Carelinks Winter Welfare / Refugee Appeal 2019-2020
In previous Winters for several years now,
Carelinks initiated a major project to try to meet the significant problem of suffering as a result of the low temperatures in Eastern Europe and the former USSR. We provided funds to pay for heating bills, improved houses against the cold, installed internal toilets, delivered firewood, warm clothing, medical and other assistance to our most needy brothers and sisters.
You can see a brief video taken last Winter of an old lady, bent over and relying upon a cane, seeking to navigate the ice and snow-
https://youtu.be/OvYF8v1cJRI Life is hard enough in areas where the state doesn't have funds to clear snow and ice, but when you are without family and support, it's all so much harder.
We provide and deliver a lot of firewood, and you can see a video of us doing this last year at
https://youtu.be/G35aqCiIikM there you will see a fairly typical situation, where a family were trying to keep warm by burning cardboard boxes they had scavenged:
As reported in our updates, we believe this significantly alleviated the suffering of families, single mothers and especially elderly brothers and sisters.
Given rising fuel prices the average cost of heating an apartment is almost the entire old age pension. Those with no supporting relatives, living alone, are left with literally nothing to survive on over the Winter months.
For those living in the large concrete blocks which house the majority of the urban population, if they don't pay their heating bills, they have to vacate the apartment- which often means going to live in the night shelters, and being out on the street from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. We would like to particularly continue our project in Latvia this Winter too.
Please consider donating whatever you can afford to enable us to do this. We continue to be also faced with the needs of many baptized refugee brethren from Africa and the Middle East who are facing the Winter with a minimum of state support, in various parts of Europe. Particularly there are some of those baptized in Italy who have no state support and some are in derelict primary schools in the mountains with no provision of warm clothing etc. Following are a few typical photos of help provided in previous years and would like to continue assisting. We're seeking to provide a total of 8,000 GBP [10,000 $] towards this project. We have no overheads and no salaried workers, so your funds go direct to those in need.
We have already started distributing firewood and giving Winter welfare support.
Here are some photos of work done over previous Winters:
Sister Rita Brother Yuri were living in a room without heating, trying to keep warm by covering themselves in sleeping bags and boiling water with an element and trying to warm themselves from the steam; we provided bar heaters, covered their electric bill and got them into better accommodation. We did this for quite a few of our most urgent cases:
In rural areas, we delivered firewood and other assistance to isolated brothers and sisters too old or ill to cope with the Winter, often due to having been abandoned by neighbours and family who have gone off to the towns and forgotten about them:
With temperatures down to -45 degrees in some parts of Russia where we have brethren, Winter becomes very difficult to cope with for the sick, elderly, single mothers and isolated. We try to provide relevant material support for them, including warm clothing and welfare packages:
This is a wonderful project, involving relevant humanitarian help being given to a lot of good hearted brothers and sisters who are in urgent need through no fault of their own, living as they are in the broken down social and economic situation which there is in the ex-USSR, with no other source of support, and in an area where temperatures can go down very low indeed.
This isn't just a nice idea, this program has been run for many years already and we have all contacts in place for it to happen this year too. Please do be as generous as you can and pass this appeal on to others, and above all please pray for this project and for our brethren and sisters.
You are welcome to donate towards this work through our usual channels, for bank account details see
https://carelinks.net/doc/donations or PayPal to tiybible@yahoo.com
Donations from the USA, Canada and UK are tax deductible.
You can send cheques made out to "
Carelinks" to
Carelinks, P.O. Box 152, Menai Central, NSW 2234 AUSTRALIA
Carelinks, c/o Jim Anne Barton, 27 Cedar Creek Lane, RR1 Elgin, Ontario K0G 1E0, CANADA
Carelinks, c / - 968 Turakina Valley Rd, R D 11, Wanganui NEW ZEALAND.
Carelinks, c/o 27 Castle Gardens, Bath BA2 2AN U.K.
Carelinks Outreach Inc, 125-03 133rd Avenue, South Ozone Park NY 11420 USA