Sunday 18 December 2016

Viewing This Video Will Save Lives. Literally!

Saturday 17 December 2016

Rice up with me

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#إيران: نرجس، تقرأ احد كتيّبات البرنامج وتقول انها تود ان تكون جزءً من البرنامج عندما تكبر، لتوفير الدعم للمحتاجين ومستقبل أفضل للأطفال في مجتمعها.

©WFP/Mohammad Khodabaksh

#Iran: Narcissus, read one of the pamphlets program and says she wants to be part of the show when I grow up, to provide support to the needy and a better future for children in her community.

في الفترة ما بين 12-18 ديسمبر/كانون الأول قدم برنامج الأغذية العالمي مساعدات غذائية لاكثر من 39,000 نازح ولاجئ في أنحاء #ليبيا
©©WFP

Between 12-18 December, wfp provided food assistance for more than 39,000 displaced persons and refugees throughout #Libya
©WFP

صباح الخير من لبنان! يامن وحمود إخوة ويستمتعون بالخبز والزعتر واللبن في إفطارهم. فرت عائلتهم من منزلهم في مدينة حمص السورية قبل ثلاث سنوات. اليوم، يعيشون في خيمة في طرابلس، لبنان.
©©WFP/Edward Johnson

Good morning from Lebanon! Safe and maud brothers and enjoy the bread and milk and thyme in their breakfast. Family fled from their home in the city of homs, Syria, three years ago. Today, living in a tent in Tripoli, Lebanon.
©WFP/Edward Johnson

WFP has three main goals under its Syria response

1) To deliver food to people affected by conflict, malnourished children, pregnant women and nursing mothers;
2) To provide emergency food assistance, and;
3) To offer tailored programmes focusing on relief and recovery, school feeding and nutrition.

Food assistance

In October, as a result of new donor support, WFP has been able to increase the value of the electronic vouchers it uses to provide food assistance to extremely vulnerable Syrian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon to an average of US$21 per person per month – 80 percent of the full intended voucher value. This is a positive development as assistance was cut down to 50 percent on average during the previous months due to a severe lack of funding.

WFP reaches more than four million people every month inside Syria with urgently needed food and provides electronic food vouchers (e-card) to up to 1.5 million refugees in neighbouring countries.

WFP knows that host countries are affected by the burden of the refugee crisis. And, thanks to the food e-card system, WFP has injected more than US$1 billion into the local economies of Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt and helped create thousands of local jobs in the food retail sector.

Visit the Syrian Arab Republic newsroom for the latest news releases, stories, photos and publications on the Syria emergency.

WFP Programmes

General food distribution

Every month, WFP distributes family food rations to displaced and conflict-affected families across Syria. These rations contain staple food items including rice, bulgur wheat, pasta, lentils, canned food, sugar, salt, cooking oil and wheat flour. More than four million people benefit from this assistance every month.

Relief and recovery

As the conflict drags on, WFP is working with key partners to build resilience in relatively stable areas. Food assistance for some displaced families will be provided as an incentive to work on rehabilitating infrastructure, vegetable gardening or poultry production with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

School feeding

In 2014, WFP launched a school feeding programme in Syria in partnership with UNICEF and the Ministry of Education. In December 2015, WFP distributed healthy school snacks to 375,000 children in primary schools in Rural Damascus, Damascus city, Aleppo, Homs, Tartous and Al-Hasakeh.

Children receive date bars fortified with vitamins and minerals to encourage them to enrol and stay in school. WFP started also in December distributing the first batch of locally produced date bars that WFP purchased from a local manufacturer contracted in late August, which sources the raw materials from Syrian wholesalers and employs 15 people, including 5 women, involved in all stages of production. This initiative is a milestone in WFP’s effort to strengthen and build resilience in Syria.

Nutrition

WFP’s nutrition programme for pregnant women and nursing mothers helps more than 7,000 mothers in Homs and Lattakia buy fresh produce, dairy and meat products to supplement their diets using WFP food vouchers. WFP plans to expand this programme to Tartous, Aleppo and Qamishly over the first quarter of 2016, reaching 15,000 mothers.

To prevent child malnutrition, WFP also aims to provide supplementary feeding products to 240,000 children under the age of five in eight Syrian governorates.

Critical funding shortages

Millions of Syrian refugees need help and we have an obligation to ensure that their basic needs are met. Syrians in despair are now taking extreme measures to cope including returning to Syria or leaving host countries for elsewhere. Those in the most difficult and vulnerable situations in neighbouring countries are unable to move because they cannot afford it.

In 2015, WFP faced critical funding shortages that forced it to reduce the level of assistance it provides to vulnerable Syrians inside and outside the country.

How you can help

Sustainable and predictable funding is needed to ensure that WFP assistance continues.

Please donate today and help get life-saving food to families who need it the most. Our work is 100% voluntarily funded, and 90% of every contribution gets to beneficiaries. Every donation makes a difference. Just $50 will provide food for a child for the next three months.

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Siyabonga's Heart Garden PROJECT HOPE

Support Project Hope with a FREE click and share today!! It really makes a BIG difference to the lives of others; thanks!

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HOPE works in more than 35 countries worldwide. Please enjoy our blog as we document the successes and challenges of our work to provide Health Opportunities for People Everywhere.

A Year of HOPE

What an exciting year!

Posted By: Tom Kenyon, M.D., M.P.H. on January 4, 2017

Labels: Africa , Americas , China, Haiti, Macedonia, United States , Global Health Expertise, Disaster-Relief, Chronic Disease, Humanitarian Aid, NEXTGen, Women’s and Children’s Health, Health Care Education, Partners, Infectious Disease, Health Systems Strengthening, Volunteers

Our programs and professionals made tangible strides in building health capacity across the globe in 2016. Our volunteers inspired health workers every day in hospitals and clinics that serve the most vulnerable patients – newborns and their mothers.In Sierra Leone, HOPE volunteers shared lifesaving skills in neo-natal and maternal care with local nurses whose determination is matched only by our drive to improve the quality of health care in a place of great need.

When Haiti plunged back into crisis after Hurricane Matthew struck, threatening to undo the country’s hard work in rebuilding after the 2010 earthquake, HOPE medical volunteers rushed to support doctors and nurses at St. Therese Hospital in Nippes.

In Central Asia our teams were at the forefront of amazing innovations in TB detection and treatment, giving Project HOPE a voice at international forums.

In Africa, we were on the frontlines, improving treatment for people living with HIV and are fiercely determined to work with partners seeking to end the AIDS epidemic by 2030.

In Europe, HOPE was there for thousands of people trapped in the migration crisis in Macedonia, in need of medicines and health care.

And closer to home, I was thrilled to see the Health Affairs journal, published by Project HOPE, expand its coverage of global health this year. I’m confident the journal will continue to be a crucial platform for the nation’s leading policy experts as a new administration takes office next month.

The global health challenges that await us in 2017 are enormous indeed. With a deeply dedicated staff at our headquarters in Virginia and offices around the world as well as the goodwill of our volunteers and continuing support of our dedicated supporters, we are poised to live up to our mission with even greater impact in 2017!

Check out more of HOPE’s lifesaving stories from 2016!

Hurricane in Haiti

Baby Tom Kenyon Smith

Bringing TB Awareness and Care to Migrant Workers in Kazakhstan

Ann Perez Named Volunteer of the Year

New Program in Malawi Seeks to Prevent New Infections and Lessen Impact of HIV

Friday 16 December 2016

Feed the hungry by taking a short quiz!

Pop Quiz: What do you really know about these lunch foods? Take the @feedingamerica quiz and help fight hunger!. http://bit.ly/2aZMtov

5 Real Health Benefits of Helping Others

By: Elise Moreau
January 17, 2017

About Elise
Follow Elise at @elisem0reau

Helping others makes us feel good. That feeling of making a difference in somebody else’s life — even in a small way — tends to trigger a deeper sense of satisfaction that doesn’t really compare to anything else.

Unfortunately, the realities of life don’t make it so easy to find the time in our busy schedules to volunteer for a cause that’s important to us, help a dear friend move to a new place or offer to take our young nieces/nephews to the park for an afternoon of fun. Sometimes, helping others in ways like these just doesn’t come as much of a priority as other things — like work, errands, yoga class, cleaning and so on.

A person who doesn’t necessarily prioritize generosity above their personal to-do lists isn’t automatically a selfish person. In fact, many people end up helping more people than they probably realize in their everyday lives — without being fully conscious of it.

It’s time to take notice of how being more helpful to friends, relatives, coworkers and even strangers really makes you feel. The more you become aware of this feeling, the more you’ll naturally want to do more to to help others, and the more you’ll be rewarded in physical, mental and emotional health benefits.

Here’s how.

1. You may live longer.

In a recent study, an international team of researchers conducted survival analyses of 500 seniors ages 73 to 103. They found that grandparents who helped take care of their grandchildren (not as primary caregivers) lived longer on average compared to grandparents who didn’t help take care of their grandchildren. Half of grandparents who lent a helping hand with grandchildren were still alive a decade after the first survey was conducted, and the same was true for seniors who didn’t have grandchildren but supported and helped their own children.

2. Your brain’s pleasure centers will become activated.

It turns out that giving feels just as good as receiving — if not more. A brain-imaging study revealed that when people donated money to charitable causes, the reward system in the brain becomes engaged in the same way as when people received money. In fact, more parts of the prefrontal cortex become activated when altruistic choices are made over selfish ones.

3. It can help you manage stress.

Research has shown that compassion is linked to lower stress levels. Fifty-nine subjects took a questionnaire that asked them about their levels of compassion and then completed a series of stressful tasks while they were evaluated by an evaluator who either acted in a supportive way, in a positive way or in a neutral way. Results showed that subjects who exhibited higher levels of compassion on the questionnaire ended up interacting more with the supportive evaluators than the other types of evaluators. They also experienced physical benefits like lower blood pressure, lower heart rate and lower cortisol levels compared to subjects who showed lower levels of compassion.

4. It may help lower inflammation.

Medical researchers who examined cellular inflammation in self-reported “happy” people found that lower levels of inflammation was present in only certain types of happy people. Those who felt happy because their lifestyles involved lots of personal pleasures still had higher levels of inflammation. Those who had lifestyles characterized by purpose and meaning — or in other words, a life that involved helping others out — had lower levels of inflammation.

Related: Top 12 Anti-Inflammatory Foods

5. It can help you develop a more positive and open mind.

Some studies have linked a state of self-focus to anxiety and depression. Shifting one’s focus to others is an effective way to get out of the constant ”me” perspective where thought patterns can cause problems to seem worse than they really may be. Helping others is essentially a great way to get out of your own mind where you can see and experience things from other points of view.

Now you know that helping others doesn’t just feel good — it’s actually one of the healthiest habits you could incorporate into your life. So start thinking about the random acts of kindness you already make, and think about how you could make them more frequent or expand on them for an even greater effect.

Photo Credit: Thinkstock

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