ABOUT
Carmen Garcia-Jersild
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My inspiration to start Helping Children of Venezuela:
In 2016, my son Santiago was born and everything changed literally. I have been reading in the news and research about the Humanitarian Crisis in my home country of Venezuela. As a new mother, it was hard to imagine how families were surviving with the scarcity of food and medicines. The crisis was so bad that people had to stand in line in front of grocery stores for hours to buy food. Back then, of the total number of malnourished Venezuelans, 48% of them were between 6 months and 2 years of age and 16% were just babies younger than 6 months. I think I read every single news article about Venezuela and I asked my family in Venezuela how accurate was the information I was reading about and to my disbelief it was worse than what I thought. Children were dying due to the lack of food and with inflation at 2,300,000, the money many families had was not enough to buy the basic needs. During one of the news reports I wrote down the name of the Venezuelan Doctor the program was interviewing and just reached out to him via social media, he was the director at the time of the biggest Pediatric Hospital in Venezuela. We connected and the rest is history. In August 2017, we hosted our first fundraiser to raise money to Help Children of Venezuela and since then we have sent 41 boxes full of children items such as baby formula, power milk, baby food, mac and cheese, diapers. etc to Venezuela.
Helping Children of Venezuela Foundation started as a project, just me trying to help the moms and innocent children caught in the middle of the Humanitarian Crisis, but now two years into this project, I see things through different lenses, I have more compassion, I try to put myself in someone's else shoes something I didn't do before.
People asked me what is the goal ... To me the goal is to never stop caring, never stop helping the innocent children of Venezuela.