- 31. August 2021
Humanitarian Emergency Aid
CORONA VIDEO BLOG – 08.04.2021 – HANNES SCHMID
The situation has not improved; quite the contrary. In order to alleviate the acute situation, Smiling Gecko has been providing emergency humanitarian aid since the beginning of the Corona crisis in March 2020, supporting more than 400 families with over 2,400 family members in the area. Our emergency team regularly distributes packages of food and medical supplies to those in need. In addition to rice and dry food, the packages also contain all available products from our own agricultural farms, such as vegetables, pork, chicken, beef and fish.
A current phenomenon is that many parents are leaving their children behind in the countryside to fend for themselves while they try to earn some money doing unskilled labor somewhere in Cambodia. These children have nothing. They walk for hours to the almost dried up lakes to fish. But there is almost no fish left and after a whole day’s search, there is usually only a handful of small fish for cooking. Whole groups of children go into the jungle to look for edible stuff like ant eggs, lizards, insects or wild fruits and leaves. Because there are so many children, it becomes increasingly difficult to find anything edible. Therefore, in addition to feeding the families, we focus especially on these children between the ages of 2 and 9, for whom the damages caused by malnutrition would remain noticeable for the rest of their lives.