we had brought would help even in the slightest way. We handed over 800 reusable menstrual pads for women/girls these kits were donated from "Days for Girls" organization based in USA. We bought and distributed formula milk, soap, scalp oil, shoes, and food items. We held mini trainings to create awareness about basic hygiene in order to help reduce the spread of infections among people at the camp. We answered questions, held hands, listened to their stories, and made notes of what else they would really need to continue to survive."
We would like to thank the following DFG teams for contributing kits to this cause: San Francisco Peninsula CA, Rocklin CA, Sacramento CA, Roseville CA, Petaluma CA, Central Santa Rosa CA, and Murietta North CA.
We are currently raising money to get more kits to Ethiopia with Nurse Obse Lubo and the East African Medical Relief Foundation (EAMRF.org).
